And, no, it’s not the 16-year-old girl whose nude photo get forwarded to a couple of dozen people by her angry 18-year-old boyfriend. It’s the boyfriend. Thanks to America’s most current sex panic, 18-year-old Phillip Alpert was convicted of distributing child porn, a felony, “and sentenced to five years probation and required by Florida law to register as a sex offender,” reports CNN.
“You will find me on the registered sex offender list next to people who have raped children, molested kids, things like that, because I sent child pornography,” says Alpert in disbelief, explaining, “You think child pornography, you think 6-year-old, 3-year-old little kids who can’t think for themselves, who are taken advantage of. That really wasn’t the case.”
Alpert’s attorney Larry Walters agrees and he’s fighting to get Alpert removed from Florida’s sex offender registry. The law lags behind the technology, he says. “Sexting is treated as child pornography in almost every state and it catches teens completely offguard because this is a fairly natural and normal thing for them to do. It is surprising to us as parents, but for teens it’s part of their culture.”
We’re gonna have to make it illegal for teenagers to own cell phones with cameras or we’re gonna have to give them drugs to delay the onset of puberty until after they’re 18 or we going to have to accept the fact that we live in a brave new world where the intersection of horny teens and newer technologies is going to require us to rethink the simplistic application of laws that criminalize the possession and distribution of these sorts of images, particularly in cases where they were created by and for teenagers.
Yes, Alpert was a douchebag; yes, it was wrong for him to forward that picture to embarrass and humiliate his girlfriend. But if he’s a child pornographer and a sex offender, so are the overwhelming majority of his peers. Making an example of an unlucky asshole like Alpert isn’t going to stop teenagers from sexting each other anymore than making an example of few hundred thousands unlucky pot smokers has stopped people from smoking pot.
@49: While it’s possible that the pictures will “haunt her for the rest of her life,” there is very little evidence that this is even a remote likelihood. A reasonable justice system doesn’t distribute justice on the basis that of remote possibilities: it looks at actual evidence. And if Vanessa Hudgens can go on being a Disney angel after the the exact same fucking thing happened to her there is really no reason to believe that this girl is going to be wearing the scarlet A around her neck for the rest of her life.
And your perception of what life is like for registered sex offenders is just bizarre. Like someone else said, these are people who are frequently targeted by vigilantes. Moreover, they will have trouble finding meaningful employment and decent housing. It’s not that people will “might not trust him as easy,” it’s that people will see him as a rapist and a predator. Which he’s not.
Seriously, Emmi, you’re just being an idiot. It’s okay to not understand the basic principles of judicial reasoning, but you can learn from this discussion rather than just injecting this Old Testament style venom into it.
@50: People aren’t defending this guy’s choice to send the pictures out. They are defending him from the absurd charge of being a child porn distributor.
dear EmmiG,
please live life for a couple more years (as you mentioned before that you were teen) and then come back and talk to us about life experiences and the effects of living through adolesence on an adult.
thanks.
This jerk’s actions should be prosecutable, though I agree the sex-offender status is a little overboard. Then again, ‘sex-offender status’ for anyone is already pushing the boundaries of constitutional legality.
He deserves what he gets. Though misapplication of the law is not the way to go here. Laws do need to be written to punish anyone who seeks to sexually humiliate/alienate another person, particularly in cases of an abuse of trust.
EmmiG, you are right on the money from a moral standpoint. People arguing that the laws do not apply to him are also right. That said, if there is no law to punish him for what he did, there should be, and I’m not crying if he gets stuck with the sex-criminal label on this one because, frankly, he is.
We’re defending the guy, asshat, because he doesn’t deserve to be labeled a sex offender and pedophile for the rest of his life. What he did was dumb and awful but he should have been prosecuted or sued for defamation, not for being a “sex offender”.
The punishment does NOT fit the crime.
And maybe the victim will learn it’s always, always stupid to let or encourage people to take compromising pictures of you.
@51
Vanessa Hudgens is an extremely famous and well-liked star before she went through that scandal (and yet she still had to “apologize” and grovel for doing something that wasn’t even wrong) , and if you think the average girl or woman gets the same treatment then you are wrong. This girl has no Disney channel spokespeople working to save her reputation or her future jobs/relationships.
If you dismiss “remote possibilities” with respect to the full impact of what this guy did to her you can’t bring up the remote possibility that this guy will be killed by a vigilante when discussing what sort of punishment he deserves.
@55
And maybe the victimizer will learn it’s always always stupid to use naked pictures of kids in order to control them. Judging from the article, he has not yet.
@35 My point is not that 16 is an adult, it’s that 16 is not a child. The reason prosecutors are taking the “we have to destroy the children in order to save them” approach is that there is no recognition in the law for anything other than children and adults. But we all know that there is a vast arc of development that takes place in between those categories.
The hard boundary at age 18 (magic switch) is ridiculous. It has no basis in biology. It is arbitrary. I’ve known a 25 year old with the sexual maturity of a 13 year old, and in my own case I left home at 17 to live my own life (and that felt like a good 4 years too late).
wow. it is amazing to me how many folks are willing to argue that this bozo doesn’t deserve to be charged with distribution of child pornography for … distributing child pornography.
under 18 = child. that’s a legal definition. it doesn’t matter what we think about what 16 years olds are/should be capable of, christ!
and yes, his intent was to use this material to retaliate against an ex. *dumb du-dumb dumbbbb… duuuuumb!*
yes, puberty occurs before the age of majority. if it isn’t intuitive that sending electronic images of naked minors is something you shouldn’t do, then it’s going to become obvious as cases like this one come to light. i would hate to think social progress was arrested just because we’d rather not think about these things logically.
no, not *all* teens send naked photos of themselves around. really. a lot of them have modesty complexes, believe it or not. those who don’t will learn this painful lesson sooner or later. mr dumbstruck 18 year old was guilty of exactly what he was charged with. being a rare case of justice served, i refuse to be outraged.
i should add that once upon a time, technology caught folks by surprise who were drinking and driving. it is now a no-brainer that this combination represents a poor choice on the part of the driver. some people *still* struggle with the idea that cell phone use while driving is a poor choice – even as the evidence piles up around us.
someone is always going to be surprised that the stupid thing they did was stupid. why are we defending idiots here? YO, DUDE – sending naked photos of an ex-gf around – dumb! if the ex is a minor? EVEN DUMBER. i refuse to feel sorry for him.
and dan, likening Alpert to a pot smoker doesn’t qualify as an analogy, it’s such a poor comparison. how does ingesting something yourself compare with sending nude photos of an ex in anger with intent to hurt that person? there is really nothing there. you’re not normally this bad with analogies, put some effort into it.
i don’t see drunk-driving laws as the nail in the coffin of *that* poor choice either, but it doesn’t mean those laws are in vain or aren’t useful. suggest a tier system upon which distribution is graded, maybe, but don’t refuse to see it as a crime and throw your hands in the air saying there’s nothing we can do. he wasn’t convicted of creating pornography, he was convicted of distributing it. that *does* make him a sex offender. *and* a douchebag.
Emmi girl,
Try getting a job or renting an apt if you are on a sex offenders list. HE can’t even remain at home with his parents without registering. He can’t attend school without registering… Some schools won’t even enroll him because of it. His life is kaput!
@61
I dislike a sex offender registry when someone has already paid their debt to society back and show remorse and want to change their ways, but he isn’t spending any time in jail, he shows no remorse or attempts to get help.
He sent out naked pics of a 16 year old girl to dozens of people in order to get some sort of twisted power in an argument. He didn’t care and he still doesn’t care about how sending those pictures would impact her life, so why should anyone care if “some” schools won’t enroll him? He had his chance, he fucked up.
@62: This wasn’t rape. This wasn’t murder. This wasn’t even domestic violence or bank fraud. What he did was not nice, and I believe in the right of this girl to attempt to obtain justice via the civil law system that we have in place to deal with character assassination, harassment, and intentional public humiliation.
Consigning him to a life in which he is required to inform all his future neighbors that he is a sexual predator (again, he is not) is a punishment that does not fit the crime. No matter how many times you say that this girl’s life is over (it’s not) and that he “should have thought of that before” (I agree, what he did was wrong), it won’t make this punishment fit the crime. You’re just defending the indefensible, and if you ever fuck up (most people do at some point), you’ll be really glad there are cooler heads out here who will actually care about such things as due process and proportional punishment.
I just want to take a moment to be thankful that all of the dumb things that I did as a teenager never got me onto a Sex Offender List. As a female, the odds were in my favor, but then again, my high-school-boyfriend’s lawyer-parents promises me they would charge me with statutory rape if they ever had proof I slept with their son. And he was 3 months older than me. So, the worst I did was break the Texas Sodomy Laws that existed at the time, and the best I did was manage to not get caught. I’m just saying, think back to when you were a teen: we all did some retarded things.
@63
This is intentional sexual public humiliation of a kid, I think his neighbors should know before he dates anyone else who might trust him sexually.
He will be embarrassed in front of his neighbors just like he embarrassed her and maybe “child pornography” isn’t accurate, but that still doesn’t make him a victim.
He’s sexually abusive, and I have fucked up before, but never like that. I can’t imagine trying to hurt and humiliate someone like that, especially not a 16 year old girl who trusts me and is probably still kind of insecure in her sexuality and friendships and what she wants to do with her life. I’m not calling for the death penalty but other people should know what he did before they trust him as a sex partner and he should have to get jail time at least. He doesn’t sound like he wants to seriously commit into changing his ways and that just means that whoever he dates next, either a minor or an adult, will probably only get worse sexual “punishment” when he is angry. If you admit that he is wrong, what punishment do you believe he should get?
@65: It’s not just his potential sex partners that would know to “not trust him”: it’s that virtually everyone he came into contact with, including neighbors and potential employers, would need to be informed of his “sex offender” status, and this would lead to the natural conclusion on the part of most people that he either sexually assaulted someone, or trafficked in child pornography — i.e., the areas of crime that the sex offender registries are designed to inform people about.
As I’ve said, I think an issue like this is best dealt with in civil court. While I’m not a lawyer, I think the circumstances of the case sound similar to what I understand as defamation of character. Her attorney should be able to make a case for the material and emotional damage done to the girl by this boy’s actions, and award her an amount of money commensurate with that. It’s entirely possible that this could wind up hurting the boy much more than five years of probation, since he could be paying off the damages for years, and ultimately it has the advantage of being a punishment that is directly related to and commensurate with the actual consequences of his actions upon the victim.
It’s also possible that a jury would see the emotional and material damages as not that great. Either way, it seems much more just than framing a vicious spat between two people of the same age as the moral equivalent of a middle-aged pervert luring pre-pubescent kids into the candy van.
Putting this bozo on the sex offender registry is like putting everybody named “Mohammed” on the terrorist watch list.
Here’s an idea: let’s try to put our finite enforcement resources against ACTUAL DANGEROUS CREEPY PEOPLE, not some guy who forwarded a freaking attachment.
@ Kresblamania:
You seem to have the mistaken impression that this girl posted photos of herself on a public website. That’s the only way your comments about “getting things back from the internet” make sense. She did not do that. She gave photos of herself to her boyfriend, trusting him to keep them private. Obviously that trust was misplace, but he’s the one who betrayed her, and he’s the one who should be punished. This girl did not email her photo to dozens of people and then regret it; she gave them to one person who she should have been able to trust, and HE sent them out without her permission. That was his decision, not hers. You are absolutely blaming the victim when you imply that giving photos to someone you’re in a relationship with is the same as posting them on the internet. Plenty of couples take naughty photos that are never posted.
I disagree. If you give your picture away you give up any control over it. If you want to retain control over it then don’t give it away or draw up some kind of contract with the receiver. She gave it to him. He can do anything he wants with it. Any 16 year old capable of mailing a photo as an attachment surely knows how easily it can be forwarded. I would have been shocked if it wasn’t.
The lesson is don’t allow yourself to be photographed unless you are comfortable with the whole world seeing it. And more generally speaking don’t do anything you consider to be shameful just because you think no one is looking. If you get caught be prepared to take responsibility for your actions. The photo was created with her consent. She did that. She needs to live with it. In the grand scheme of things it’s a very small thing that some people have seen you naked.
I haven’t said much about Alpert so far so I will just say that the only consequence for him should be that she shouldn’t date him.
@65:
You offer a whole narrative about the case, personifying the girl as innocent and vulnerable and the man as dangerous and predatory.
Please link the articles, the court testimony, accounts from witnesses, etc, on which you base your characterization of the case.
For it is not evident from the news accounts what went on here.
Filling in the details by projecting ones own visceral reaction of disgust onto the defendent is exactly the tendency court systems exist to defend against.
You are talking just like a lynch mob.
EmmiG
I am currently completing a PhD on attitudes towards sexting in the Media and Journalism Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, Australia. I am very interested in speaking to you about this matter. I have read your comments with interest and I think you make some extremely important points.
If you would like to be involved in this study I can be emailed at ninafunnell1@gmail.com
I hope to hear from you.
Nina
So, he passed some nude pictures of her to his friends without her permission. They had a fight and now Phillip Alpert is arrested and charged for “distributing child pornography”….Well, I just wonder if that girl is satisfied… I think he doesn’t deserve to be judged like the an adult who possesses child pornography…