{"id":385674,"date":"2010-03-04T16:14:18","date_gmt":"2010-03-04T21:14:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/seattletimes.nwsource.com\/html\/northwestvoices\/2011248616_fightingchildpornography.html?syndication=rss"},"modified":"2010-03-04T16:14:18","modified_gmt":"2010-03-04T21:14:18","slug":"fighting-child-pornography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/385674","title":{"rendered":"Fighting child pornography"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Raise age of consent, make exception for \u2018sexting\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>While important problems are addressed in the proposed child pornography bills, a tragic inconsistency remains [\u201cBolster the fight against child porn,\u201d Opinion, Mar. 1]. The logic presented for these bills is to protect minors under 18 from child abuse. However, the age of consent in Washington is 16.<\/p>\n<p>State laws permit a 16-year-old to have sex with any and all takers. However, it would be a felony to have a picture on a cellphone of her flashing a breast. To be consistent, either raise the age of consent to 18 or reduce the definition of child pornography to 16.<\/p>\n<p>Also, while \u201csexting\u201d is less common than smoking or drinking, these crimes are misdemeanors. About 15 percent of 16-year-olds have sent an explicit image of themselves. With this law, a minor sexting a friend faces the same legal peril as a distributor of child pornography involving 7-year-olds. There should be an exception in the law for possessor of a few images of someone close in age. Finally, people engaged in \u201csexting\u201d should not be put on the sex-offender registry. His or her presence on the registry dilutes the impact of the sex offenders we should be wary of.<\/p>\n<p>While I trust Rob McKenna to be reasonable with this law, he will not always be the state\u2019s attorney general. The laws need to reflect what we as a state intend.<\/p>\n<p><em>\u2014 Bill Hughes, Bellevue<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Raise age of consent, make exception for \u2018sexting\u2019 While important problems are addressed in the proposed child pornography bills, a tragic inconsistency remains [\u201cBolster the fight against child porn,\u201d Opinion, Mar. 1]. The logic presented for these bills is to protect minors under 18 from child abuse. However, the age of consent in Washington is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2861,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-385674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2861"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=385674"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385674\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=385674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=385674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=385674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}