If you want an insight into the bizarre world of modern child protection, look no further than the case of the 14-year-old boy who has been reported to the police for ‘producing an indecent image’ of, er, himself.
The boy, who lives in the north of England, took a nude shot and sent it to a girl he fancied via Snapchat. That app, popular among our depraved youth, is supposed to delete pictures within 10 seconds – except if, like pretty much everyone who uses Snapchat, you’ve hooked up your phone so you can screenshot the pic before it disappears.
The girl circulated the picture around school and he was pulled in by the school’s attached police officer. While he was not formally arrested or charged, he was told the details would be stored against his name for at least 10 years – and they may even flash up if he had to complete an advanced DBS (formerly CRB) check later in life.
This case was clearly handled badly. The boy was encouraged to confess to what amounts to a serious criminal offence before his parents were even called in. And there’s no clear reason why this had to be a criminal matter in the first place. How, exactly, can you commit a crime against yourself? And, while the idea of pimpled teens ‘sexting’ each other might make us cringe, it’s little more than a new, digitised means through which they take their first, awkward steps into the world of sex and romance. His mother, speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, said he was being ‘at best naive’ and at worst a ‘teenager’. It’s hard to disagree.
The real issue here is the intense pressure schools are now under to tackle headline child-protection issues and, in the process, negotiate a tangled web of legislation. The recent criminalisation of so-called revenge porn – in which people circulate naughty pics of others in order to humiliate them – is a case in point. In the media, teenagers are often presented as those most vulnerable to this phenomenon. But, by a quirk of legislation, people can only be victims of revenge porn if they are over 18. Had he been a few years older, the boy would have been the victim, rather than perpetrator.