All posts by Thomas L. Knapp

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Teen Sexting: Time to Decriminalize Childhood Mistakes

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Teen Texting (RGBStock.com)

Disturbing: Reports of a “sexting ring” involving a large number of Colorado teens.

More disturbing: The legal response.

“Hundreds of students at Cañon City High School who gave little thought to taking and sharing nude pictures of themselves or classmates could now face criminal charges of child pornography,” reports Kirk Mitchell of the Denver Post.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably an adult who remembers doing stupid things as a teenager — things that you regret, that you hope everyone else has forgotten, and that you’d rather not talk about.

If you’re a parent, you know that your own kids, despite your best efforts to guide them safely to adulthood, are also going to do foolish things that in hindsight they’ll wish they hadn’t done.  It’s just part of growing up.

What no parent wants is for their kids’ childhood mistakes to be hung around their necks like millstones for the rest of their lives due to the ease with which prosecutors try kids “as adults” and impose legal mandates like inclusion on “sex offender registries.”

Yes, it’s saddening that our teenagers sexualize themselves so early; especially so when they memorialize that sexualization in semi-permanent form that can come back to haunt them later. But doing that is so easy these days — every kid has a cell phone and it’s as easy as point, click, share — that to treat teen “sexting” as a crime is perverse.

Even more perverse is the attitude of Fremont County, Colorado District Attorney Tom Ledoux.

On one hand, he claims his hands are tied by outdated child pornography laws, intended to punish predatory adults, that make teen-to-teen sexting a crime: “It doesn’t matter if it was consensual. There is no distinction according to Colorado state statutes.”

On the other hand, he claims the authority to decide for himself which kids are “criminals” and which kids are “victims”: “The district attorney’s office will make distinctions as we see fit.”

Governor John Hickenlooper should put the brakes on LeDoux’s intended destruction of young lives right now with a two-step process.

First, Hickenlooper should direct Colorado Attorney General Cynthia Coffman to prepare pardons for his signature for all students  caught up in LeDoux’s witch hunt, so that he can put an end to it with the least damage possible.

Secondly, he should urge Colorado’s legislature to draft and pass legislation either exempting teen sexting from the state’s definition of child pornography or making it a misdemeanor that doesn’t follow a kid around for life.

Teen sexting is here to stay, because the technology isn’t going away and because kids will be kids. It’s up to us adults to minimize the resulting damage, not add to that damage.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

Arbitration Isn’t The Problem

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English: First 4 digits of a credit card

 

Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Robert Gebeloff of the New York Times claim to have discovered “a far-reaching power play orchestrated by American corporations” (“Arbitration Everywhere, Stacking the Deck of Justice,” October 31). They’re missing the forest for the trees. Arbitration is not the problem.

Corporate preference for private arbitration instead of litigation in government courts is nothing new. The twist in the Times expose is that arbitration clauses have evolved to make it more difficult for dissatisfied customers to band together and bring particular types of suits: “Class actions” in which numerous complaints are bundled together, reducing the plaintiffs’ costs and resulting in huge potential aggregated damage awards.

In recent years, arbitration clauses have begun specifying individual arbitration. Corporate attorneys know that most customers won’t spend hundreds or thousands of dollars arbitrating $10 complaints. If the complaints can’t be aggregated, they’re not worth pursuing from a financial standpoint. A win for the corporations, a loss for consumers whose complaints don’t pass the financial test.

What Silver-Greenberg and Gebeloff leave out are two important consumer tools: Information and choice.

Their story opens with reference to “a clause that most customers probably miss” on “page 5 of a credit card contract.”

The reason most customers probably miss that clause is that most customers don’t bother to read contracts pertaining to small-money matters, or have them reviewed by attorneys, before signing them. That’s a choice. So is the decision to sign something one hasn’t read.

The Times piece quotes F. Paul Bland Jr. of Public Justice, a “national consumer advocate group.” Bland claims that “[c]orporations are allowed to strip people of their constitutional right to go to court.” No, people are allowed to voluntarily waive their right to go to court, in return for valuable considerations. If they do so from voluntary ignorance, that’s their fault and no one else’s.

It’s not that complicated:

If you don’t want to commit to arbitration in general, or to individual arbitration in particular, don’t sign contracts committing yourself to those things.

If you consider reading and understanding a contract before you sign it to be too much work, don’t complain when your decision to remain ignorant comes back to bite you.

If you really, really want something, but the only way to get it is to accept an arbitration clause, then make your choice. Do without that thing or to accept the clause. Nobody owes you a smart phone or a credit card or whatever. Take the deal or don’t take the deal. Don’t blame arbitration itself, which is as good in some cases, and better in most, than resort to government courts. Remember, it was government that made the corporations so powerful in the first place.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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