We live in a time in which some Western countries have to deal with major cases of legislative schizophrenia. They want to protect kids by teaching them that sex is something dirty and disgusting.
But on the other hand they seem to have a perverted passion for destroying the lives of the very same kids by adding pre-teens to public sex offender lists, charging 10-year-old girls with rape for playing doctor or telling a teenage boy that he’ll have to get his boner photographed by cops because he was sexting with his girlfriend.
The newest fad in this kafkaesque nightmare is to treat the same person as a child and an adult at the same time. This requires some mental gymnastics you’d think no sane person would be capable of.
So here’s what’s happening: A teenager takes a selfie of themselves while they’re naked. In the eyes of the Unites States legal system this means they just sexually exploited a child–themselves. But due to the seriousness of this crime they will be tried as an adult by the courts
The girl was listed on a warrant as both the adult perpetrator and the minor victim of two counts of sexual exploitation of minor – second-degree exploitation for making her photo and third-degree exploitation for having her photo in her possession.
A conviction could have put the girl in prison and would have required her to register as a sex offender for the rest of her life. [source]
If sexting is a good idea in general is a debate worth having but trying a minor as an adult is an outright ridiculous premise. But in a system that literally hands out the death penalty to minors and mentally ill people all common sense must have been gone over board a long time ago.