¶ … shame in teenage sextual relations," Nina Funnell outlines a conceptual criticism of the approach taken by the Commonwealth on matters relating to the laws governing various sex crimes. According to Funnel (2011), there are fundamental problems with the enforcement of certain sex crime laws against minors because they were obviously drafted and enacted mainly to protect minors and not to punish their sexual behaviour. In that regard, Funnell (2011) focuses especially on the issue of the prosecution of teenagers who transmit sexualised photographs of themselves to others as violators of child pornography laws even though those crimes are, essentially, victimless crimes. The author points out that in addition to the nonsensical application of those laws to the class of persons they were originally intended to protect rather than punish, the Commonwealth has exhibited a simultaneous lackadaisical approach to prosecuting sex crimes involving bona fide victims and adult perpetrators, such as in the case of an adult male convicted of surreptitiously photographing teenage girls under their skirts (Funnell, 2011).
Meanwhile, the consequences to minors prosecuted for so-called "sexting" types of offences (McLoughlin & Burgess, 2010; Svantesson 2010) are, at least arguably, worse than the consequences of actually being victimized by the same types of crimes in circumstances where they are actually victimized by adults, such as in the case of the adult male caught photographing teenage girls under their skirts (Funnell, 2011). Granted, the long-term criminal penalties in the Commonwealth are less damaging than those in the United States (Hinds & Daly 2001; Ronken & Lincoln 2001); however, there is no doubt that merely being arrested, prosecuted, and convicted is tremendously traumatizing to teenagers and that the fact that the offence…
