It gets even worse when absolute age is considered. It's insane that two 17-year-olds can meet and date and want to have sex, yet people come with pitchforks to prosecute the first one unfortunate enough to turn 18!?
But in the end I dropped it because it struck me that while the legal ramifications of this situation may be considered stupid, the far overriding worry to me is how unhealthy this situation is: for those involved, for their community, and their culture.
The focus should be on the far more difficult problem of changing that. While legislation may be a part of that, I doubt if that alone is the solution. How do we fix this?
I agree, and I think the problem stems exactly from the culture that vilifies sex. If you treat sex as something natural and normal, I think teenagers will be much less likely to treat it as something to "collect".
(Not saying anything like that happened here though).
But even ignoring the child sexual abuse images aspect: It's a pretty unhealthy culture where children assign point values to naked photographs of other children. That's not normal exploration of childhood sexuality.
In cultures that have much more open sexuality we see reduced sexual activity in children (eg, less sexually transmitted infection; fewer unplanned pregnancies).
The UK / US seem to have a problem with this and just telling children to stop doing it doesn't seem to be working.
(Fully agree that prosecuting a child for taking an image of themself is a bad idea)