By Barbara Felix | 25 April 2005, 17:49

Alistair Gillespie, of the governments net task force, is calling for a re-think on how we deal with underage sex offenders after the case was dropped against a teenage girl who had taken topless photos of her friends and posted them on the internet. As the law currently stand, had she been found guilty, she would have been put on the sex offenders register and possibly received a jail sentence.

Whilst this story explored the legal rammifications, it neatly sidestepped the social ones. This story reminds me of another story I read, a year or so back, about page 3 birthday girls in The Express. Since these girls were appearing topless in the newspaper on their sixteenth birthdays, surely this meant that the photo’s had been taken when they were fifteen or younger? the implication being that either the paper was breaking the law by printing the pix, or it was lying to it’s readers. I was more interested in why the girls involved in the above case had stuck their pix up on the net. Was it naivete? or was it a bid to advertise themselves?