Picture this: a 14-year-old boy is flirting with one of his 13-year-old classmates on his phone. He texts her a naked photo on Snapchat. She sends him one back.

Their teachers find out and report it to the police. Because they’re both under 18, they have technically committed the offence of distributing an indecent image of a child – even though they’re the child in question.

They are cautioned and put on a police database for sexting – meaning they both have criminal reports against their names for the next 10 years.

This is not an exaggerated situation of what could happen in an overly politically correct world; it’s a reality.

Already this year a 14-year-old boy has been given a criminal record for sexting (in a similar scenario to the imagined one above) and a schoolgirl aged under 18 has received a police caution for sending an explicit photo to her boyfriend.

"The problem is we end up with no hard and fast rule on what should be done if an incident of sexting is reported."

These are just the cases that have hit the headlines. In total, more than 1,000 under-18s have been investigated for sexting since 2012. Many have ended up with a conviction under child pornography laws which can affect their education, work and travel opportunities in adulthood.

It’s no wonder that a group of MPs and peers are calling for a change in the law to stop sexting teens from being criminalised under child porn laws.

The All-Party Parliamentary Group for Children (APPG) is campaigning for the Home Office to re-write rules on how the police record these incidents as crimes. They say that instead of being criminalised for these ‘low-level’ offences, children should be referred to other agencies such as their school, counselling or social services for “support and intervention.”

Teens view sexting as harmless - but the law says otherwise Credit: Alamy

Yet Policing Minister Mike Penning has defended the current system, saying: “If a member of the public reports any violent incident, the police must record it as such. Police officers can and should, however, exercise their discretion in the action they take once a crime has been reported."

The problem with that is we end up with no hard and fast rule on what should be done if an incident of sexting is reported. Just as with sexual consent laws, where it is technically illegal for two 15-year-olds to have consensual sex, it’s up to individual police officers to decide how to respond.

In some cases, understanding police officers may let the sexting teenagers off without a caution. But in others, they may have pressure from confused and angry parents to impose a harsher sentence because they blame a teen for corrupting their child.

If the police agree, they could legally place a teen on the sex offenders register and destroy that person's future.

It's a shocking thought, particularly given that most of those teens have no idea they’re doing anything illegal. Dr Christine Barter, NSPCC senior research fellow and lecturer at Bristol University, recently surveyed more than 1,000 teens and found that for most of them, it was reciprocal and consensual:

"Girls shouldn’t have to pretend they’re scared of doing something illegal when want they really want to say is they don’t feel comfortable Snapchatting an image of their genitalia."

“For nearly all boys there was no negative impact. For girls it was more varied. If it was sent with no violence or abuse and it wasn’t shared, the impact was usually positive. They thought it was sexy and fun. It being illegal was something they didn’t even comprehend or could understand.”

The only time that sexting had negative impacts – typically only for girls – was if they felt pressured into it. This is where the existing sexting laws can be helpful. Dr Barter explains: “The law was used as protection by some young people who were being pressured into doing it – they could say ‘I can’t, it’s illegal.’”

It's why she thinks that decriminalising teens for sexting is too simplistic a solution: "It’s difficult because the context in which the sexting has occurred is the main thing. For some young people it’s ridiculous they’ll get a criminal record but for others, it helps them."

Sexting can be a positive experience for many teens Credit: Chris Rout/Alamy

The existing law can aid teens in other ways. Ann Olivarius, senior partner at law firm McAllister Olivarius, explains: “If we decriminalise sexting, one of the problems is it could be used as a way to groom girls. Girls who are vulnerable with self-esteem issues and want to be accepted could be caught in."

But, like children's charity NSPCC, she still supports the APPGC's calls, and urges police "to distinguish between sexual experimentation and harmful criminal behaviour.”

I couldn't agree more. Young people shouldn’t be criminalised for sexting. Almost half of British teens have sent a sext, and the sheer numbers show just how normalised it has become for them. They shouldn't have to face potentially life-ruining sanctions for doing what teens have been doing for years - flirting.

Of course a change in law could create problems, such as making girls more vulnerable to grooming and less confident to say 'no', but that just shows how important it is for them to have a decent sex education.

Girls shouldn’t have to pretend they’re scared of doing something illegal when want they really want to say is they don’t feel comfortable Snapchatting an image of their genitalia.

We need to help Britain’s youth understand the complex dangers of sexting so they can decide individually what's right for them, but we shouldn’t stop them from doing it with a blanket ban. Sexting isn’t child porn and it’s about time our law reflected this.

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