:-0?>NC Law: Teens who take nude selfie photos face adult sex charges
After a 16-year-old Fayetteville girl made a sexually explicit nude photo of herself for her boyfriend last fall, the Cumberland County Sheriff's Office concluded that she committed two felony sex crimes against herself and arrested her in February.
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....
With the growing popularity of sexting among teens, two researchers said the courts would fill with defendants like this girl if the Sheriff's Office were to arrest all the teens who make nude photos to share with their love interests.
Were such a standard to apply nationwide, "you're talking about millions of kids being charged with child pornography," said psychologist Jeff Temple of the University of Texas Medical Branch.
Temple said his research has found that 28 percent of teens use their cellphones to send naked photos of themselves to other teens....
The Fayetteville girl, Brianna Denson, was sexting with her boyfriend, Cormega Zyon Copening, the Sheriff's Office said. The agency hit Copening with five sexual exploitation of a minor charges - four for making and possessing two sexually explicit pictures of himself and the last for possessing a copy of the picture that Denson made for him.
Copening, who was 16 at the time and is now 17, also faces possible prison time and the requirement to register as a sex offender if convicted. The charges have already forced him off the football team at Jack Britt High School. He had been the quarterback.
"That's crazy. That seems like overkill," ...
Although the pictures are illegal, sexual intercourse between 16-year-old teens is not. The age of consent for sexual activity in North Carolina is 16, and it dips younger than that for teens who are less than four years apart in age....
She shouldn't have been charged in the first place, researchers Temple and Drouin said.
"It seems to me that you might be among the strictest of the laws that I've heard of" in the country, Droiun said.
Copening's case is still pending....
Worth noting - With one of the largest United States Army installations in the world, Fayetteville is certainly a center for perfectly legal digital depictions of violence and the threat of violence, some of which at the moment appear alongside the article under the heading "PHOTOS: MILITARY & FORT BRAGG".
in this forum? 
