I'm gonna go against the grain here. I'll preface this by saying that I think all sex-offender cases should be handled on a case-by-case basis, and if we use a

I'm gonna go against the grain here. I'll preface this by saying that I think all sex-offender cases should be handled on a case-by-case basis, and if we use a bit of common sense, things would be a lot better for everyone. Here's a scenario that is likely rare but plausible. Some girl and boy both at age 15 could be sexting each other. Pics are exchanged, and the pictures are removed from the phone and placed on a computer hard drive. Neither party wants the pics found, so the classic, "bury the pics 10 levels deep in a made up directory that looks like a legit folder hierarchy" is used. A week later, the pics are forgotten about. Fast forward 5 years. The hard drive crashes. The once teen has a few sporadic backups, but they haven't been regular. They go to a data recovery business. "I'm mainly concerned with the pictures and a lot of the text documents. Try to salvage as many of those as possible. Everything else is whatever." The business gets to work and applies a could of filters to list of recovered media. Among the media exists 10 or so pictures of a young teen. He received them when he was 15, and he forgot about them. He had no intention of ever looking at them again. Hell, he would have deleted them ages ago had he thought about it, but now he has a hell of a story to explain to the feds. I don't think teens should be prosecuted as sex offenders for exchanging pics of themselves with other teens, but I think the heart of the matter is in the right place. I don't have a solution to magically fix everything, because there are always going to be implications. Just don't ruins a kid's life for the truly innocuous mistake of exploring sexuality with someone of the same age.