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Can my son be in trouble with child pornography laws?

Business Questions 8 views 2 answers
My son is 21. Approximately 8 - 10 months ago he was chatting with various people on Facebook. A girl he didn't know sent him a sexually explicit photo of herself. A week or so later he discovered this girl was 15 or possibly 16 years old. He immediately removed the picture from his Facebook and blocked the girl from contacting him. He is now very concerned that he can be in trouble over this. Further investigation found this young girl to be a heroin user and supposedly her father is a police officer. Rumor is she has sent her father to intimate or arrest male victims of what she does. This sounds like a father/daughter scam to me, but my only concern is to convince my son that although technically having this image might have been against the law, he did not know the girl or her age, did not solicit the image and removed the image and blocked her from further contact once he knew the girl's age. Please let me know if there is any chance if he could be prosecuted for anything. The way I read the law it's the girl who broke the law by producing the underage porn and distributing it via the internet. Also the father can be charged if he is ignoring what she is doing.

Attorney Answers

2
Ricardo Desa ·
This may be a scam, it may not. Legally speaking, the mere possession of child pornography is a crime. That being said your son should delete any copies of this picture that are in his possession. Since most devices with hard drives don't actually erase when you delete a file (they merely open the space to be written over, it is possible to delete the image without removing it from your device. Your son may consider destroying the hard drive that contained the image or at least utilize special software to ensure that any vestiges of this image are gone forever.
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