Dr. Mary Aiken:

Ireland has one of the highest rates of sextexting in Europe. It is a social problem but, arguably, normative. Back in the day people went behind the cowshed and played strip poker or spin the bottle, but the difference was they did not take digital images and disseminate them widely. Children and young people or teenagers are sexually curious. The problem with sextexting, as a social problem, is that it is viewed through the lens of the legislation that deals with child pornography. If the child is underage and the image is explicit, it amounts to child pornography. If a 13-year-old generates an image of himself or herself and sends it his girlfriend or boyfriend, de factohe or she is generating and distributing child pornography, albeit of himself or herself. As many as 1,004 children in Denmark are being prosecuted for distributing child pornography because they shared explicit images.