A 16-year-old Norwegian girl has been fined and issued a two-month suspended jail sentence for filming two 17-year-olds having sex at a party and then posting her video on the social media service Snapchat. It’s one of the first such cases to go to court in Norway.
The court in Sandefjord, southwest of Oslo, ruled that spreading such images was both offensive and hurtful, even though it may be common in teenage circles. The incident occurred at a private party in Sandefjord in December.
The 16-year-old’s video was only around three seconds long and was only out on Snapchat for around two hours, when its subjects found out about it and asked the 16-year-old to erase it. She did, but the video had already been spread further to various groups on Facebook.
Prosecutors charged her with producing sexualized images of minors and invasion of privacy. The girl pleaded guilty as charged, apologized in court to her two subjects and said she regretted that she hadn’t considered the consequences of her actions.
“I’m glad the court took this type of case seriously,” prosecutor Torunn Hallenstvedt Siqveland told newspaper Aftenposten. She hopes it will make other teenagers realize that spreading such videos is not just an innocent joke but a criminal act.
newsinenglish.no staff
