Youth Accused of Sending Indecent Images – Case Dropped

Case study summary

This was an unusual case where a 17-year-old was sending nude images of himself to another teenager that he was in a relationship with. This case should never have been taken so far by the police. We persuaded them to drop the case part-way through their investigation.

Case study

Our client was a 17-year-old student. As many teenagers do, he formed a relationship online with another boy of the same age. As part of this relationship, the two would exchange explicit photographs with each other. As they were over 16 and they could legally consent to sexual activity, it never occurred to them that this was a criminal offence.

The law states that it is an offence to possess, receive or send an incident image of anyone who is aged under 18. Therefore, by sending and possessing incident images of each other, they were technically committing an offence.

Our client was approached by the police and asked to attend an interview. With the assistance of his parents, he instructed our specialist sexual offence lawyers to represent him.

Our lawyers attended the police station with him. This case had come to the police’s attention when they received a trigger warning from a social media network suggesting indecent images of children had been sent from the client’s account. In these cases, the police do not use the trigger warning as evidence against suspects; instead, they seize the electrical device to see if evidence of indecent images can be found on them. This is what the police did in this case; they seized the client's laptop that he needed for his school work.

When we attended the interview, the police stated that they were yet to have the devices forensically examined. In this situation, we cannot know if the police will actually be able to retrieve any evidence from the device. If the police did not find anything on the devices, there would be no case against the client. As a result, the correct tactical decision was to make no comment in the police interview, as it is for the police to gather evidence against our client, and they had not yet done this.

Outside of the interview, our lawyers started to negotiate with the police and suggested that this case should not be treated as a police matter. The purpose of the law in this area is to convict people who have downloaded abusive images of children and not to criminalise teenagers in consensual relationships. The police accepted our arguments, cancelled the forensic examination of the devices and returned the devices to our client.

The client was relieved to be able to carry on with his studies. He is looking forward to applying for university places without this case hanging over him or his family.