The Senate on Thursday began advancing legislation regulating the sale of motor vehicle catalytic converters, and cracking down on both teen sexting and so-called “revenge porn,” giving new momentum to substantial bills that in some cases had stalled for years with less than a week until the term ends.
After the Senate Ways and Means Committee favorably recommended redrafts of three bills Thursday morning, the Senate in the afternoon gave initial approval to the catalytic converters proposal (S 3169), a redrafted sexting and explicit materials bill (S 3167), and a land transfer involving Northampton (S 3171).
That middle bill aims to tackle a pair of thorny, related topics that some advocates and policymakers warn have been difficult to rein in.
It would create a new juvenile offense for unlawfully possessing or disseminating sexually explicit materials, including nude photos of another person, and would create a new diversion process for minors alleged to have violated that law, according to a summary produced by the Senate Ways and Means Committee.
The bill calls for new educational programs about sexting and posting indecent images and videos online. Taking aim at a practice often referred to as revenge porn, the bill would additionally create a new criminal offense for distributing sexually explicit visual materials of another person without their consent and quintuple the allowable criminal harassment fine from $1,000 to $5,000.
Victims’ rights advocates, Gov. Charlie Baker and Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito have pushed for years for action to crack down on revenge porn. Nearly every other state in the country has some form of a ban on posting, publishing or disseminating sexually explicit pictures without the subject’s permission, even if they originally consented to creating the image, but reform supporters say a legal loophole in Massachusetts prevents prosecutors from acting in almost every such case here.
The House unanimously approved its own version of legislation related to sexting and revenge porn in May and a catalytic converters bill in October.
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