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The way state attorneys general have been dealing with sex in the digital age lately shows government officials have no idea how to deal with sex in the digital age. Two cases in point: craigslist erotic services listings and teen sexting.

After attorneys general across the nation put craigslist under the glare of their interrogation lamps and made a series of demands with no legal backing whatsoever (especially in South Carolina), craigslist complied by shutting down its erotic services category. To help with what state officials hoped would curb prostitution, craigslist replaced “erotic services” with an employee-monitored and more expensive “adult” section.

Doing so has done little to discourage prostitutes from posting on craigslist. It’s just created more cryptic language and, as ArsTechnica reports, made the sex trade more dangerous than before. Considering it was the “craigslist killer” who inspired the pressure to change, a more dangerous craigslist might be considered an unintended consequence.

Another unintended consequence of digital age laws: charging children with trafficking child pornography. The most famous case of many across the states is out of Pennsylvania, where three teenage girls have been charged with “peddling child pornography” by a local DA after a teacher discovered the girls had shared semi-nude pictures of themselves with classmates.

According to one survey, a fifth of American teenagers had participated in sexting (combination of sex and text messaging), and how one could possibly consider slapping sex offender charges on kids for the rest of their lives is just unconscionable. Nonetheless, Breitbart reports that a dozen states have levied child porn charges against kids across the nation.

A voice of reason appears from Canadian academia though (really, it takes a foreign scholar to make this connection?): Sexting is the digital generation’s version of “doctor,” “strip poker,” or “spin the bottle.” Wonder how many of us (not me, of course ;-p), could have been slapped with sex crime charges in junior high just a few decades ago?