Sexting Laws in the ACT: Age, Offences and the Sex Offender Register

In the Australian Capital Territory, the Crimes Act 1900 makes it a serious offence to produce, trade in or possess child exploitation material of anyone under 18, there is no statutory defence for a teenager who creates or shares their own image or a peer's, and only a narrow set of registration carve-outs give a young person a real chance of staying off the sex offender register.

The Age Threshold and Core Offences

Child exploitation material offences in the ACT sit in Part 3 of the Crimes Act 1900, sections 64, 64A and 65. None of the three sections defines "child" locally; they fall back to the Act's general Dictionary, which sets "child" at under 18. That matters because two nearby, unrelated sections in the same Part, section 56 (persistent sexual abuse of a child) and section 66A (failure to protect), do carry their own local override of "child" as under 16. A reader should not assume a single age applies across the whole of Part 3; for sections 64, 64A and 65 specifically, the threshold is under 18.

Section 64, using, offering or procuring a child for the production of child exploitation material or a "pornographic performance," scales its maximum penalty two ways: by whether the child is under 12 (subsections 1 to 2, with absolute liability on the age element) or 12 or older (subsections 3 to 4, strict liability on the age element), and by whether the offence is aggravated.

• Under 12: up to 15 years standard, 19 years aggravated.
• 12 or older: up to 10 years standard, 13 years aggravated.

Section 64A, trading in child exploitation material (producing, publishing, offering or selling), carries up to 12 years standard and 15 years aggravated. Section 65, possessing the material, carries up to 7 years standard and 9 years aggravated; section 65(3) provides the section's only defence, that the defendant had no reasonable grounds for suspecting the material was child exploitation material, a knowledge-based defence that does not turn on the age of the person depicted relative to the accused.

Using the current $160-per-penalty-unit rate under the Legislation Act 2001 (ACT), the maximums above translate to figures such as $240,000 for the standard section 64(1) offence and $112,000 for standard section 65 possession, though the imprisonment maximums are what matter most for a young person facing these charges.

Sending, Receiving or Forwarding an Image as a Teenager

No statutory peer, near-in-age, or self-image defence exists for sections 64, 64A or 65.Section 64 runs from subsection (1) through to (5), and (5) is a definitions clause, not a defence; the next provision in the Act is section 64A. A full-text search of the Act for "near in age," "self-generated," "sexting" and "of themselves" returned no results against these three sections. (The ACT's separate non-consensual intimate image law, section 72D, does carry its own "near in age" defence, but that defence is scoped to that different offence, not to the child exploitation material provisions covered here.)

Legal Aid ACT's own youth-facing guidance states plainly that a young person "can be charged with crimes relating to child pornography, even if you are under 16 years of age," with no mention of a peer exception, consistent with the statutory position above. In practice, a teenager who creates their own image, keeps a peer's image, or forwards one to someone else is exposed to the same offence elements as an adult, subject only to ordinary prosecutorial discretion, which is not a legal defence.

Registration: The Carve-Outs a Young Person Actually Has

Sections 64(1), 64(3), 64A(1) and 65(1) are all Class 2 registrable offences under the Crimes (Child Sex Offenders) Act 2005 (ACT). Registration is not automatic for a young person, and the Act gives two different routes to avoid it.

The narrower route, section 9(1)(c)(i), names section 65(1) specifically: a young person is not a registrable offender only because of a single conviction for that possession offence. It does not extend to section 64 or 64A. A separate, general carve-out at section 9(1)(b) can also apply to any single Class 2 offence, including section 64 or 64A, where the sentence did not include imprisonment or supervision.

The broader route, section 9(3) to (4), is available for any of the four offences: a court, on application, can find that including a young offender on the register is inappropriate in the circumstances, weighing the offence's severity, the offender's age at the time, the harm caused, rehabilitation efforts and ongoing risk. If a young person is registered despite these carve-outs, the reporting period is shorter than an adult's, 7.5 years by default under section 89(1), reduced to 4 years under section 89(2) where the only-ever registrable offence is a single Class 2 offence, which every ACT child exploitation material offence is.

Adult Sharing: Lawful With Consent, a Different Offence Without It

Sexting between consenting adults is lawful. Sharing an intimate image of an adult without their consent is a different part of the Act, Part 3A, which includes sections 72C and 72D (distributing) and section 72E (threatening to distribute) an intimate image. For the full picture of non-consensual intimate image and deepfake law across Australia, including how each state and territory's offence is framed, see deepfake and intimate image laws in Australia.

If ACT Policing Contacts You or Your Teenager

What happens during a police interview, the right to silence, and the right to a lawyer are covered separately at Miranda rights in Australia. For the comparison across all eight Australian jurisdictions, age thresholds, penalties, and which states have a young-person defence, see sexting laws in Australia. For everyday legal topics generally, see the Australia everyday law hub.