International sexting and suicide threaths

Question

Im here asking for someone very dear to me whose been struggling with something similar. So let's take this as a hypothethical question.

Let's assume a girl (18 from Slovakia) and a boy (17 from Egypt) started an online relationship. The boy first claimed to also have been 18 but later ended up disclosing his real age, by this time they both sexted and exchanged nudes. The girl wanted to cut all contact immediatly upon finding out his real age but the guy was known to be depressed and in general suicidal due to some other life circumatances. The girl has wanted to break up for quite some time but the boy threathenes to commit suicide if she does. On top of this not only if she breaks up with him but she had to talk him out of doing it many many times in general. She is also very afraid regarding the nudes they both sent to each other as the age of consent in Egypt is 18 and pornography is banned in general. They havent done anything sexual since.

My friend herself has been very depressed over this and stressing herself to death, she has started to be suicidal herself and i had to talk her out of it myself. She doesnt know what to do and if she should break up with him but she expects he will hurt himself if she does. She is scared of going to jail if she does and deeply regrets everything. She feels trapped in this relationship and just wants to cut all contact and move on. So im here on her behalf to hopefully give her some peace of mind or at least tell her whats the worst possible scenario.

My question is can she face any charges for this? She never kept any pictures and they both cut all sexual contact upon finding out. Additionaly, if he ends up comitting suicide can the cause of it be atributted to her? There was no blackmail involved from either sides, he was known to be suicidal before they met and she has talked him out of doing it and been supportive many times. Can it be a crime to break up/cut contact with someone suicidal in general?

I know that some of you are gonna say this might be a scam or the suicide threaths might be nothing but threaths, but lets assume this situation is 100% real and not a scam/empty threaths.

Answer 1

Additionaly, if he ends up comitting suicide can the cause of it be atributted to her? There was no blackmail involved from either sides, he was known to be suicidal before they met and she has talked him out of doing it and been supportive many times. Can it be a crime to break up/cut contact with someone suicidal in general?

While there are some isolated cases of people in the U.S. being held responsible for causing a suicide through flagrantly malicious online activity intended to urge someone to commit suicide, these cases are extremely rare.

The likelihood that the Slovak or the Egyptian legal system would consider interacting with someone in a manner that might tip them over the edge to be legally sanctionable acts that caused suicide, especially in the absence of such calculated malice, are even lower, especially, fairly or not, in the case of a young man who commits suicide. Neither of these legal systems tends to be as "delicate" in policing emotional harm as those the U.S., for example, especially when it involves emotional harm to men.

Egypt, for example, does not make instigating suicide a crime as some other countries do. In Slovakia, there is such a crime, but is it doubtful that these circumstances would qualify. Under Section 154 of the Slovakian penal code, the following offense (as translated by a Wikipedia contributor at the same link) states:

Participating in a Suicide

(1) Any person who incites another person to committing suicide, or helps him to commit suicide, shall, if at least a suicide attempt takes place, be liable to a term of imprisonment of between six months and three years.

(2) The offender shall be liable to a term of imprisonment of three to eight years if he commits the offence referred to in paragraph 1 a) acting in a more serious manner, b) against a protected person, or c) by reason of specific motivation.

Inciting someone to suicide is far more than not properly considering someone else's feelings in the context of a remote romantic relationship. It is actually egging someone on to kill themselves.

If the young man committed suicide, this might lead to young woman to feel moral guilt, but is unlikely to give rise to legal charges.

Some sort of extralegal effort to secure revenge on the part of a family member or close friend of the young man, if he committed suicide, would be more plausible.

For example, I could imagine such a person trying to carry out some sort of revenge porn retaliation that would as a practical matter be very difficult to shut down with the means of the legal system. But, as horrible as that would be, it probably wouldn't gain all that much traction. The online world chases extremes in pornography and normally doesn't have much appetite for a few risque nudes of an eighteen year old women which are dime a dozen in the online pornography world.

My question is can she face any charges for this? She never kept any pictures and they both cut all sexual contact upon finding out.

This seems unlikely, but probably not impossible. Laws against online pornography are often written with an eighteen year old cutoff age even when the age of consent is much lower to actually have sex, in part reflecting a distinction between potentially commercial sexual materials and non-commercial ones.

Still, realistically, the young man in Egypt is far more likely to face trouble under Egyptian prohibitions against pornography involving adults, or other Egyptian laws, than the young woman in Slovakia is to face consequences of any kind under either Egyptian or Slovak laws.

Assuming, as is likely, that the young woman is not Muslim and that he is Muslim, he could also face some manner of religiously oriented sanction if he said anything to her indicating doubt in Islam - even death - if he, for example, secretly confessed to her that he was an atheist or agnostic or would like to convert to Christianity, for example.

The Slovak legal system, in contrast, wouldn't care at all about that kind of interaction and wouldn't extradite someone to Egypt in connection with an offense like that.

Child pornography laws are viewed by prosecuting authorities as primarily a means by which girls and perhaps gay men are exploited, not as means of preventing harm to heterosexual men, and the stereotypes about who is harmed in both Slovak and Egyptian culture work to the Slovak young woman's advantage. Few authorities would even think to conceptualize the case as a harm to the Egyptian young man that needs to be vindicated with a criminal prosecution. The man himself would surely urge authorities not to do so as the harm to him of such a prosecution would exceed any benefit he would receive from it.

Extradition to Egyptian officials is something that is usually available only if (1) the offense is quite serious, and (2) the punishment in Egypt is more or less comparable to the punishment in Slovakia for the same offense. These two conditions are unlikely to be met, and extradition is a remedy used sparingly even when it is legally available under a treaty between the countries involved.

Also, of course, there is the practical reality that none of this material is likely to make it into the hands of the authorities, and that even if it did, it would not appear very blameworthy to an extent that would justify a criminal prosecution in a marginal case.

Conclusion

The young woman needs emotional support and reassurance that this situation is unlikely to have dire consequences as heart-breaking and embarrassing as it might be. Her life is not going to be over, no matter what happens.

How it would be best for her to interact with the young man is more of a relationship issue and a moral issue than it is a legal one.

Answer 2

Just chill. This was a storm in a teacup.

"The boy first claimed to also have been 18 but later ended up disclosing his real age, by this time they both sexted and exchanged nudes. The girl wanted to cut all contact immediatly upon finding out his real age but the guy was known to be depressed and in general suicidal due to some other life circumatances."

This whole question ends here. In Europe, the presumption of innocence is not carved out all the perfect exceptions for the government to do as they please——they do so despite of it.

The girl has no duty to presume the boy lied which was, clearly, a material consideration in her decision to disclosing sexually explicit material of herself available to the boy; in other words, she has no duty to presume the boy would defraud her for the pictures, and the factual premises are sufficient for no judge to be able to rationally rule that, for e.g. by portrait photos of the boy, the girl had no factual basis to have a well-funded belief of the crime of fraud taking place or having taken place until the boy made the confession.

In sum, this means the girl lacked mens rea or a guilty mind, acted in honest mistake of fact which “mistake” was at the hands of the boy.

Since the girl ceased any further acts that could remotely be argued to cross criminal lines, the girl simply cannot be charged of anything under any criminal theory either Slovak¹ (the age of consent is 15 for intercourse, there was no intercourse here, no violation), Egyptian (doesn't matter for the girl) or European law (for e.g., the Lanzarote Convention it only requires where it is in force, incl. Slovakia, "according to the relevant provisions of [Slovak] law, has not reached the legal age for sexual activities" that is, if either parties to them is 15 years or younger which is not the case here; also, the Lanzarote Convention or international law is not in force in Egypt).

Even if a completely nonsensical finding would ever even be considered in Egypt in connection with any of this, as user @o.m. also affirmed, there is simply no way in hell Slovakia would ever extradite the girl to a rather openly autocratic country like Egypt (or any country inside or outside the EU for that matter) based on the above facts of (e.g. fraudulent obtaining of her sexually explicit photographs or other media by the boy, etc.).

All in all, if all this was in reaction to the girl freaking out because of the imagined potential legal repercussions, it was a storm in a tea cup; nothing really happened here legally unless she wants to press charges for fraud; however, under Slovakia law the fact the boy was 17 and not 18 will probably not be deemed material for purposes for a fraud charge to be pressed even upon her own police report and request of prosecution.

¹ Slovak Criminal Code, § 201 "Sexual abuse 1. Any person, who has sexual intercourse with a person less than fifteen years of age or who subjects such person to other sexual abuse, shall be liable to a term of imprisonment of three to ten years."