Canberra

Young people placed on the sex offenders’ register for sexting partners who were under the age of 18 will be able to apply to have their name removed from the list under changes proposed by the Victorian government.

The waiver will apply to cases involving 18 and 19-year-olds who were in a consensual sexual relationship with teenagers a few years their junior and were caught under strict child abuse material and child sex laws.

Under the current legislation, anyone aged 18 or older who receives or possesses a sexually explicit image or video of anyone under the age of 18 is guilty of possessing child abuse material and will be automatically placed on the sex offenders’ register for a minimum of eight years. People on the register are banned from working with children and must comply with strict reporting conditions, including telling police if they plan to leave the state for more than two days, providing detailed travel plans and reporting back to police within a day of returning from overseas.

The proposed changes in the Sex Offenders Registration Amendment (Miscellaneous) Bill 2017, announced by the police minister, Lisa Neville, on Thursday, will allow courts the discretion to exempt people from automatic registration as a sex offender if they are satisfied there is no ongoing threat to the community. The exemption would apply to people who were 18 or 19 when they committed a reportable offence, either by having sex with a person aged under 16 or possessing sexually explicit images of a person aged under 18. In both cases, the waiver would only be granted if the victim was at least 14 years old at the time of the offence.

The announcement comes days after an analysis by the Queensland Sentencing Advisory Council found nearly 1,500 children in that state had been found guilty of child exploitation offences, mostly for sexting-based offences. A Victorian government spokeswoman said the exemption clause would apply to about 30 people per year brought before the courts on sexting charges and could potentially apply to hundreds of people already convicted and placed on the sex offenders’ register for sexting.

At the same time, the proposed legislation would toughen the penalties against teenagers under the age of 18 who are placed on the sex offenders’ register by banning them from working with children while they remain on the register, which can be as long as seven-and-a-half years.

Youth Law Victoria policy officer Tiffany Overall said she welcomed the changes but questioned why they were not introduced as part of a 2014 law that exempted minors from child abuse material laws. “It would have been good for it to come earlier but it is a very good thing,” she told Guardian Australia.

Overall said the strict conditions imposed by the sex offenders’ register could have a damaging impact on young people that was often disproportionate to their initial offence.

“I know of one young man who has just completely isolated himself from his family, can’t socialise with his younger cousins, because he is so ashamed of it,” she said. “And that is one case where the magistrate said they did not believe he should be on the register and would not have put him on their if they had been given that discretion.”

Legal Aid Victoria’s executive director of criminal law, Helen Fatouros, said being placed on the sex offenders’ register had a “profound and substantial impact on a person’s life” and automatic registration produced “unfair outcomes”.

“The legislation was plainly not intended to catch young people who have formed consensual relationships” she said. “The registration of young people in these circumstances does not serve the overriding objective of protecting vulnerable members of the community.”

A spokesman for the Law Institute of Victoria, Michael Holcroft, said the latest reforms should be expanded to allow the court discretion in all cases where a person might be placed on the sex offenders’ register but said the reforms announced on Thursday were a welcome step.

Holcroft said placing young people who were of low or no risk of reoffending on the sex offenders’ register had a “huge” impact on their life and diverted resources away from the monitoring and control of more serious sex offenders.

The proposed changes to the Sex Offenders Registration Act would also give police the power to obtain the fingerprints and DNA of people on the register without a court order and the power to search their house without a warrant.

Both the Law Institute of Victoria and Legal Aid Victoria opposed expanding police powers to take DNA and fingerprints without a court order, saying existing police powers were sufficient.

Box:

A double-edged law

Under the 2014 sexting laws, children under the age of 18 who send and receive explicit images or videos are not guilty of child abuse material offences provided there is a less than two-year age difference between the children in the images and everyone involved is consenting. But minors who maliciously distribute sexually explicit images, or who threaten to do so, are committing an offence.

The 2014 laws were introduced to protect teenagers from being prosecuted for engaging in what has become normal teenage behaviour, but they do not protect people aged 18 or over who receive sexually explicit images of people under the age of 18, even if those images are sent within the confines of a lawful and consenting relationship.