A Rights-Based Approach to Youth Sexting: Challenging Risk, Shame, and the Denial of Rights to Bodily and Sexual Expression Within Youth Digital Sexual Culture

Abstract

Educational interventions on youth sexting often focus on individual sexters or would-be sexters, and are driven by the aim of encouraging young people to abstain from producing and sharing personal sexual images. This approach has been criticised for failing to engage with the complex sociocultural context to youth sexting. Drawing upon qualitative group and one-to-one interviews with 41 young people aged 14 to 18 living in a county in southeast England, I explore young people's perceptions and practices surrounding sexting. By taking a grounded theory approach to the research, I reveal how young people's shaming of digitally mediated sexual self-expression shaped and was shaped by a denial of rights to bodily and sexual autonomy and integrity. This denial of rights underpinned harmful sexting practices, including violations of privacy and consent, victim blaming, and bullying. I conclude that responses to youth sexting should attend to this broader youth cultural context, emphasise the roles and responsibilities of bystanders, and encourage a collectivist digital sexual ethics based upon rights to one's body and freedom from harm (Albury,

Only sluts love sexting: youth, sexual norms and non-consensual sharing of digital sexual images

“…Moreover, while present-day hegemonic cultural representations of ideal femininity encourage girls and women to perform specific types of (hetero)sexiness on the one hand, girls and women are at the same time discouraged from and punished for performing sexiness through moralizing, pathologising and slut-shaming discourses (e.g. Bailey & Hanna, 2011;Burns, 2015;Dobson, 2015Dobson, , 2019Lippman & Campbell, 2014;McGovern & Lee, 2018;Ricciardelli & Adorjan, 2019;Ringrose, Harvey, Gill, & Livingstone, 2013;Setty, 2019bSetty, , 2019c. Also, sexual double standards underpin victimblaming responses to girls and young women whose images are distributed without their consent, with girls and women being made responsible for (preventing) the abuse of their images (Burkett, 2015;Crofts et al, 2015;Dobson & Ringrose, 2016;McGovern & Lee, 2018;Salter, 2016;Setty, 2019b).…”

“…Many research participants had such negative opinions about sexting, that they were not able to imagine why peers would make and share sexual images in the first place, especially outside of formal (romantic) relationships (see also Manning, Giordano, & Longmore, 2006). This lack of understanding, which is embedded in present-day negative discourse about sexting, facilitates non-consensual image sharing: it makes it easier to share other people's images without their consent and to blame the victim for it (Setty, 2019c).…”

“…One research participant explains about an image of a girl lying on a bed with a naked upper body: 'Had this been a man, who had made such a picture in a similar pose, many people would not call it a nude picture' (boy, 17, bystander). Such gendered evaluations of 'sexual' images makes girls more vulnerable for becoming a victim of nonconsensual image sharing, as her pictures are judged as more sexual, and therefore more 'interesting' to share (see also Setty, 2019c).…”

“…Secondly, research participants condemned girls easier than boys for making and sharing sexual images of themselves, and girls were often confronted with slut-shaming and stigmatization (see also Burns, 2015;Dobson, 2015Dobson, , 2019Dobson & Ringrose, 2016;Lippman & Campbell, 2014;Ricciardelli & Adorjan, 2019;Ringrose & Harvey, 2015;Ringrose et al, 2013;Setty, 2019bSetty, , 2019cS. Walker, Sanci, & Temple-Smith, 2013).…”

“…Moreover, the advice to stop sexting in order to prevent image-based abuse makes those who are actually responsible invisible, namely the perpetrators: people who share other people's sexual images without their consent. In order to respond more adequately to the problem of non-consensual image sharing, scholars have argued that we need to shift our focus from (potential) victims to (potential) perpetrators and the context that enables this type of sexual violence (Angelides, 2013;Karaian, 2014;Naezer, 2018a;Setty, 2019c). With this article, we want to contribute to this shift by identifying the different scenarios of and motives for non-consensual image sharing among Dutch youth, and by analysing the role of present-day sexual norms and taboos in the experiences of young perpetrators, victims and bystanders.…”