Online sharenting: Identifying existing vulnerabilities and demystifying media reported crime risks

Abstract

Sharenting – the digital sharing of sensitive information of minors by parents or guardians – has not yet been investigated from a criminological perspective. However, there are reported concerns regarding its criminogenic potential amidst fast-growing media interest in sharenting practices, particularly in relation to the perceived crime risks. This article offers an exploratory analysis of cases where such practices led to the victimisation of minors, evidencing the gap between media reports about crime risks and actual victimisation. The paper also demonstrates that sharenting is a more complex phenomenon than generally recognised. By exploring these issues, the paper advances criminological understanding of the practice and demonstrates the divergences between media-reported crime risks and victimisation associated with sharenting. Although the paper highlights media exaggerations of such crime victimisation which can heighten public fear and anxiety, the article also provides new insights on the nature of actual victimisation, to raise awareness and aid preventative intervention.

Share with care: negotiating children’s health and safety in sharenting practices

“…In a comparison with other groups analyzed in the ProTechThem project (e.g. Lavorgna et al, 2023), data shows that each community has its own rules and styles to address such consequences and administrators play an important role in orienting and ruling parents toward some essential values and behaviors with the aim to protect children's privacy. Groups' rules provided by administrators are often porous and general, aimed more at ensuring a pleasant affective environment and a useful experience within the group than protect children's privacy.…”

“…From a societal perspective, parents are thus considered solely responsible for child rearing, and this legitimates the representation of “bad parenting” as the cause of all social problems (e.g. Gillies, 2008; Lavorgna et al, 2023). The literature shows that social media are spaces in which discourses about good or bad motherhood or mothering practices are performed and constructed (e.g.…”

“…Data were collected in the course of an innovative triangulation of passive digital ethnography and both qualitative content and visual analysis of posted material in a purposive sample of social media groups (Kozinets, 2010;Lavorgna et al, 2023;Pink, 2016). In particular, this paper analyzes the findings of the monitoring of two public, open Facebook groups: one in the UK (with 277,300 users) and one in Italy (2200 users) concerning sleep advice and training for children, where children's health and wellbeing were discussed through a frequency of dozens of posts daily.…”

Criminogenic and harm-enabling features of social media platforms: The case of sharenting practices

“…The sharing of potentially sensitive information of minors can originate from motivations ranging from parental pride and social isolation, to the search for social influence and profit (Lavorgna et al, 2022). Whilst some of these factors are inherent in the nature of social media platforms (Haillikainen, 2015), some can directly increase the rewards for harmful sharenting practice.…”

“…Especially over the last decade, sharenting has received scholarly attention by several disciplines, including law (e.g., Steinberg, 2017; Hancock, 2021), media, communication and cultural studies (e.g., Chalken and Anderson, 2017; Choi and Lewallen, 2018; Archer, 2019; Ranzini et al, 2020; Barnes and Potter, 2021); computer science (e.g., Ammari et al, 2015); educational sciences (e.g., Cino and Damozzi, 2017; Di Bari, 2017; Brosch, 2018); and psychology (e.g., Lazard et al, 2019). So far, however, this common social practice has been almost ignored by criminological scholarship (Lavorgna et al, 2022), which is surprising as we consider that, beyond risks posed by negative psychological repercussions in ignoring children's desire to having (or not) an online identity (Steinberg, 2017) or due to the perpetuation of gender and racial stereotypes (Choi and Lewallen, 2018), there are concerns regarding the potential for financial exploitation (Archer, 2019; Barassi, 2019), grooming and child abuse, cyber hate and identity crimes (e.g., Bezáková et al, 2021; Wachs et al, 2021; Williams-Ceci et al, 2021). Indeed, recent research has shown that, despite the potential under-emerging and underreporting of cases where sharenting has led to the victimisation of minors, there are systemic vulnerabilities in current sharenting practices that can cause the perpetration of harms (Lavorgna et al, 2022).…”