Policing ‘sexting’: Responsibilization, respectability and sexual subjectivity in child protection/crime prevention responses to teenagers’ digital sexual expression

Abstract

This article examines the motivations, techniques and potential consequences of the governance of teenage sexting. I examine the over-representation of white, middle-class, heterosexual, female sexters, and abstinence from sexting discourses in the ‘Respect Yourself’ child protection/crime prevention initiative. This campaign, I suggest, exploits slut shaming in an effort to responsibilize teenage girls for preventing the purported harms that may flow from sexting—including humiliation, sexual violations and criminalization—for both themselves and their peers. I examine this responsibilization effort through the lens of critical whiteness, queer, girlhood/young feminist and porn studies’ theorizations of the politics of sexual respectability and sexual subjectification and argue that this campaign simultaneously: reveals anxieties about the decline of the moral authority of the white, middle-class, heterosexual nuclear family; constitutes certain teenage girls’ unintelligibility as sexual subjects; and, undermines teenage girls’ ability to challenge a normative sexual order in which they are often blamed extra/legally for their sexual victimization.

Reframing Risqué/Risky: Queer Temporalities, Teenage Sexting, and Freedom of Expression

“…Canadian policing and child protection agencies have emphasized the risks of sexting since 2005 when Cybertip.ca-Canada's national tipline for reporting the online sexual exploitation of childrenissued a public alert about "the growing trend of young girls posing nude for webcams and the distribution of the resulting photos and videos on the Internet" [10,25]. Subsequently, provincial and federal policing units across Canada released warnings about the myriad risks that sexting poses for both teens and their parents.…”

“…While the legal risks of sexting have loomed large in media and crime control coverage as well as academic responses to the practice since 2008 11 , also present in these warnings are references to the intimate and financial risks that sexting may pose to minors', and particularly to girls', reputations and future prospects [10,27]. Notably, despite the fact that the legal rationale for criminalizing child pornography rests on fears about the risk of sexual exploitation, this fear plays a very minor role in anti-sexting PSAs and warnings 12 .…”

“…Despite the existence of this exemption, present day social, political, and extra/legal debates surrounding teenage sexting in Canada tend not to acknowledge the constitutionality of this subset of teenagers' consensual sexual expression 5 . Although we have yet to witness the prosecution of teenagers for scenarios that fall within the exemption's parameters, or for consensual distribution that falls outside of these parameters, we have seen the development of numerous anti-sexting campaigns by police and child protection agencies which decry the very possibility of consensual and 'safe sexting', let alone the affordances of the practice as acknowledged by the Supreme Court [9,10]. In this article, we argue against the construction of youths' 'risqué imagery' as inherently risky and thus potentially subject to legal censure 6 .…”

“…In Part I, we map and trouble the way in which academic, police, and child protection responses to consensual teenage sexting emphasize the practice's relationship to embodied risks (including mental, physical and sexual health and bodily integrity), financial risks (including 'future prospects'), intimate risks (such as sexual assault and ruined reputation), and legal risks (including criminalization of minors and their parents) 9 . In Part II we assert that the risk regimes documented in the previous section act as a proxy for moralizing and thus governing youth sexuality [9,[20][21][22], and suggest that any research examining sexting's risks ought to consider additional and alternative variables and theoretical frameworks 10 . In an effort to reconsider and resist the risk based moral regulation of adolescent sexual expression we reframe consensual However, as is discussed at a later point in the article, this claim is undermined by the creation of the existence of the private use exemption as well as other extant defenses to the law, such as artistic merit.…”

“…In contrast they "seek to expand [and complicate] an understanding of gendered and sexual risk into the everyday relations in the young people's immediate, inside-known realm of peer-to-peer relations in their social networks both online and offline" ( [19], p. 125) (Emphasis in original). 10 In making this claim we are not proposing an alternative formula or analysis that guarantees a reliable and quantifiable yield. As Hunt writes, "holding out such a promise…all too often functions as a form of normative judgment" ( [20], p. 175).…”