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As a result of a 2011 Texas law, schools in that state are required to provide students with an educational program about sexting. After skimming the course materials online, I took the 30-question quiz and scored only 85%! It didn’t reveal which answers I got wrong, but I suspect I missed some of the technical legal questions, like whether a particular type of sexting could be a class A, B, or C misdemeanor. Many of the questions are more subjective:

If you engage in sexting behaviors, your relationships with friends and family can be negatively affected in what ways?

* A. Others may think of you as “easy” or sexually active

* B. You may attract the unwanted attention of predators

* C. Others may be embarrassed to be seen with you

* D. All of the above

Chapter draft: “How to stay safe online: Self-esteem advice for girls”

I’ve just uploaded a draft of Chapter 2 of my book. This chapter examines the discourses of self-esteem and girl power in the advice produced for girls about sexting and online safety from 2005 to 2010. I find that these forms of advice often encourage girls to censor themselves and exercise extreme caution online, treating their creativity and online expression as symptoms of low self-esteem that needs to be corrected. Most troubling, this advice to girls unfairly holding them responsible for preventing male sexual violence and harassment. I end on an optimistic note, arguing that online safety messages would be more evenhanded and effective if they were built on an alternative model of girls’ agency promoting collective action and social justice.

2SMRT4U campaign material

 

Sexting as media production: Re-thinking social media (draft now available)

I’ve uploaded a draft of a paper that’s currently under review. It’s about thinking through sexting as a form of media production. The idea for the paper came from reading Mary Celeste Kearney’s excellent book, Girls Make Media. She argues that there is inherent value in girls’ media production, regardless of the content they produce. I wondered, how far could I push that claim? What would it mean to apply it to sexting? The paper also comes from my reading of the technology studies literature on the unique benefits and opportunities new media can offer women, girls, and other marginalized populations. We already know that sexting can go wrong. But in this paper I wanted to consider, what could be good about sexting? What are we missing when we just focus on the risks instead of the opportunities?

Ultimately I argue that not only does thinking about sexting as media production lead to better responses to sexting (abstinence, for example, clearly will not work), it also demands that scholars add consent to their models of social media and media production. Here’s the abstract:

Many adults are struggling to find appropriate responses to teen sexting: they are blaming the victims of nonconsensual sexting, using harsh child pornography laws against minors, and giving teenagers the ineffective message to simply abstain from sexting. While some scholars champion girls’ media production practices, mainstream discourses since the early 2000s typically portray girls’ media production as irresponsible, dangerous, and out-of-control because it involves sexual content. In this paper, I illustrate and challenge the dominant mainstream assumptions behind some of the major concerns about digitally mediated sexuality by drawing on scholarship that examines the benefits of youth media production and digital social interaction. I argue that viewing sexting as a form of media production would lead to models of social media production that could account for sexuality and consent.

An age-neutral typology of sexting based on consent

I’m trying to develop a typology of sexting that highlights consent. Many people don’t bring consent into sexting at all, just assuming instead that sexting is always nonconsensual. I’ve seen some legal scholars stress forwarding without permission by distinguishing between “primary” and “secondary” sexting (Ryan, 2010), or between “self-sexting” and “downstream sexting” (Calvert et al., 2010), but none of these capture the issue of consent at every level of sexting.

Wolak and Finkelhor’s model (below) is specific to youth (and to some assumptions about youth sexuality), since in their framework consensual sexting fits into the category “experimental.” Calling it “experimental” might help convince prosecutors that they shouldn’t charge those youth with child pornogarphy offenses, but it seems to me like a limited way of understanding consensual sexting.

Wolak and Finkelhor, 2011

This model I am working on in the table below is age-neutral. My definition of “consensual sexting” is that the production, distribution, and reception of the image are all consensual. “Abusive sexting” occurs when the production, distribution, and/or reception of the image is non-consensual. For example, an image could be produced consensually and then distributed without permission–in this case this is abusive sexting at the level of distribution.

Aspect	Consent	Examples
production	consensual	- taking a sexual photo of oneself - willingly and knowingly appearing in a sexual photo that someone else creates
	nonconsensual	- photographing nudity or a sex act without the knowledge of one or more of the people depicted in the image - coercing someone to appear nude, pose sexually, or perform sexual acts on camera
distribution	consensual	- sending a sexual image of oneself to one or more people - posting a sexual image of oneself on a public website
	nonconsensual	- using a cell phone to forward a sexual image (without the permission of the person depicted) to one or more people - posting a private sexual image of someone on a public website without permission- knowingly hosting a private sexual image of someone on a website
reception	consensual	- sending a sexual image to someone who requested it
	nonconsensual	- sending a sexual image to a person who does not want to see that image

I’d love to hear comments about this new model.

New chapter draft: “Should teens have the right to sext? Privacy, consent, and social media”

I’ve just finished a draft of my chapter on sexting for a textbook, Communication in Question: Competing Perspectives on Controversial Issues in Communication Studies. My chapter will appear alongside another position piece arguing: “no, teens should not have the  right to sext.” Read my side (“yes, they should have the right”) here. This is what it’s about:

While many legal and educational commentators believe they are protecting youth from victimization by making sure sexting is illegal, I argue that they are actually exacerbating the problem. This is because when sexting is illegal for everyone, it lets abusive sexters off the hook. One of the ways that abusive sexters avoid blame is because of the idea that no teenager should be creating sexting images in the first place. This leads to the problematic consensus in mass media and law that everyone involved in sexting—regardless of whether their behavior was consensual or abusive—is equally guilty of wrongdoing. Affirming that teenagers have the right to consensually create and share explicit images helps to protect them from peers who might maliciously distribute their private photos.

Comments are welcome, I would love to hear what you think of this piece.

Recommended reading on teen password sharing

How Parents Normalized Teen Password Sharing « Social Media Collective.

danah boyd:

I know that this practice strikes adults as seriously peculiar, but it irks me when adults get all judgmental on this teen practice, as though it’s “proof” that teens can’t properly judge how trustworthy a relationship is.

New peer-reviewed sexting research just released

Two new studies about sexting from the Crimes Against Children Research Center were released today.

The first is a study of arrests for youth-produced sexual images. One of the most interesting findings is that 47 young people were arrested in 2008-2009 for sexting with other youth as a result of incidents that involved no abuse or malicious activity. These 47 people represent 7% of all cases brought to the attention of law enforcement that the study examined (675). Based on the study’s estimate of the total number of cases nationally (3477), I’d estimate that 242 young people may have been arrested in the US during 2008 and 2009 for sexting with peers that was consensual and did not involve any “intent to harm or reckless misuse.”

Before the publication of this study, we only had anecdotal evidence of such cases, but now I think it’s fair to say that a fairly large number of youth are indeed being arrested for consensual sexting with peers. It’s a small proportion of all youth who sext, but 242 (estimated) unconstitutional and unjust arrests is a serious problem that highlights the larger issue of the criminalization of youth sexuality. I hope they publish the data on the race and sexual orientation of these arrested youth soon–we can guess that people of color and queer youth will be disproportionately represented.

The second study is the first peer-reviewed national study on the prevalence of sexting among youth. Previous privately conducted studies have found, by asking slightly different age groups of youth questions that define sexting in different ways, that anywhere from 4% to 19% have sent sexual images. This study of youth 10-17 years old and finds that 1% have appeared in or created an explicit image that could violate child pornography laws. Though almost 10% report being involved in sending or receiving “sexually suggestive” images. Based on this and other studies, I would guess that the numbers would be substantially higher for a group of people ages 15-25. While only 1% of minors may be violating child pornography laws, the issues of privacy and consent in our use of social media are more important than ever.