I am currently working on a monograph that examines the responses to sexting in mass media and law. Here is a description:
Scholars, educators, and legislators are at a crucial juncture in which new and pre-existing laws are being used to criminalize adolescents’ use of mobile media in their sexual lives. My book, Sexting panic: The criminalization of girls’ sexuality, explores the responses in both mass media and law to teenage girls who use digital media to produce sexually explicit images of themselves, a practice called “sexting” when it involves cell phones. While sexting has been in the news since late 2008, the legal and ethical issues it raises are only beginning to be discussed. Authorities often blame and even prosecute girls who create and share explicit images of themselves, but most responses to sexting pay little attention to people who maliciously distribute private images without permission. Many scholars and mainstream cultural commentators attribute sexting to girls’ low self-esteem, the raging hormones of adolescence, or the supposed dangers of digital technologies and they often assume, incorrectly, that sexting always leads to victimization and inevitably damages future career prospects.
This book combines an analysis of mass media representations with an examination of legal and policy discourses to investigate the production and circulation of commonsense assumptions about girls, sexuality, and digital media. I examine the connections between mass media and official government texts by looking at sources such as television news, talk shows, newspaper articles, position papers, press releases, legal proceedings, and legislative and parliamentary hearings and debates. Using discourse analysis, I produce an account of the common sense that travels between media and policy and the relationships and interactions between a range of expert and authoritative discourses.
I find that a key problem underlying the unjust responses to sexting is an inaccurate understanding of teenage girls’ sexual desires and choices—in short, their sexual agency. The first part of the book examines failures in educational and legal contexts to protect girls from nonconsensual sexting, which is the malicious distribution of their private images. In these chapters I find that educational messages and news commentaries hold girls excessively responsible for their victimization while removing the blame from perpetrators of sexual harassment. The second part of the book covers some different ways that girls and their partners are criminalized when they do in fact consent to sexting. In these situations, I find that legal and public opinion denies girls’ agency and delegitimizes their choices.
Building on my critiques of these inaccurate models of girls’ agency, I offer an alternative way of thinking about girls’ sexual choices. The book concludes by arguing that that sexting should be viewed as a form of media production. In turn, I argue that models of media production also need to better account for sexuality and consent. This reorientation to sexting highlights that sexual image production is not inherently harmful but that the malicious distribution of private images certainly is. This model moves the conversation about youth and sexuality online beyond assertions that all forms of sexting are deviant criminal offenses to a more careful consideration of what girls do and do not consent to when they engage in digitally mediated sexual practices. By examining the catastrophic responses to sexting and offering an alternative model, this book contends that scholars, educators, and policymakers need to reconsider taken-for-granted ideas about digital media and young women’s sexuality.
