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.

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.

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.

COPPA predates the rise of social media. Its architects never imagined a world where people would share massive quantities of data as a central part of participation. It no longer makes sense to focus on how data are collected; we must instead question how those data are used. Furthermore, while children may be an especially vulnerable population, they are not the only vulnerable population. Most adults have little sense of how their data are being stored, shared, and sold.

Folks have been largely silent on the role of boys and men in all this. Who, exactly, taught this young kid that the right way to treat a girl who likes him is to ask her to perform a sex act in public? (If the rumors are to be believed, she was attempting to win his affection.) Who taught the boy with the camera that they could video record sex acts and upload them to the internet without consent of the principals? Who the hell is the third kid who is just watching? Why is he hanging around while this is happening? Is anyone concerned that the things these boys learned, either explicitly from their peers or implicitly from society?

While the major national US papers seem to be ignoring the story so far–which would be surprising except that the teens involved are African American–there is plenty of coverage in online media. And those articles tend to blame Cole herself or the internet in general. Even if “Cole” is a pseudonym and her twitter feed is fake, the reactions to the story are telling. Few have any harsh words for the boys who filmed her and distributed the video. Here are some particularly troubling headlines:

Amber Cole Apologizes to Boys; Expert Says She’s ‘Desperate for Male Validation and Love’

Amber Cole : ‘Hurt a Lot of People’ According To Her Dad

Amber Cole Is the Newest Teen Scandalista But She Won’t Be the Last

The consequences of social media for teens

Amber Cole Where Is Your Mother? She Needs to Step Up!

(2) I added a longer description of my book project here.

story via AD

In fact I think the reality is far more disturbing. I think Perry is well aware that his state’s sex education policies are harmful to youth, but that the political capital he maintains by publicly supporting abstinence-only is more important to him.

Perhaps this is too cynical.

The more charitable–but equally disturbing–interpretation is that he truly believes that abstinence-until-marriage is such an important moral value to promote that it is worth spending money on educational policies that have negative effects on teens’ health.  In this video, his rhetoric is clear: he is saying that even if abstinence-only education enables just a few kids to delay sex until marriage, it is worth the cost to the rest of the teens in the state. Feminists and leftists need to understand that their opponents in this matter are not idiots who cannot comprehend a statistic–they know abstinence is not working but they desperately want it to. They are idealists and optimists like we are. Unfortunately, in this case their optimism translates to seriously harmful policies.

Statistics and empirical studies are useful for convincing fence-sitters and pragmatists to support comprehensive sex education. But the real battlefield is in the realm of ideas about sexuality. Why do people like Perry think abstinence-until-marriage is so vital and important? What does it mean to them and why are they willing to make huge public health sacrifices to pursue it? Until we can redefine what sexuality means for people with these views, no proof of abstinence-only’s disastrous effects will convince them that it is not a goal worth pursuing.

Anti-Sexting (HUNGRY BEAST) from Elmo Keep on Vimeo.

via MW

The scope of [proposed Ohio bill] H.B.132 should be limited to encompass only nonconsensual sexting, as this limitation would still successfully deter the form of sexting that causes harm to its participants and society, while allowing teens to maintain their freedom of expression with regard to non-harmful consensual sexting.

This key distinction between consensual and nonconsensual sexting is too often missing from new laws, media coverage of sexting, and even a lot of legal scholarship.

This is not in any way about keeping communities safer. It is about further punishing and portraying as deviant those who have failed to comply with societal rules regarding sexuality, class, and womanhood. It’s not about making communities safer, it’s about specifically ensuring that these particular community members are as unsafe as possible. And in that sense, it’s certainly working.