Many parents use apps to monitor their kids. From Life360 that tracks their location, to Nest cameras in the baby’s room and apps that log every text message, there is a lot of enthusiasm for the surveillance of children. It’s an understandable reaction to genuine fears and anxieties, but there are alternatives.
Devorah Heitner argues that we don’t need parenting apps that monitor kids, we need to mentor empathy:
“We need to shift discourse away from discussing sexual and suggestive photos as inappropriate and abnormal, and rather focus on the inappropriate acts of sharing. This not only places blame back where it belongs – on those violating privacy – but also moves away from discourse that demonizes expressions of sexuality; instead we ought to approach sexually suggestive and explicit pictures as part of normal sexual expression, exploration, and intimacy.”
— Jacqueline Ryan Vickery, “Oh Snap! Stop Shaming the Sext“
Another disturbing case of a teen’s sexual assault that was recorded, distributed, and the victim-shaming that followed. What would it take to move from a culture of victim-blaming to perpetrator-shaming? Of course, we are happy to ostracize sex offenders when we can see them as deviant strangers, as we do with sex offender registries, and that’s not productive. But when it’s an acquaintance, a boyfriends, a fellow partygoer, we pivot 180 degrees and blame the victim. There has to be a way to change this, so that when people learn about–or even see–a rape, the default, common reaction is to criticize the rapist, not the victim. Not to see him as a monster, but to see that he harmed someone and did a bad thing. It sounds pretty simple, and yet, it’s not happening.
In these moments, I am reminded of Sarah Projansky’s work on the ubiquity of representations of rape in film and popular culture. And I think this helps us understand that these incidents, like Steubenville, are not about teenagers or social media. The ideas about rape they demonstrate are absolutely endemic to our culture. The question is: how do we burn those ideas down?
The fact that Jada, the 16-year-old victim in this case is speaking publicly is astounding. Her bravery, confidence, and clarity about what happened to her is the only encouraging thing about this terrible incident. She says:
I had no control. I didn’t tell anyone to take my clothes off and do what they did to me. … I’m just angry.
If everyone thought about rape as Jada explains it here, we’d be a long way towards solving this problem. She shouldn’t have to explain these things to us. She shouldn’t have to be brave. But we should all be angry. (edited)
Update: Important analysis from Robin Boylorn at CFC about the complications of celebrating Jada’s bravery:
While I join others in supporting and celebrating Jada’s bravery I worry that being proud of her stoicism is an improper response to the trauma she has experienced. Jada is 16 years old and not only has she been raped, but publicly exposed, outed, mocked, teased and threatened. Rape victims are usually afforded privacy and time in which to process the trauma. Jada, however, has been put in a public spotlight and interrogated about an event with consequences that far exceed the immediate backlash and immaturity of peers. Perhaps instead of being proud of her for being strong we should let her be visibly devastated, distraught, shocked, and inconsolable. Maybe instead of being impressed that blackgirls can withstand so much suffering and become role models for strength, we should be concerned about their emotional wellness, their vulnerability, their humanity.
… The problem with blackgirl strength is that it never lets up. Blackgirls don’t have the luxury of a time out or a break to breathe. The problem with blackgirl strength is that our very lives are stake and if we don’t learn to mask our pain we won’t know how to survive. The problem with blackgirl strength is that practice makes perfect and after while we have that strength, no pain, never let ‘em see you sweat ish down pat. The problem with blackgirl strength is that it doesn’t offer protection. The problem with blackgirl strength is that nobody ever tells us we don’t have to be strong and we don’t know how not to be. That is a problem.
I’m quoted in a CBS News article today.
Hasinoff cautions parents not to worry excessively about kids who spend a lot of time texting. “I don’t know that texting a lot is a particular problem,” she said.
“We need to think of cellphones as a way that kids communicate. You’d never say kids are talking to their classmate too much at recess, or that they used 1,000 words at recess, and that’s excessive,” she added.
… The study says parents may wish to “openly monitor” their kids’ cellphones. But Hasinoff said “that sends the exact wrong message.”
Parents should talk about the importance of privacy and serve as role models, she said. “We want to be teaching kids to respect the privacy of other kids and develop the sense that privacy really matters,” she explained.
Kids should also learn about the need to gain consent for any kind of sexual behavior, including sending someone sexually explicit photos, she added.
This article also illustrates the way that research gets translated into headlines. The study itself was careful to mention that different sexting behaviors were correlated with both riskier sexual behavior and condom use. And the authors noted that the number of young people who were sexually active was too small to draw any conclusions about that. But there it is in the headline, a conclusion: “In middle school, sexting linked to riskier behavior.”
Look it’s @KirkYuhnke @KDVR interviewing @CUDenver new media comm prof @AmyAdele about messaging apps.
— Marcia Neville (@MarciaNeville) March 17, 2014
Mitchell Grafton
In the past few months, there’s been a lot of media attention to girls who’ve died by suicide after being raped in public settings (eg. at parties) by multiple assailants, shamed and humiliated by peers, and failed by the adults in schools and justice departments who should have supported them. Audrie Pott was 15 when she took her own life and Rehtaeh Parsons was 17 years old. Parsons’ father wrote in a public statement:
My daughter wasn’t bullied to death, she was disappointed to death. Disappointed in people she thought she could trust, her school, and the police.
Some of the media coverage makes these tragedies seem like technology problems, and in all these cases digital photographs and distribution indeed heightened the slut-shaming both girls experienced. When tragedies like this happen in other parts of the world, people often blame a misogynistic culture that is supposedly uniquely terrible “over there.” When it happens here, it’s much easier to blame technology.
These are not the first, nor will they be the last girls to commit suicide after being raped and then slut-shamed for it. It’s well established in the literature that suicide attempts are strongly correlated with child sexual abuse. These particular cases get so much attention because of the heightened shaming these girls experienced through social media. What’s genuinely new in these cases is not the slut-shaming from peers but the fact that the rest of us can see it. The evidence that is left behind when people socialize online makes once-private locker-room talk and whispers in the hallway public and visible to adults.
My hope is that youth educators and parents who are shocked by what Pott and Parsons’ peers said about them online can understand that what these girls experienced was not an exception but merely a highly visible (and, I hope, extreme?) version of what happens to survivors of rape all the time. Social media lets us see slut-shaming and rape culture in the light of day, but when we talk about these cases we have to recognize that these attitudes are not unique to teens or to a few bad people–they are absolutely endemic in (adult) mainstream culture.
update: Beth Lyons has a great post at Shameless about how the media have been reporting Parsons as a victim of “bullying”–which is really, really the wrong word for what happened to her.
A fantastic new report on sexting from Kath Albury, Kate Crawford, Paul Byron, and Ben Mathews was released today. They offer a list of practical recommendations that legislators, educators, prosecutors, and parents would do well to take into account. Here are some highlights of the report’s excellent recommendations:
- We recommend that both educational and legal responses to sexting reflect ‘harm reduction’ principles rather than promoting abstinence from the production and exchange of digital photos between peers or from using social media.
- We recommend that sexting education be more focused on fostering ethical, respectful practices between intimate partners and within friendship networks.
- We recommend that educational strategies that address sexting, including information resources for adults, seek to problematise and challenge gendered double-standards in relation to concepts such as ‘provocativeness’, ‘self-confidence’, ‘responsibility’, ‘consequences’ and ‘reputation’.
- We recommend that educational strategies that address sexting, including information resources for adults, distinguish between non-consensual production and distribution of sexting images and consensual image sharing.
- These educational strategies should emphasise ethical frameworks, and recognise that sexting can be an expression of intimacy, rather than shaming young people for sexting. Framing sexual expression only as a risk does little to alleviate anxieties or feelings of shame that young people may experience in relation to their sexualities.
Amy A. Hasinoff 