Blog by Emily Setty
Youth digital intimacies—specifically, digitally-mediated sexual image-sharing among young people—has become a key topic within Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) in schools. In England, Department for Education (DfE) statutory guidance on RSE directs schools to educate young people about ‘the law’ and image-sharing; notably, that the production and exchange of sexual images of minors is illegal. Doing so, it is presumably hoped, will discourage the practice via the ‘learning outcome’ that image-sharing is ‘wrong’ (DfE 2019). It has been seen that issues of consent, regarding the production, exchange and distribution of images, as well as the inequities and power relations that shape image-sharing, have taken a back-seat in decontextualized education that instructs youth to abstain. Such education—with limited recognition of the inhibitory effect of abstinence-based education—encourages them to report any issues they have to an adult (Crofts et al. 2015; Dobson and Ringrose 2015; Setty 2020a). The UK Council for Child Internet Safety’s (UKCCIS) guidance does, however, encourage schools to address consent, privacy, respect, healthy relationships and gender norms, among other topics, when educating about ‘sexting’ (the colloquial term for digital communication about sex) (UKCCIS 2017).
Teaching about ‘safe sexting’ (see Hasinoff 2015, 2017) or ‘digital sexual ethics’ (see Albury 2017) is, in reality, difficult for schools in a context in which youth digital intimacies are predominantly framed in terms of risk, illegality and regulation (see Lee et al. 2013; Moran-Ellis 2012). Doing so would involve taking a contextualized approach that distinguishes consensual from non-consensual and otherwise abusive practices, and challenging the latter, rather than framing image-sharing as inherently wrong or harmful (see, for example, Cooper et al. 2016). My experiences working with schools indicates that educators are reluctant to take a contextualized approach in RSE—which, they acknowledge, would facilitate discussions about consent and digital sexual ethics—because image-sharing is uniformly prohibited for youth (see Setty 2020a). They want to avoid implicitly, let alone explicitly, condoning image-sharing among young people. This reluctance also has implications for going beyond interpersonal image-sharing contexts and addressing the roles and responsibilities of ‘bystanders’ and the blaming and shaming of those harmed via abusive sharing (see Dobson and Ringrose 2015; Harder 2020; Hasinoff 2015; Setty 2019b). Schools are constrained in meaningfully challenging victim-blaming because they are to teach that young people should not produce images to begin with, which involves an emphasis on the victim’s culpability and responsibility that is a hallmark of victim-blaming (Hasinoff 2017).
It may, however, be contended that it does not matter whether young people develop ethical digital sexual cultures because they should just learn that sexual image-sharing is wrong and to abstain, which would render any acknowledgment of the nuances of the phenomenon unnecessary. This is problematic because:
- Young people may be able to recite the law and other ‘facts’ that they are taught in RSE but this can fail to resonate with the realities of their lived experiences (e.g. see Hirsch et al. 2019; Setty 2020b);
- Deterrent approaches may lead to young people minimizing the seriousness of or attempting to avoid punishment or censure for otherwise normalized or rewarding behaviours, rather than developing an ethical mindset (Setty and Ringrose, forthcoming; Setty 2019a);
- Young people will eventually become adults for whom legal and normative expectations around digital image-sharing ostensibly permit consensual image-sharing and prohibit abusive and non-consensual sharing (see Jackson and Scott 2010; Albury 2017); and,
- Harmful and abusive image-sharing reflects wider socio-structural inequities and injustices that require addressing irrespective of the digital mediation of youth sexual culture (e.g. Albury 2017; Dobson 2018).
Scholars have noted the difficulties for schools in ‘speaking the unspeakable’ when educating about topics of sexual deviance (see Hancock and Barker 2018). Risk aversion and reluctance (or refusal) to take a contextualized approach because of current discourses surrounding youth sexuality in a digital era means that RSE on these topics is disembedded from the realities of young people’s lives (see Crofts et al. 2015), which, in turn, restricts educators from meaningfully engaging learners and shaping and guiding their behaviours and experiences. There is limited room for skills development and engendering critical consciousness of the sociocultural context that shapes risk and harm—and intertwining pleasures and rewards—in contemporary youth digital intimacies (Albury 2017; Dobson 2018; Hasinoff 2017; Karaian and Van Meyl 2015).
An extensive body of literature suggests that longstanding gender inequities and power relations shape youth digital intimacies (e.g. De Ridder 2017, 2018; Lee and Crofts 2015; Lippman and Campbell 2014; Ringrose et al. 2013; Naezer and van Oosterhout 2020; Salter 2015; Setty 2018a, 2019a, 2019b). The taken-for-granted nature of this wider context combined with the normalization of abusive and harmful image-sharing, in which risk and harm is attributed to the affordances of digital media rather than the agency of individuals, underpins victim-blaming (e.g. De Ridder 2017, 2018; Dobson and Ringrose 2015; Hasinoff 2015; Setty 2019b, 2020a). Given that youth digital intimacies are shaped by wider sociocultural contexts, could RSE endeavour to address the issues more indirectly through engaging with the broader meanings and norms that young people hold about sex and relationships (see Hancock and Barker 2018)? Educators could explain to young people that image-sharing is illegal, while, perhaps separately, critically engaging with:
- The inequities and power relations that shape abusive behaviours and blame, shame and sexualized bullying among youth in general (see Salter et al. 2013; Dobson 2019);
- The realities of how consent is constructed, negotiated and enacted within youth sexual culture and how this corresponds with legal and affirmative consent ideals; and,
- The complexities and contradictions of ‘rights’ and ‘responsibilities’ in a digital era and the intersections of human agency with technological affordances (Livingstone and Third 2017; Hasinoff 2015, 2017).
Doing so may indirectly inspire ethical and egalitarian youth digital sexual cultures because the wider contexts of risk and harm are being addressed. However, will this be sufficient? Scholars have discussed how young people desire real education that explicitly speaks to their concerns and lived experiences, and legitimizes their sexual agency and subjectivities, with all the variation and diversity thus entailed (e.g. Allen 2005; Jørgensen et al. 2018; Naezar, Rommes and Jansen 2017; Setty 2020a). Will it be credible, therefore, to, essentially, skirt around the phenomenon and only engage with the broader context that delimits opportunities for ethical and egalitarian youth digital sexual cultures? The conflict between tackling victim-blaming, and the gendered stigmas and shaming processes that facilitate it (see De Ridder 2017, 2018; Dobson 2019), while unequivocally emphasizing the ‘illicit’ nature of youth-produced sexual imagery, meanwhile, remains. Moreover, the normalization of non-consensual sharing in youth digital sexual culture perhaps requires naming the behaviours. If, for example, young people characterize girls being bombarded with unsolicited ‘dick pics’ or being pressured by boys to share images as ‘boys being boys’ (Salter 2015; Setty 2019a), then these practices need to be specifically ‘called out’ and critically deconstructed (Setty and Ringrose forthcoming; Setty 2020a).
At issue is the contested notion of youth sexual rights in a digital era (Livingstone and Third 2017). These rights are typically framed in terms of protection, which has led to efforts to monitor and regulate young people’s behaviours. This monitoring and regulation has unfolded in line with longstanding assumptions and anxieties about youth, sexuality and technology which have, perhaps unintentionally, reinforced the inequities and injustices that shape abusive and harmful image-sharing (Albury 2017; Dobson 2018; Lee et al. 2013; Lloyd 2018; Salter et al. 2013). Instructions to abstain do not engage with nor challenge the wider contexts of risk and harm. They will alienate those who do not define their experiences or behaviours as dangerous or harmful (albeit may conceive of them as risky, but not always problematically so) while obscuring the role of bystanders who shape and give meaning to abusive and harmful practices but who oftentimes conceive of themselves as non-participants because they are not creating the images themselves (Hasinoff 2015; Setty 2020a).
Rather than trying to educate within current normative frameworks of deviance, illegality and regulation, there is a need to critically deconstruct these conceptualizations of youth digital intimacies (Albury 2013). While the DfE guidance on RSE states that rights and responsibilities online are the same as those offline (DfE 2019), this is not borne out in wider discourses and there is limited engagement with how the affordances of digital media are reshaping conceptualizations of rights and responsibilities (see, for example, Albury 2017; Hasinoff 2017; Hasinoff and Shepherd 2014; Setty 2018b). There is a need to explore these conceptualizations, and the narratives that delegitimize particular individuals, bodies, and forms of sexual and intimate expression that underpin the risks and harms that youth perceive, experience and perpetrate (both as ‘sexters’ and ‘bystanders’) (Albury 2017; Dobson 2018; Setty 2019b).
There may, therefore, be no avoiding the need to name and speak to the realities of youth digital intimacies, which requires making space for doing so in a context in which educators are, perhaps understandably, inhibited (see Albury 2013). There seems to be a reluctance to learn from young people about how digital media is re-shaping contemporary sexual and relational culture (Albury 2013; Lee et al. 2018). Given that digital media is more significant than ever for young people, and, indeed, adults, due to the intensification of digitally-mediated communication and intimate connection during the Covid-19 pandemic, the need to reflect upon how educators construct and engage with youth digital intimacies and position youth in the pedagogic process is all the more urgent. Otherwise, education risks becoming even more disconnected from and less relevant to the realities of young people’s contemporary digital lives (see Scott et al. 2020). I may be asking “too much” of RSE (Cense 2019, 273), and alternative, more informal, youth-led and youth-centered settings for engaging with young people about these issues, such as those offered by youth workers, may have greater scope for taking a different approach, and perhaps already are (see Formby and Donovan 2020). Yet, given that peer-involved abusive behaviours often unfold in schools there is, I would suggest, no way of completely removing the need for formal educators to examine and reflect upon both their proactive and reactive pedagogy regarding youth digital intimacies.
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