Blog by Emily Setty
‘Youth digital intimacies’ can be defined as the production and exchange of sexually intimate and explicit content via mobile and other digital technologies by and among young people. Much has been said about the rates at which young people are creating and sharing sexual content with one another. A recent meta-analysis (which draws together the findings from different studies) found that approximately 14.8% of young people under the age of 18 had sent personal sexual content of themselves and approximately 27.4% had received personal sexual content from others. Rates tend to increase with age and there is increasing evidence that boys and girls are participating in digital intimacies to a similar extent.
Such findings perhaps raise more questions than they answer. What, exactly, is being produced and shared, and with and by whom? Why is it being shared, and with what effect? How is privacy and consent playing out in young people’s digital and online sexual cultures? What about those who are not directly involved in producing and/or sharing images, but may be playing a role as bystanders? Finally, how, if at all, should parents, educators and law enforcement attempt to respond to the phenomenon? The last question is particularly pertinent given that it is currently illegal to produce, possess or share sexually explicit imagery of under 18s. This includes content created by the young person themselves even if they never share it. While the police and Crown Prosecution Service in England and Wales have stated that they are unlikely to take a heavy-handed approach to consensual sharing among similarly aged young people, there remains a need to tackle abusive and harmful behaviours, and other forms of risk.
Thinking sociologically about youth digital intimacies requires careful consideration of the interpersonal, social and cultural contexts in which sex and relationships unfold. A landmark study conducted on behalf of the NSPCC in England (Ringrose et al. 2012) identified that sexual and intimate image sharing was fairly normalized among the young people who participated in the study. Focus groups, interviews and social media analyses revealed that as a phenomenon it was characterized by sexism and gender inequality. Boys were pressuring girls to send them images, which they would show to their friends for ‘kudos’ and ‘lad points’ in their peer groups. The girls in the images were often shamed and stigmatized, and were balancing the risk of being bullied by peers and experiencing reputational damage with the pressure they felt they were under to please boys.
It can be assumed that risks and harms such as those described by Ringrose et al. (2012) are inherent to digital intimacies because technology provides the tools with which young people can exploit and harm one another (see Hasinoff 2015). Important to recognize, however, is that technology indeed merely provides the tools; it does not compel a person to use those tools in a particular way. Thinking sociologically about digital intimacies therefore also requires critically exploring why individuals make the choices they do and with what effect. While developments in digital technology may give rise to new practices or may intensify or reshape long-standing practices, it is important to tease out exactly what is new or different from what is fundamentally the same old processes just unfolding in new spaces. Gender inequalities, sexual double standards between boys and girls, the attribution of risk to heterosexual dynamics (see below), sexual shaming, victim blaming and bullying are not new issues.
All this means that expecting it to be possible to eradicate risk and harm through just focusing on the technology is unlikely to work (see Hasinoff 2015). We need to get at the underlying issues. Why, for example, are individuals more likely to shame girls for being sexual than they are boys? It is important to ask such questions because then we can start to challenge some of the taken-for-granted sexism that we can see playing out in young people’s digital sexual cultures. It can be difficult, however, to inspire a more positive bystander culture. It is perhaps not enough to just encourage young people to ‘call out’ poor behaviour. We also need to look at what is rewarded and what is punished in the peer group and why.
Why, for example, do boys get to share images of girls and can gain ‘status’ and ‘popularity’ from other boys for doing so? What does that tell us about masculinity? Furthermore, it is seemingly the case that girls often ‘slut shame’ one another; why would they do this? There is something here about power. It is, and always has been, difficult to navigate the terrain of teenage life, status and belonging in the peer group. If girls know they can be shamed for being sexual, it may feel safer to be on the side calling a girl a slut (rather than being the one being called a slut), but all that means is that, in the end, the cultural landscape remains risky and difficult for all girls and limits all girls’ freedoms and rights.
It is also important to avoid generalizing or making assumptions about what is a risk, who is likely to be a perpetrator, and who is likely to be a victim. Focusing on particular risks and harms, for example that girls will be pressured to share images and that it is likely that these images will be shared, distorts and simplifies the reality of risk. Oftentimes, personal sexual and intimate content is kept private, so it is not necessarily a foregone conclusion that young people will behave unethically. It also means that we miss other forms of harm. Setty (2020) conducted research with young people and the girls her study said that the biggest issue they faced in digital intimacies is being sent unwanted explicit images from boys (i.e. ‘dick pics’) and that this is a day-to-day experience that they have just got used to. Some of the boys spoke about sending such images, but they just saw it as harmless fun and said that if the recipient did not want the images they could just ignore them. Often though, these images were accompanied by messages pressuring the recipient to respond in kind, and there was little appreciation of the harassing and non-consensual nature of the practice.
Setty’s (2020) research also found that digital intimacies can involve being ‘cat-fished’ for content (i.e. when a person solicits content from another based on false pretenses) and that boys, as well as girls, can be victims of non-consensual behaviours and shaming within the peer group. Boys are often characterized as more likely to be the perpetrators and it is the heterosexual boy-girl dynamic that is seen as most risky. As well as completely ignoring LGBT+ young people, this obscures the risks and harms that boys can face (and, importantly, that girls do not always see themselves as victims or digital intimacies as harmful). Setty (2020) found that boys can find it difficult to navigate youth sexual culture and the demands and expectations of masculinity in their peer groups. While the shaming they experience may not always be as intense as that directed toward girls, there seems to be a need to challenge the idea that ‘banter’ is always harmless. Some boys found it anything but harmless.
Digital intimacies is not, however, always experienced as harmful and unsafe. Young people recount positive and pleasurable experiences, for example, of intimate connection and self-expression with others. They nevertheless have to balance these positive potentialities with the risks, which can create a sense of insecurity, particularly among girls. It is also important to think critically about what young people describe as pleasurable; sometimes girls talk about enjoying pleasing boys and it can be difficult to disentangle personal pleasures from a sense of obligation that reflects gender inequalities connected to sex and relationships. Boys, moreover, will talk about the ‘fun’ of sharing and looking at images of girls with their friends, while showing little awareness of or concern about the impact of such practices on the girls themselves.
Given the complexities of youth digital intimacies, how should we educate young people about sex and relationships in the digital era? Educational interventions tend to emphasize that digital intimacies are ‘dangerous’ and ‘risky’ but often fail to explore for whom it is risky or why. The warnings can be directed toward girls in particular, who are seen as being more likely to have their images shared without their consent and to be shamed by peers, but rarely is it questioned why girls face these risks, why boys pressure girls to share images, or how a more positive bystander culture can be created among young people (Dobson and Ringrose 2015).
By presenting risk and harm as inevitable, educational interventions may (perhaps inadvertently) reinforce the non-consensual behaviours and victim blaming that we often see playing out in young people’s digital sexual cultures (Dobson and Ringrose 2015). There is the idea that ‘boys will be boys’ and that girls are passive sexually and need to show some ‘self-respect’ and ‘so no’ to boys. This rests upon old-fashioned gender inequalities and expectations in relationships, constructs a heteronormative dynamic in which other contexts of image sharing are ignored, and fails to inspire more egalitarian and ethical standards of practice. The narrative that ‘privacy is dead’ in the digital era and that it is shameful for some young people (particularly girls) to be sexually expressive then justifies the blaming and bullying of victims in the peer group. Some of the young people who participated in Setty’s (2020) study stated that bullying can help victims learn that they made ‘a mistake’, but would we talk about any other victim like that?
Just warning young people about the dangers and risks therefore represents a missed opportunity to inspire a ‘sexual ethics’ for the digital age (see Albury 2017). Setty (2020) found that young people are learning that they could be harmed or punished if they share images (of themselves or others), but that this often just leads to them concealing their practices and not getting the help they need, nor of developing a particularly responsible or ethical outlook toward themselves or one another.
Rather than conceiving of youth digital intimacies as fundamentally wrong and dangerous, a sociological approach would direct us to explore how changes and developments in sex and relationships in the digital era could be used as a platform for inspiring broader social and cultural change. Inherent to this is speaking directly with young people about their perceptions and experiences, with all the diversity thus entailed (see Scott et al. 2020). Surveying young people and generating the kind of numerical prevalence rates outlined above may provide some insights, but such surveys are designed by adults with adult-centric assumptions shaping the questions asked. We need to give young people the opportunity to define the issues and to break down the contexts in which different practices—harmful and not harmful—unfold.
Doing so can help inform educational interventions that genuinely equip young people with the skills and ethical outlooks that they need to navigate contemporary digital sexual life safely, responsibly, ethically and, perhaps, pleasurably! Indeed young people will, eventually, become adults for whom legal and normative expectations around digital image-sharing allows for consensual sharing and prohibits abusive and non-consensual sharing (see Albury 2017). Finally, as we’ve seen, harmful and abusive image-sharing can reflect wider social inequalities connected to gender and sexuality that require addressing regardless of whether it is happening online or offline. Irrespective, therefore, of whether an individual young person has or intends to produce and share their own sexual content, it is important to be educating about the broader issues raised and empowering all young people to act as ethical citizens within the contemporary digital sexual landscape.
References
Albury, K. 2017. Just because it’s public doesn’t mean it’s any of your business: Adults’ and children’s sexual rights in digitally mediated spaces. New Media and Society, 19(5), 713-725.
Dobson, A.S. and Ringrose, J. 2015. Sext education: Pedagogies of sex, gender and shame in the schoolyards of Tagged and Exposed. Sex Education, 16(1), 8-21.
Hasinoff, A.A. 2015. Sexting panic: Rethinking criminalization, privacy, and consent. Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press.
Madigan, S., Ly, A., Rash, C.L., Van Ouytsel, J. and Temple, J.R. 2018. Prevalence of multiple forms of sexting behavior among youth: A systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Pediatrics,172(4), 327–335.
Ringrose, J. Gill, R., Livingstone, S. and Harvey, L.(2012. A qualitative study of children, young people and ‘sexting’: A report prepared for the NSPCC. London: NSPCC. Retrieved from: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/44216/1/__Libfile_repository_Content_Livingstone%2C%20S_A%20qualitative%20study%20of%20children%2C%20young%20people%20and%20%27sexting%27%20%28LSE%20RO%29.pdf
Scott, R.H., Smith, C., Formby, E., Hadley, A., Hallgarten, L., Hoyle, A., Marston, C., McKee, A. and Tourountsis, D. 2020. What and how: Doing good research with young people, digital intimacies, and relationships and sex education. Sex Education. doi: 10.1080/14681811.2020.1732337
Setty E. 2020. Risk and harm in youth sexting culture: Young people’s perspectives. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Biography and methodological note
Emily Setty is a Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Surrey. Emily undertakes research with young people to explore their perspectives on their contemporary sex and relationship cultures, in particular in digital contexts. Emily works closely with practitioners and policy-makers to understand how research findings can be translated into more effective and responsive educational interventions directed toward young people to address the risks and harms they face.
Emily’s research published in 2020 Risk and Harm in Youth Sexting Culture: Young People’s Perspectives reports on qualitative research conducted with 41 14 to 18 year-olds in schools and youth clubs in England. The research involved focus groups (group discussions) with boys and girls in their friendship groups, where they talked about the issues of privacy and consent in their digital sexual cultures. Some young people participated in follow-up one-to-one interviews where they spoke in more depth about their personal experiences.
This type of research enabled participants—in this case the young people—to define and discuss what they considered important, which generated youth-centered insights into the issues. In the focus groups, Emily was able to observe how young people interacted with one another. While they may have acted differently by themselves, these group settings revealed the social norms and cultural standards of practice that shaped the participants’ lives. The one-to-one interviews, meanwhile, enabled young people to share experiences and views that they may have kept concealed in the focus group and represented a ‘safe space’ for them to talk about their perspectives.
The trouble with this type of research is that it is time consuming and requires individuals to feel willing and able to share their perspectives openly in a research environment, which can be difficult. This means that it is not possible to say that the perspectives shared represent the views and experiences of all young people. Instead, it is only possible to interpret and draw conclusions about those who have participated in the research. Such methods do, however, enable researchers to dig beneath the statistics and to reveal hitherto hidden or unrecognized issues, as well as the complexity of the phenomenon. Researchers try to make sense of the findings in light of other studies and wider theories in order to offer suggestions and arguments that may have broader relevance. For example, Emily does not claim to know exactly how every young person feels about or experiences digital intimacies. However, she can say that their experiences are likely to be shaped by social and cultural contexts (e.g. connected to gender, sexuality, peer group dynamics, relationship expectations etc.) that require investigation and recognition in educational interventions. The specifics will vary, but this broad principal is likely to stand.