Girls deconstruct sexting-related harm prevention messages

Participants

Twenty-eight girls participated in groups of 3 to 5. They were aged 16 (n = 24) or 17 (n = 4) years old. In an open-ended questionnaire, 27 participants identified their gender as ‘female’ and one as ‘fluid’ (hence our umbrella reference to our participants as ‘girls’ is not entirely accurate). They reported their sexuality as: heterosexual/straight (18), bisexual (4), pansexual/maybe pansexual (2); four participants provided no response. Participants described their ethnicity as: British (1), Chinese (2), Indian (1), Iranian/Japanese (1), Māori/PākehāFootnote³ (1), Māori/Pasifika/Pākehā (1), Pākehā/Asian (1), Pākehā (12), PNG (1), Samoan (1), Samoan/Māori (1), and Taiwanese (1). The ethnicity of four participants was difficult to categorise (‘New Zealander’ [3] and ‘mixed’ [1]).

We recruited participants through daily school notices, inviting students who were interested in discussing ‘girls’ perspectives on the topic of ”intimate online communication” – including the culture of ”sending nudes’’. Students were able to sign up within existing friendship groups or individually.

Workshop interviews

Each of the seven groups participated in a series of three workshop interviews that were facilitated by either AW, BT, GS or OC. The three workshops were structured sequentially to focus on the social context and gendered dynamics of sending nudes, harm prevention messages, and girls’ views about the extent to which there are problems associated with sending nudes, how and why these occur, and how they might be addressed. We planned the workshops with structured activities and questions to focus the discussions, and implemented the arrangements somewhat flexibly to allow room for girls to discuss the issues in ways that were relevant and interesting to them.

Of particular relevance to our analysis, in the second workshops, as a prompts for discussion, we presented participants with: (1) material from New Zealand’s online safety agency’s webpage on Sexting (Netsafe Citation2015) and, as a counter-point, (2) a summary of findings from a study of young women’s and men’s views about sexting (Walker, Sanci, and Temple-Smith Citation2013). Aimed at parents, the Netsafe webpage provides information on ‘sexting and young people’, including what parents can do if they find ‘naked photos’ on their children’s devices, and how to prevent their children from sexting. The summary of Walker, Sanci, and Temple-Smith (Citation2013) research highlighted key findings on the gendered nature of sexting, and recommendations for challenging power dynamics and promoting bystander intervention that involves young men. We posed questions about how the Netsafe materials imagined a parental response, how young people who send nudes were represented, whether sending nudes is depicted as a problem, how the problem is portrayed, and what solutions are presented for how it can be fixed. We asked girls what they would change about these representations of young people and sending nudes. While the prevention material we shared from Netsafe was a significant prompt for our discussions related to harm prevention, the workshops had a broader focus including messages in the media and girls’ observations and inferences about people’s views more generally.

Our framing of the issue – in terms of girls’ online communication with boys, particularly in relation to sending nudes – was a deliberate starting point because of the gendered nature of the problematic issues the school had recently been facing. However, we were careful to not restrict discussions in ways that were presumptively heterosexual or heterosocial.

Workshop interviews were each approximately 45–60 minutes long, and were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. We assigned participants pseudonyms and used codes to identify which group and workshop quoted extracts come from. For example, Group 1 Workshop 1 is displayed as G1-W1. We do not identify individual participants’ ethnicities or gender and sexual identities for confidentiality reasons. The study received ethics approval from the University of Auckland Human Participants Ethics Committee (Reference 017527). Prior to participation, participants signed a consent form after being given written information about the study and the chance to ask questions.

What, if anything, is the problem?

In all the groups, girls agreed that the potential risk of nudes being misused in unethical and harmful ways was a legitimate concern. Across different groups and sessions, however, girls shared a range of views about sexting, about how big a problem image-based sexual coercion, harassment and abuse was, and about how best to prevent it. In this section, we discuss how girls responded to representations of the problem of sexting-related harm.

At some points girls’ talk leaned towards emphasising risk and at other points it leaned towards downplaying risk. Overall, participants seemed wary of ‘over-exaggerating’ (Jen, G5-W2) the scale of sexting, and by implication the scale of the potential problem, while also recognising there is a problem: As Jen (G5-W2) said, ‘Yeah I do think that it’s like a big issue but I wouldn’t say it, that it affects most people’. Framed in a different way, but sharing this ambivalent tone, Alanna (G6-W2) described Netsafe’s information on sexting, for example, as ‘magnifying the problem a little bit’, while noting that she felt ‘it’s appropriate that they do’.

Some girls more directly pushed back against the representation of sexting-related harm as a significant problem, appearing keen to reject a too-easy association of sexting with harm. This position was noticed in three of the groups, where girls rejected what they saw as misleading representations caused by extreme case formulations and generational misunderstandings. Miranda (G3-W2) for example, suggested that wider public discussion around sexting was misleadingly focused on ‘extreme cases’ where something went wrong. Similarly, Lea (G6-W2) described the Netsafe materials as ‘kind of talking about more of the extreme aspects of it’: going on to say, ‘it’s not like every sexting image sent has been like exposed or leaked or something’. In G3-W2, girls pointed to generational misunderstandings leading to media (and parental) constructions of the problem that were out of touch, coming from ‘older people’ (Miranda), who ‘don’t tend to … [have] personal experience’ (Helen) and who ‘don’t understand what is actually happening and the emotions associated with like the moment when you are asked or when you are sending’ (Kim). Several girls were critical of what they saw as an overly ‘negative’ portrayal of sexting and the abstinence advice that followed. Mia, a member of the feminist group that tended to articulate these critiques most strongly, noted:

As some girls in this (and other) groups said, such advice is at odds with the way young people are advised to navigate potential risks related to ‘sex’:

Tamsin observed that messages limited to advice not to send nudes was ‘kind of like history is like repeating itself’ (Tamsin, G7-W3) as with teaching abstinence in relation to sex in the past. Not only is this a problem because it ‘doesn’t work’ (Tamsin, G7-W3) – ‘people aren’t going to stop sending nudes’ (Lucy, G7-W2) – but participants were alert to the problematic ways such messages unfairly responsibilise girls for rape prevention by limiting and constraining their behaviour, and in doing so setting up the conditions for victim-blaming. Overall, girls’ objections to abstinence-based harm-prevention messages in relation to sexting were both practical and principled. As Penelope suggested, it would be unthinkable to respond to the potential risk of rape by promoting abstinence from sex or avoiding interactions with men or moving in public spaces.

‘Usually it’s her fault’: the gendered economy of responsibility and blame

Girls oriented to the way these ‘just don’t [send nudes]’ messages target the behaviour of the person sending nudes as the point for intervention. For example, one participant in Group 1 noticed that the Netsafe material only had information for parents on ‘how to prevent your child from sending’ nudes (Louise, G1-W2). In Group 6 (W2), Lea similarly noted that the Netsafe material is ‘just [about] sending it, how do I prevent my child from sending’. Overall, girls noted that it targets ‘the people who are going to be affected not like people that cause the situation’ (Rory, G7-W3). While the Netsafe material on sexting was gender neutral (referring to ‘young people’, ‘our child’, ‘my boyfriend or girlfriend’), some participants readily de-coded the gendered meaning and likely assumptions regarding who are imagined as at-risk senders of nudes in peer-to-peer interactions – and where responsibility implicitly, if not explicitly, lies. As Miranda and Kim observe below, the sequence of connection between sender, gender and responsibility implicitly constructs girls as both the victims and the source of ‘the problem with sexting’ (see also Dobson Citation2019):

Before we had introduced the Netsafe (Citation2015) and Walker, Sanci, and Temple-Smith (Citation2013) materials in the second workshop, the girls in this group were asked what they saw in the media about sexting. They had already noted that problems related to sexting are gendered; as are ‘common sense’ approaches to the solution:

Mia (G7-W1) made a similar point, giving the example of someone sending nudes ‘and then people would save those and then like send them around’, noting, ‘it would all be the girls’ fault. Like the pressure would be on the girl and not on the guy. It’s not about the guy it’s about the girl’ (Mia, G7-W1). Participants in Group 3 returned to this theme of how, while girls are likely to be blamed within general discussions about sexting, the role of boys is relatively invisible in talk about the exchange and circulation of nudes:

This exchange highlights the girls’ observation of a gendered economy of responsibility, wherein girls are both hypervisible and responsibilised as ‘sexters’, while the role of young men is largely hidden from view.

Image-based sexual coercion, harassment and abuse: A symptom of gendered inequality

In all groups, girls connected the potential harms related to sexting as well as the intervention messages designed to prevent such harm, to the broader context of gender inequality. In some groups in particular, girls readily observed different societal expectations for women and men and different societal responses to women’s and girls’ behaviour compared to that of men and boys.

In discussing the dominant discourses of gender and heterosexuality, for example, girls in Group 3 outlined the differing societal expectations for women and men, observing that women would be expected to be ‘gentle and quiet’ (Miranda), ‘sensitive’ (Helen), not ‘assertive’ (Rose), ‘not having opinions’ (Miranda). When asked how these ideas would relate to sexuality, they said:

In Group 2, girls shared similar observations of social expectations:

Some girls observed how these normative cultural understandings of gendered sexuality – that portray men as sexually driven and needy – can be used to minimise and excuse boys’ and men’s coercive or unethical behaviour and blame women for their own abuse. In Group 7, Penelope brought up the example of a man who ‘was exposed’ as having ‘this weird obsession with child pornography’, and who ‘came out to the media’ drawing on these kinds of ideas about men’s naturally uncontrollable sexual behaviour (in this case overlaid with a discourse of addiction) to rationalise his abusive actions:

When the workshop facilitator asked the group, ‘so how would that relate to sending nudes, that dynamic?’, Penelope said:

Lucy suggested that these kinds of ideas about men’s uncontrollable sexuality also work to engender a more sympathetic response to a boy’s decision to send his own nudes – which, as Penelope (G7-W2) said, is ‘never perceived quite as extremely as the girls’:

Girls in three different groups used the phrase, ‘boys will be boys’ (Abbey, G4-W1; Chloe, G2-W3; Rose, G3-W3) to represent this dynamic, as they mapped out the ways in which societal expectations for girls and boys shaped ‘the field of play’ for sending nudes – in relation to responsibly, accountability and blame. Girls noted that while boys and men were given a wide berth in terms of accountability – as Chloe (G2-W3) said, ‘they say boys will be boys. It’s okay, we can forgive anything’Footnote⁵ – girls were burdened with the extra responsibility associated with being constructed as ‘morally superior’:

By contrast to the maturity and restraint societally expected of girls, participants explained how the ‘boys will be boys’ trope works to normalise, minimise and turn a blind eye to unethical and harmful behaviour by boys:

The girls in Group 4 continued this theme, specifically extrapolating to how these sociocultural notions supported the gendered economy of responsibility and translated into a form of harm prevention that not only restricted girls and women but conveyed the message that unethical and harmful behaviour by men is unfixable:

But where does this critique leave us? The practical conundrum girls face

As we have shown, many girls identified how a gendered economy of responsibility unfairly holds girls responsible for any harm they may suffer in relation to their intimate images being misused, while excusing boys for the coercive and unethical behaviour that contributes to such harm. Girls critiqued this in relation to harm prevention messages specifically as well as the wider social context in which such messages are produced and received. For example, girls variously drew attention to the role of gendered constructions of morality, and the specifically gendered construction of masculine sexuality (as lacking restraint), which both set out different expectations for girls and boys. Many girls were critical of the perils of victim-blaming that shadowed these gendered norms, expectations and power relations.

While some participants were critical of the way prevention messages focused seemingly exclusively on the behaviour of senders of nudes (and by association, girls), their critiques were frequently weighed in relation to considerations about the need for girls to protect themselves. In practice, it seemed that many girls held a both/and appraisal of the kinds of measures that might be necessary for preventing image-based sexual coercion, harassment and abuse. In critiquing sender-targeted approaches, many participants identified the problematic sexual politics they draw on and reproduce. At the same time, many of the girls conveyed that they understood the logic underlying such approaches ‘in the world we live in’ (Abbey, G4-W2) and gave the impression that girls may not have the luxury to completely reject them. In this sense, a theoretical endorsement of women’s and girls’ right to engage in intimate image sharing was counterposed with pragmatic caution considering the ‘reality’ of risk.

Girls widely agreed there was a sexual double standard that affected how boys and girls were judged for sexual behaviour (see also Thorburn et al. Citation2021). They talked about ‘slut shaming’ and ‘and how like if you are a guy you are praised and if you are a girl you are like dishonoured’ (Kathy, G1-W2). When asked if they thought that happened in relation to sending nudes, Kathy (G1-W2) for example, quickly replied, ‘all the time’. As Chloe (G2-W2) said, ‘the double standard is very true’. In discussing the sexual double standard – or what girls in Group 4 referred to as ‘gender bias’ (Eliza, G4-W2) – relating to sexting, Eliza referred to ‘the actual truth that girls get more harm than guys’, alongside the lack of recognition for this: ‘People like tiptoe over the fact that it is really the majority of the time girls that get hurt’. Recognising these gendered realities, Abbey reached a pragmatic conclusion:

Oftentimes, girls were aware of the delicate compromise this pragmatic position represented. As Poppy (G4-W3) noted, ‘even though it sucks and it kind of is almost reinforcing [the] victim blaming thing it’s still unfortunately it can be very much like that’.

In some of their discussions, girls wrestled with how best to make sense of challenging scenarios in ways that navigated an impossibly fine line between self-protection and responsibilisation leading to victim blaming. For example, girls in the feminist group discussed at length a local case in which a girl had supposedly sent a sexually explicit video of herself to a group of boys that was subsequently ‘shared and shared and shared [… .] she kind of got like a lot of like attacks because of it’ (Mia, G7-W2). As Lucy reflected on this case, she resisted a straightforward demarcation between victim-blaming (which she and the group implicitly disapproved of) and holding the view that the girl was partly, although not mostly, responsible:

Shifting the focus to boys, men and the ethics of seeking, possessing and distributing another person’s intimate images

Research has demonstrated that although young people tend to draw on regulatory discourses of sexual shame and gendered risk that responsibilise girls for their own victimisation, they are also capable of challenging sexual double standards and sexist assumptions inherent in sexting harm prevention messages (e.g. Dobson Citation2015, Citation2019; Dobson and Ringrose Citation2016). The girls who participated in our study expressed a range of views, and drew on potentially contradictory discourses in discussing messages about preventing sexting-related harm. However, within workshop spaces designed intentionally to create opportunities for critical reflection, we found that many girls were not only able to deconstruct the gender and sexual politics embedded in messages that emphasise abstaining from sending nudes, but were also able to mobilise these critiques into insights about what needs to be done differently to prevent teenage peer-to-peer image-based sexual coercion, harassment and abuse.

Participants from a couple of groups suggested that young people could be given stronger messages related to the ethics of handling nudes once they had been received. This would shift the message away from advice about sending nudes to addressing unethical use of them:

Girls from a number of groups highlighted the importance of interventions designed to promote respectful, ethical communication, suggesting these would be more effective than those designed to censor behaviours entirely:

For these girls, sexting itself was not inherently the problem. As Jade argued: ‘I feel like you shouldn’t prevent it [sexting] or not necessarily not prevent it but not make it such a bad thing because it’s not necessarily a bad thing’ (Jade, G5-W2). Rather, what these girls were calling for is a stronger promotion of respectful communication and ethical handling of intimate images.

As well as messages directly focussed on sexting, several girls drew attention to the wider underlying social factors that animate the specifically gendered harms of image-based sexual coercion, harassment and abuse. Poppy noted that teaching girls about boundaries (for example) may not only not ‘fix’ the problem, it might also reinforce victim-blaming:

In recognising the fundamental role of gender inequality Penelope noted:

Similarly, when asked what the solution to sexting-related harms might be, Laura simply proposed we ‘raise boys so they respect women’s bodies and privacy’ (G2-W3), and Rose (G3-W2) suggested the need to ‘teach [boys] how to respect the other gender’, depicting this as something that would ‘stop a massive amount of problems, like not just this one’. Abbey agreed a wider cultural shift in gendered power relations would be necessary and desirable:

Strengths and limitations

One of the contributions of this study is to highlight the value of a problem-posing methodology in supporting the capacity of girls to critically unpack dominant gendered norms; in this case, norms that contribute both to image-based sexual coercion, harassment and abuse and to the form of dominant contemporary harm prevention messages. This approach could be valuable as a pedagogical tool for engaging young people in critical analysis of a wider range of issues related to gender, relationships and sexuality, and in developing collaborative ethics. Our findings showed girls’ insights resonated with the accounts provided by feminist scholars; and their ideas support novel prevention recommendations.

In considering the wider applicability of our approach, it is important to note that participants were self-selected volunteers who may therefore have had particular interest in the topic and/or motivation for taking part in discussion-based group activities. How well the approach would work with less selective audiences remains to be tested. Furthermore, our study focussed on the dynamics of heterosocial and/or heterosexual interactions between girls and boys. If this methodology were to be adopted in an educational context, careful consideration would need to be given to how to effectively create space for also addressing the dynamics of image-based sexual coercion, harassment and abuse for sex, gender and sexuality diverse young people (see Fenaughty Citation2019), as well as between same-gender peers in general.