Society is now habitualised to spread of sexual imagery among young
THE stark news that gardaí are now requesting school crest details because they expect to have to use the identifying symbols in future sex-crime investigations is dismaying.
But it’s also a sign of how habituated society is becoming to the spread of sexual imagery involving people who are either young adults or illegally young.
The latest figures show that there is virtually no-one over the age of 12 that does not have access to a phone or device that can take and instantly share images.
So is it any wonder that when two young women and a young man took their clothes off at a Kilkenny GAA cup celebration, the phone pictures spread like wildfire?
On a societal basis, we have yet to fully take responsibility for the astonishing rise of webconnected cameras in our pockets. The scale is mindboggling: more photos have been taken in the past four years than in all of history before that. Most are now taken with the intention of sharing or posting to some public forum such as Whatsapp, Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat.
This leads to ever increasing numbers of people being left vulnerable. A few years ago, a photo of someone in a compromising position might take weeks to reach more than a few hundred people, relying on email or expensive text messages. But this week, within hours of the Ballyragget photos being taken, they were being passed around Whatsapp groups as far afield as Dubai. It could take the young people in the photo years to get over the impact that such a widely distributed photo might have on their lives.
Is this the world we live in now? Where children have to navigate an already stressful, taxing journey through teenage years and then into young adults with a newfound wariness over being shamed through phones and the internet?
There are two distinct problems that kids, in particular, face from today’s online systems.
The first is the casualisation of sexualised imagery. Access to adult images is trivially easy for young kids. Filters, whether employed on devices by parents or at a network level by services such as Twitter or Whatsapp, simply aren’t effective. It takes 10 seconds for any child with even a cursory knowledge of how Google works to find pornographic images. If you’re a parent or grandparent of a 14-year-old reading this article, your child has looked up and watched adult porn a number of times. There is little point in denying this to ourselves.
That leads to one of the most complex challenges parents today have: the normalisation among teenage peers of sending – or expecting – nude photos. This is a well documented issue that simply didn’t exist a decade ago. Teens have always faced stress and peer pressure. But rarely has it come with the potential to embarrass and humiliate them on such a scale.
The second great problem that young people, in particular, have is the negligence and mendacity of older adults who choose to share compromising images of younger people on publicly accessible networks.
Where teenagers do engage in risky online behaviour such as sending nude photos, they overwhelmingly do it on networks that are less likely to facilitate wider sharing. We know, for example, that Snapchat has a virtual lock on the messaging and
photo-sharing habits of those under 21 in this country. But Snaps sent and received disappear in a few seconds – that’s why young people are so drawn to the service. It’s inherently safer and more private to use than networks their parents use, such as Whatsapp and Facebook. (If you’re over 35 and reading this, there’s less than a one in 20 chance that you use Snapchat or even know how it works, according to Amarach research earlier this month.)
Yes, Snapchat photos can be copied by taking a screenshot, or photographed by another phone, but that is very much the exception rather than the rule.
The aggravated damage occurs when older adults of parental age get hold of the material. Because they don’t use privacy-friendly services such as Snapchat, they invariably share such images on forums such as Whatsapp groups. Once there, the images are incredibly easy to copy and share to other Whatsapp groups, which is what their adult counterparts proceed to do. Indeed, this is largely how the Ballyragget photos were share so quickly and widely among hundreds of thousands of people within hours of the event happening.
Technology has brought about numerous heightened dangers for young Irish people. Sadly, it is their older friends and family who often exacerbate the damage in the name of titillation.