Katie Harris
As teens grow up with TikTok and SnapChat, ignoring online sexual activity is no longer an option, writes
Everyone’s heard the stories. The lore passed in women’s bathrooms of friends’ cousins’ exes trying to exact revenge by sharing their nude images without consent.
Although it is never the victim’s fault, and those responsible can be charged with criminal offending, education surrounding sexting largely echoes the approach 1960s health classes took to intercourse before marriage. Don’t do it.
But as today’s teens grow up in an age of social media apps like TikTok and SnapChat, ignoring online sexual activity is no longer an option.
Sexual violence and gender researcher Paulette Benton-Greig says young people are made to walk the line when it comes to sending sexual content.
“There’s pressure not to send nudes, but there’s pressure to send nudes. So you know, the external world, the parent world, the adult world, the social world would tell them, just don’t do it.
“But also on the other hand, a lot of pressure from young men to see them.”
Last year Benton-Greig, who is a senior law lecturer at Auckland University of Technology, and her colleagues published a paper exploring teenage girls’ responses to sextingrelated harm prevention messages.
She says the teens they interviewed described the perceived unfairness of the situation, reflecting how they felt trapped between two forms of shaming: labelled as sluts if they do send nudes, or prudes if they don’t.
Benton-Greig is disappointed in resources available online about sexting, which she says are focused on how parents can tell young women “not to sext”, instead of on those engaging in exploitation, abuse or coercion.
“When you contextualise sexting itself as the problem, then the point of intervention becomes young women, right? But when you conceptualise the problem as unethical sharing or distributing or nonconsensual distributing, then it’s young men’s practices.”
Although people can be the victim of this in any relationship, she says gendered ideas around sexuality are most influential in hetero-gendered contexts, which set women up to be the main group harmed.
“Certainly it can happen in samesex relationships and a range of gender and sexual identity orientation arrangements.”
Benton-Greig believes young men are growing up in a world where
When you conceptualise the problem as unethical sharing or distributing or nonconsensual distributing, then it’s young men’s practices. Paulette Benton-Greig, sexual violence and gender researcher