A qualitative study of children, young people and 'sexting ... - NSPCC

A qualitative study of children, young people and ‘sexting’
be a smiley face and then next to the smiley face there will be something like ‘Would you have
sex with me?’ ‘Would you do this, would you do that?’ and then by sending that broadcast,
like the boy will answer it and then you will start talking to them and it is just like …
Sexting scenarios: the Blackberry messenger (BBM) broadcast
R: Like the question will be like, ‘Would you have sex with me lights on/lights off. Socks on/
socks off. What position? To what song? Condom or no condom?’ Stuff like that. It is like –
I: So you think that is quite common?
R: When I first got my Blackberry everyone was sending them and I was like, ‘Wow’. Literally
you get broadcast after broadcast after broadcast. So I started telling everyone, ‘Just untick
me, I’m getting annoyed’.
I: Unticking means like you are not on their group?
R: Yeah their broadcast group. (Kylie, year 10, School One)
2. understanding sexting: the importance of gender
One of the key findings of this research highlights the extent to which gendered power relations saturate
the young people’s lives. No understanding of sexting would be complete without an appreciation of the
extent to which an often completely normalised sexism constitutes the context for all relationships–both
on and off-line. As researchers going into the schools to meet with young people, we were distressed
by the levels of sexist abuse and physical harassment–even violence–to which the girls were subject on
a regular basis. More than this, we were struck by the way in which it is entirely taken for granted by
both girls and boys–even when the same behaviours would be grounds for dismissal in other settings
and among adults (e.g. in the workplace) or for arrest and prosecution if they happened in public space.
In order to convey the nature of the sexist culture in which young people operate, and to operationalise
it, we have identified a number of different indicators that were discussed fulsomely by young people in
the study. These are considered below.
Boys ‘ownership’ of girls’ bodies
Perhaps the broadest level at which sexism operates in the young people’s lives is to be found in the
deeply rooted notion that girls and young women’s bodies are somehow the property of boys and young
men. As we shall show later, this took on vivid forms in one of the most common practices of sexting in
which boys solicited, and girls sent, photographic images of themselves or parts of themselves in which a
boy’s name had been written in black marker pen. Significant numbers of these images were circulating
in the period of this research, with some boys claiming to have up to 30 pictures of different girls on their
phones. A typical example would be for a young woman to send a shot of her naked breasts, squeezed
together, with the caption ‘Jason owns me’ scrawled prominently across part of her cleavage.
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