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

A qualitative study of children, young people and ‘sexting’
However, the attitude to porn was mixed – for example Kamal in year 8 said he enjoyed it while Kaja
(year 10 School Two) said peer produced photos were much better to have and porn was for ‘nerds’ and
‘virgins’. Age emerged as an important factor too in relation to attitudes to porn among the boys, with
the suggestion that porn use is associated with youth and inexperience. Here is 15 year old Adam (School
One) again:
I don’t know cause I ain’t done that, I aint been on porn in a while cause I used to go on that when
I was young. I was excited, I was a virgin, I wanted to know what sex was like. That’s where I
started learning a bit from and then I just stopped watching it, cause why watch it when you can
do the real deal.
Interestingly, this opened up the possibility for disavowal of porn-use to function performatively to
display sexual prowess and experience. Irina talked about how using porn could make boys seem
desperate and unpopular because they cannot get a ‘real girl’:
I think when they have pornography it is just like, I think, I don’t know, sometimes it puts their
ratings down because like you think–some boys think you are having porn on your phone because
you can’t get girls, like, to beat you so you have to do it to porn and stuff like that, to yourself, and
whatever. (Irina, year 10, School One)
Girls did not talk to us about their own use of pornography, but depicted it as a male preoccupation.
But we are also interested in how the use of pornography in school settings can pose a problem for girls.
Claire (13, School One) described how boys watching porn at school made her uncomfortable and felt
that porn was impacting how boys wanted them to look:
R: Well they just show their friends, and afterwards if they like a girl, they will go like how they
want her body to be like the person on the pictures.
I: How do they say that?
R: They just say, like ‘Your body should be like hers for him’.
Another 15 year old girl said she thought that porn was shaping boys’ imaginations and sexual demands,
and also that boys had no interest in girls’ pleasure. She went on to explain how she thought this worked:
how a form of emotional blackmail was used to get girls to do things for their boyfriends:
a lot of girls … think the guy is going to look at them like, ‘Oh you don’t love me because you
haven’t done this, that and the other and my friend’s girlfriend’s doing it’. They kind of blackmail
you saying love, love, love when actually love has nothing to do with it, it is just your complete lust
to get a bit excited about something that is not that great. (Monique, year 10, School One)
4. peer surveillance, exposure and ratings
Exposure
The sexting practices we have outlined so far all took place against a backdrop of peer surveillance. The
ability of online and mobile technologies to capture, save and send pictures and screen grabs (screen
munches) of messages meant that young people were acutely aware of the potentially public nature of
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