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

A qualitative study of children, young people and ‘sexting’
sexual identity, with deleterious consequences for lesbian and gay young people. All these issues urgently
require further research.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t
When asked what could be done about the sexual harassment they experienced, girls moved back and
forth between a simple and often quite judgemental exhortation to ‘just say no’ if you don’t like it or
don’t want to, to a realisation that things were often more complicated and the pressures intense. The
common-sense understanding of how to treat bullies, with ideas such as ‘ignore them and they’ll get
bored’ and ‘don’t let them have the satisfaction of letting them know you are upset’ could often work
against girls, since if they followed such advice and did not scream or make a fuss during an incident
of physical sexual harassment they were at risk of being depicted as ‘not bothered’ or even as ‘liking
it’–with negative consequences for their sexual reputation. Likewise, anti-bullying policies do not seem
to address the ubiquity of mobile technologies in which messages could be sent repeatedly, and in which
non-response (ignoring it) could lead (as we saw in section 3) to very public ‘punishments’.
Silence and fatalism
Girls often told us that they would tell a teacher or tell their mum if the sexual harassment – whether
on or offline – became particularly upsetting. However, we quickly learned that this was a rote and
‘expected’ answer that bore little relationship to the real situation. Thus further gentle probing could
reveal a different story of girls who felt silenced by many fears including being seen as a ‘snitch’ or ‘snake’
Asked how she would react to being touched up, one 13 year old told us she would:
R: Tell the teacher or my mum or someone.
I: Really, you would really tell the teacher? Because a lot of girls have said they wouldn’t tell a
teacher?
R: Well I wouldn’t but when we had this interview and I got some booklet from the library and
there was me and Skylar and Ashley was talking to a man about it and he even said that we
can come and tell him and then he will sort it out and stuff …
I: If you told on somebody, would you be worried about that at all?
R: Yeah. I’m worried like – the hard thing is like it would be so much easier if there wasn’t no
such thing as ‘snake’ or ‘grass’ because I really hate it when people – it’s bullying in a way.
But it is not and yeah, and like most girls, they just can’t say what happened because of the
reactions that they will get towards them from boys, and even from more (Cherelle, year 8,
School Two).
Cherelle explained that this had been difficult for the whole of her first two years in school:
R: I would just go home and my mum would say, ‘Did you have a good day?’ and I would just say
‘Yes’ knowing that it wasn’t okay, but there was nothing I could do about it. But what would
be better if the teachers checked the cameras more often because it is mostly right in front of
the cameras and this has happened from Year Seven and no one has discovered about it.
I: So tell me about the last time somebody touched you up, what happened?
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