Most teens today are comfortable with documenting their lives online. Posting photos, updating their status messages, sharing rapid-fire texts, and being a click away from friends are the new normal for teens. It now occurs all around the world, including Canada. Sexting is a result of advances in technology enabling new forms of social interaction. Messages with sexual content have been exchanged over all forms of historical media. Newer technology allows sending pictures, and videos, which are intrinsically more explicit and have greater impact, without the involvement of photo printing personnel, or the need of a photo processing. The danger with sexting is that material can be very easily and widely sent, over which the originator has no control.
What is sexting?
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Guest post by Nina Funnell Based on her many thoughtful conversations with youth and adults about sexting over several years, Australian researcher and author Nina Funnell — who I met and heard speak at an Internet safety conference in Sydney last year — offers adults the rare opportunity to step outside the box of conditioned, fearful and often legalistic thinking about technology and sexuality. Here is her take on an in-depth report on teen sexting just released by The Atlantic for its November issue. The views of many sources — both beyond and on the scene in that particular school sexting case — are then woven in, to diagnose the problem and suggest various strategies. The police, in particular, are quoted at length. This trend is not new. Through an extensive analysis of more than 2, media items on the subject of sexting produced between , Australian researchers have found that young people themselves rarely feature in such discussions. They are, in effect, locked out of the public debate about their own bodies and choices, while parents, teachers, academics, police and government officials are given broad scope to judge the issues and offer reasons as to why teens behave the way they do. Even more concerning is that, when journalists do attempt to include the voices of young people, they sometimes only do so in order to judge and mock those young people or to hold them up as objects of ridicule and derision for a cynical public. When the daughter was 17, Squires caught up with her and wrote about the encounter:. I saw a happy, attractive and popular young woman.
What teenagers wish their parents knew about sexting
Depending on which expert you ask, sexting among teens may be extremely common or incredibly rare. Studies have reported rates of youth sexting as low as 1. Child development researcher Sheri Madigan of the University of Calgary and her colleagues scoured all the data they could find about sexting behavior among teens. Among the 34 studies that included data on sending sext messages, the average prevalence was That means more than 1 in 7 teens admitted to — or boasted about — sending a sexually explicit message, photo or video of themselves. The researchers said this discrepancy could reflect the fact that one person can send a message to multiple recipients. Five of the 39 studies included in the analysis asked teens whether they had passed along a sext from someone else without asking for permission first. This figure is based on information from four of the 39 studies. Certain apps have reinforced this impression of privacy by making sexts easier to share and easier to erase supposedly. After all, mobile phones are becoming the norm at younger and younger ages.
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