Teens, sexting and image-based sexual abuse: a child rights approach
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Welcome to the LSE Events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences. I will say good evening to those of you here and those of you watching online. I'm Sonia Livingstone from the Department of Media and Communications here at LSE.

And I'd like to welcome you to this hybrid event called Teens, Sexting and Image-Based Sexual Abuse, a Child Rights Approach.

I'm delighted to welcome tonight's speakers whose names in fact you can see here Professor Liliya Green and Professor Jessica Ringrose, Dr. Kim Salvada and Giselle Woodley and I'm going to introduce them properly in a minute but I first would like to just say that this event is hosted by the Digital Futures for Children Centre which together with the Five Rights Foundation

was established a couple of years ago to research the opportunities and the barriers to a rights-respecting digital world.

In our work we support evidence-based advocacy, we facilitate dialogue between academics and policy makers and we amplify the voices and experiences of children. Particularly within the framework of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and its general comment number 25 on how those rights apply in relation to the digital environment. You can visit our website to see our work.

As you will see, we're going to try to bring a child rights focus into the very lively ongoing debates about society's management of children's digital lives. We're keen to ensure that these debates address the very important factors of safety, privacy and security, but also that they consider the full range of children's rights to flourish in a digital world.

And we are particularly interested in exploring the responsibilities of governments and companies so as to avoid burdening individuals with the task of managing today's largely opaque and unaccountable technological systems and business models. So we ask what does good look like and how can we learn from children's everyday experiences to design better?

Just by way of a preface, in our last report, I just wanted to mention, our last report,

was on multi-stakeholder responses to a particularly challenging concern with technology facilitated child sexual exploitation and abuse, which kind of illustrates in a very kind of pressing way some of the complex problems that we're trying to address in today's session and in all of our work.

Technology is changing very fast, the research in this field, as we'll also hear today, is ethically challenging and public anxieties are really heightened. So in that report, in our last report, we recommended six principles and I think they provide a kind of helpful framework for what we're going to talk about today in relation to teens sexting and image-based sexual abuse.

So our six principles, maybe keep them in mind as my colleagues talk, are number one, children's voices count. Number two, the language with which we talk about these problems matters. Number three, take care of the context in which problems and solutions emerge. Number four, avoid blaming children.

Number five, think into the future as we make our policy recommendations. And six and most important, embrace a child rights approach. So that's kind of our framing and now I want to get to the discussion. As you can see, we have four speakers and I'm going to introduce them in the order in which they're going to speak.

Each will talk for up to 10 minutes and then we'll have time for discussion and Q&A so be ready with your questions both here and also online. We will conclude this evening by 8pm and for those present we have a reception upstairs in the senior dining room on the fifth floor to which everyone is welcome.

So, our first speaker is Jessica Ringrose, who is co-director of the Centre for Sociology of Education and Equity at UCL, and her research explores youth digital cultures focusing on developing education to prevent tech-facilitated gender-based and sexual violence and misogyny.

and five years ago she received the American Education Association's Distinguished Contributions Award and her latest book, appropriately titled, is Teens, Social Media and Image-Based Abuse. Kim Silvanda is postdoctoral researcher at the Digital Futures for Children Centre in their Department of Media and Communications here.

Kim's research is focused on children, youth and media, especially online hate, racism, sexuality and online child sexual exploitation and abuse. She has worked for the UN in civil society, academia and as a government advisor, particularly in Sweden. Giselle Woodley, who will speak next, is a sexologist and a PhD candidate at Edith Cowan University in Australia.

and her thesis has explored adolescents' perspectives on sexually explicit materials, including pornography and their relationships and sexuality education across various settings, and she often speaks within the Academy but also in public settings.

And finally we have Lelia Green who is Professor of Communications also at Edith Cameron University in Australia and Lelia has researched children's digital media use for over 20 years when her work was first funded by the Australian Research Council and she's currently completing a research project on perceptions of harm from adolescents accessing online sexual content

and she has published a lot on this and related topics. So we have a very expert and interesting body of expertise here. I'm going to invite you to make sure your phones are on silent because this event is going to be recorded and will be a podcast. And I'm going to invite the speakers in turn. So I'm going to turn over to Jessica. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Sanya.

Okay, so at Sonya Sun, I'm Professor Jessica Ringrose, and I have been studying youth sexting for 15 years. Time flies. And I've got to cover 15 years in 10 minutes, so I've got a lot of slides, but I'm going to breeze through them, and hopefully I get to the end. But I hear that Sonya is a very strict chair, so I will do my level best.

Okay, so 2011, myself and actually Sonia was a part of the team. We were commissioned to do a qualitative study of children, young people, and sex sting by the NSPCC. You have to understand at that point in time we didn't really know very much about what was going on in this area and we were sort of sent in there, you know, find out what the kids are doing. So it was a small scale study. We worked in two schools with 35 young people

in London and we studied their use of Blackberry and Facebook and you're like what Blackberry? Yeah, back in the day the children were using Blackberry so it was like kind of a non-surveillable network, businessmen were on it, teens were on it and yeah it was really fascinating to see how they were developing their digital intimacies using this device.

We also looked at their use of Facebook. This is a 13-year-old boy's Facebook profile with some branding and commodification that you see on Facebook way back in 2011 when we collected this data.

So, regarding sexting, what was our main findings? We found that the technologies, the phone and the internet, were acting as new conduits for old gender power imbalances. So it's not that the technology creates a situation, but it becomes a conduit for it to take place, possibly amplify or transform how it manifests.

And in terms of power imbalances, we found that it was mostly boys that were asking girls for nudes, also for sexual services, through text, text, text, text, text. And when it came to nonconsensual image sharing, we didn't have this language back then, we were just piecing things together as we went.

they were mostly sharing or posting those on BlackBerry. And BlackBerry was also, you could do screen captures to sort of like show what communications were going on and sort of like expose peers around if they were like having sexual interactions or what have you.

Yeah, and so we went on to theorize this using feminist and gender theory to think about how boys were using images as a form of currency. Someone in Canada actually went on to write a really nice paper about nudes as hockey cards, like trading cards.

And this was really fascinating. We were looking at the homosocial bonds, mates trying to impress one another vis-a-vis these images. And here we have, if you don't participate, your heterosexual cisgender masculinity gets called out as not adequate. So it's very tough for the boys to actually challenge this behavior.

Meanwhile, because of the way that the law is set up around sexting and remains really to this day,

the person that creates an image is actually potentially criminally liable for creating it. And so what we saw was a lot of victim blaming around girls for having produced a nude in the first place, irrespective of the conditions under which they had done that. So we saw, you know, she doesn't respect herself and, you know, basically she deserves to be exposed.

So, I actually dug up the old news report on this. This is what came out. It was really funny, they did a press release and they were like, they've discovered a gritty underworld and I was like, oh my god, can we make it a little bit more nuanced?

But this is the angle they took, you know, we need to move from stranger danger to peer-on-peer threats from friends. And, you know, ever since I've sort of been looking at peer-to-peer relationships, and you can see we didn't have a language for really discussing it. They called it an extreme form of cyberbullying, whoever was writing up this news item.

This actually ended up being a really influential study. I looked it up and 1753 combined citations from the report and the article. Pretty great! Because we were really the first people that were looking at this kind of gendered power imbalance and these sexual double standards that were being produced through these digital intimacies.

During the project we really found out that what was terrible, and I'm hoping Giselle will go more into this, is the bad, what we might call, sex education. Based on the horrible laws, which sort of like were, you know, potentially finding girls criminally negligent for creating images in the

in the first place, the sex education really reflected that. So there was like this see-up video called Exposed. It was all about this girl whose image got out, her life was ruined, and it was just sort of like a huge scare tactic. Like the

the base message is abstinence. It's like, don't sext, my God. And it's understandable why the police were saying, don't do this, because we didn't have, like BlackBerry didn't have a report button. You know, we didn't have ways of protecting young people. We didn't have cyber crime really, like all the way back then. So, you know, the police were just like, for God's sakes, don't do it.

But nonetheless, that sort of fear tactic, fearmongering, it really persists. So I wanted to think about, I wanted to talk to young people about what they thought about these videos. We did some focus groups. And the girls in particular were saying, you know, they're not really like showing us

how it's down to what boys are doing, the relationship between the guy and the girl, basically masculinity and power relations around masculinity and what is the impetus behind some of this non-conceptual sharing was not really being covered in any of this sex education material.

So yeah, the terminology and the law were not really fit for purpose in addressing the harms. And many people went on to sort of argue that by conflating all

all types of sexting also into harmful, you're also not being able to properly distinguish when it's harmful and when it's not. Therefore, you know, creating a deviancy narrative around sexting, where some sexting can be completely consensual and a normative kind of trajectory, but it's all being kind of like demonized. So people said we really need to work on that. Fast forward...

Not too long ago, still 2019, another study found that sexting lessons were completely out of date. They were too late. They continued to show these terrible videos in assemblies at school. Large assemblies run by police, right? It's not a very good strategy for trying to help young people have more consensual and ethical interpersonal relationships in an assembly format.

So I started working on interventions into this, and 2018 I was working with a charity called the School of Sexuality Education, and we were trying to look into some of these relationships about online misogyny and sexism. And we were in a school in 2018, and I just was hearing all of these experiences about dick pics.

And these really hadn't come off in the previous, like there were penises involved, but it wasn't a thing to be bombarded in a kind of weaponized fashion with a gentle image. So the girls all the way through the workshops were talking about it and I went for lunch and one of the teachers had been, had dropped a dick pic on the way and I was just like, researchers like, now I've got to study this.

So I did a whole big study. Oh, yes, 2017 was apparently the year of the rise of the dick pic. There's a YouGov study just shows you the extent of it. It missed me. So I was like, 2018, I was like, I'm too old. So I was like, okay, let's study it. So we put together another project, and I'm really fortunate that I was able to do some research in Canada as well before the pandemic hit. But I was able to work with 480 people

young people in England. Mostly the qualitative was done, well it was all done in 2019 and then a survey in 2020. We used creative methodologies. We had young people draw their experiences because we knew that we wouldn't actually be able to necessarily use any of their screen shares for ethical reasons.

and we basically asked them to explain how the social media platforms worked. And this is a very strong way of accessing youth perspective. I believe it's really focused in a child's rights perspective because it's asking them to kind of share what they want, how they want, and about their experiences in context too. So some of the main concerns, loads of stuff came up, okay, but I'm just showing you some of the more problematic content that was

discussed was not these non-consensual dick pics and masturbation videos. These images are quite jarring for some adults. They're like, "Oh." But basically, I think it was a really important opportunity for young people to sort of share things that they'd never actually perhaps been able to discuss previous.

And we also, we did a survey as well, and we also asked them what they wanted to see done differently. By studying the platforms themselves, we found Snapchat was the top platform where harm was occurring. Instagram was second.

And then these findings were used to inform a new offense on cyber flashing. But like, at first I thought, okay, that's great. But actually in my new book, which is coming out shortly, where I go through the seven school sites in depth,

we kind of talk about if rape itself is decriminalized in the current criminal justice system, which is what is being argued by the violence against women and girls sector, what hope is there for a cyber crime that nobody's even heard of? And I've worked with police officers, they've never even heard of cyber flashing. So I don't know, sometimes I just wonder are these just sort of like things they come up with but they won't have any impact

whatsoever from a criminal justice perspective. And since then, I've undertaken some more studies to try and find out more about online harms, but particularly tried to do intervention work, doing sexual violence prevention work in schools. I'm just going to skip this because I know I'm running out of time. So we co-produced and piloted two participatory workshops, again with the School of Sexuality Education.

We worked with over 1600 young people working on these issues with them. We co-produced a whole suite of resources about a whole school approach to managing these issues. And we've also co-produced a freely available online course. But what I'm worried about is the lack of political will to kind of implement a lot of this. We just see a constant sort of dragging of feet from the Department of Education.

around thoroughly tackling this inquiry after inquiry. My colleagues are going to another women in equality inquiry tomorrow on misogyny. It's just like, how many inquiries do you need? Yep, I'm almost done. So, 2025, we're in a really different kind of landscape, which I know the other scholars here are gonna be talking about. We've got, you know,

Parents are, now it's like from going to, from knowing nothing, parents are just like becoming more and more and more anxious. And we're seeing, and we're seeing more awareness of like, you know, the tech companies, the tech bros are up there that own this means of kind of, you know, harm.

But the answer being given, as we know because Sonia's been researching this, is around banning social media for children. Basically punishing children for the harms that are created by a giant tech.

And a survey just came out in April 2025 that said 99.8% of primary schools and 90% of secondary schools have some form of ban now. So it is really like the kind of wave right now. And here's where I'm hoping Giselle and Kim will get into it. What chance is there for high quality RC and digital literacy that prioritizes digital rights in the current climate?

That's 15 years. Jessica, thank you so much. And I think indeed the others are going to follow and develop some of these themes and do be ready with your questions when the time comes. But we will just move through. So, Kim Silverado.

Yes, thank you. Thank you, Jessica, and I feel honored to follow you here because the work that I've been doing in this field very much builds on the work that you have done and that Sonia has done. So this talk will be based on kind of a contribution I've done in this field through my postdoctoral work. So let me begin by setting a scene that may feel familiar. A teenage girl

receives a message on Snapchat. It's from a boy she met at a party. He seems nice enough, but as the chats become more frequent, his intentions seem to shift. She's not interested romantically or sexually, but rather than saying a direct no, she sends a photo of the ceiling. In Swedish we call this "talk bild", which really translates to "photo of the ceiling". It's a silent, culturally legible way of saying "I'm not into this".

So young people will understand this. When we went into the research, I did not understand this. And so here it's all about legibility on Snapchat. But this was not a confrontational way of addressing her disinterest. It was a way of avoiding drama. But is it consent or is it refusal?

This one small image of a ceiling raises bigger questions. How do young people navigate consent in their digital intimate lives? And how can we think about consent as more than just a clear yes or no? I suggest that in digital communication, it's very textured, emotional, effective, and shaped by technological and social forces.

So this talk draws on research I did together with my colleagues Eva Elmer Stig and Charlotte Holmström at Malmö University at the Center for Sexology and Sexuality Studies. It looks at how young people understand and negotiate consent in digital communication and how this intersects with sexuality, children's rights and technology.

In Sweden, as in many Western contexts, the public and policy focus has been on affirmative models of consent. In these models, consent is defined as voluntary, conscious, and a clearly expressed agreement. In Sweden, this was enshrined into the law in 2018, something we call the consent law.

And a lot of work went into over decades to ensure that this was entered into law. And what it means is that you no longer have to have used violence or threats for your actions to be considered to be rape.

And in 2022, consent also became part of national education through the Sexuality Consent and Relationships Education Curriculum, which viewed internationally was seen as a very kind of progressive way of seeing sexuality education and kind of centering the concept of consent in a kind of...

in a child rights respecting, but also in an age appropriate way from very young ages to later on. So consent in Sweden starts with something we learn in preschool called stop mikrok, which means stop my body, which was something developed by the Red Cross, or save the children, save the children, which still lives on today. And from that point on, we learn about consent basically. So this became kind of a pinnacle of the consent education discussion.

However, this curriculum is now under threat. The Swedish parliament is looking to remove it as debates over sex education grow more restrictive internationally. These were nonetheless very important advancements both nationally and internationally. Still, as these were significant steps, framing consent through a human rights lens is also important. Such an approach will link autonomy, equality and bodily integrity

and can serve to strengthen both legal protections and cultural norms. But there are limits. As feminist scholars like Melanie Beres and Emily Seti have shown, rights-based models often assume a rational and independent subject. They assume that young people are, or should be, rational, communicative, agentic individuals, capable of clearly negotiating sexual boundaries.

Youth may also be positioned as ignorant sexual subjects and consent as a knowledge problem, something that young people have to learn. But when we actually listen to young people, their experiences are very complex. Consent is rarely verbal, affirmative or clearly expressed. It's affective and relational and deeply entangled with relations of power linked to the social and technological surroundings.

Offline, as research shows, many young people often reproduce traditional gendered scripts, and as Jessica's talk showed, boys are expected to initiate, or they use sexual interactions to gain social status. Girls, on the other hand, are seen as sexual gatekeepers. Consent is often negotiated implicitly through gestures, tone, and timing, often shaped by ambiguity, emotion, and social pressure.

Research, including my own, shows that girls often use strategies to avoid sex they don't want. They might fake enthusiasm or they might agree to avoid conflict, guilt, or damage to their reputation. Powell and others have called these situations the gray areas of sexual violence. I'm sure you've heard that term previously. Sex that is unwanted but not necessarily forced.

These dynamics complicate the idea of consent. They show how much it's influenced by emotion, pressure, and social context. These dynamics don't disappear online. In many ways, they can be intensified. Take Snapchat, which Jessica talked about, and which we also found in our study to be the central kind of platform for young people's communication, the one where they felt most safe but also most at risk.

Because messages disappear, many participants in our studies said they felt safer sharing intimate content there. The platform's ephemerality gave them a false sense of security, but they also knew screenshots could be taken. Still, this fleeting quality shaped how they communicated and set boundaries. Girls in particular developed subtle ways to say "no", like the talk field.

saying they were at a friend's house pretending to have a boyfriend. These soft refusals aimed to protect not just personal boundaries, but also reputations and social harmony.

We call this form of digital negotiation "sexual consent," a term drawn from Mihan that acknowledges the complex interplay of affect, gender, and technological mediation. Sexual consent is rarely verbalized as a yes or a no, but is a mutual choreography of permission-seeking, feeling out, and managing risk within app-specific environments.

It's a carefully navigated process with subtle cues and complex forms of multi-mobile communication. One girl in our study told us about a relationship that started on Snapchat.

It was funny, respectful, and emotionally safe. The disappearing messages gave her space to explore her feelings without fear. She said, "It just felt easier to talk about things, like you're not saving the conversation, so I could be more honest." Like in many other studies, youth also point out that things like intimate image sharing with a consenting partner was normal and an accepted part of young people's sexual and romantic relationships.

This shows us that technology isn't just a source of harm, it can also support connection and care when it's used with empathy and mutual respect. But of course, we also saw a darker side of digital sexual communication, and as Jessica showed, these things often very much overlap. The good comes kind of with the bad.

And many interactions are very one-sided. Consent is often missing entirely as you receive, for example, a host of dick pics that you've never asked for or questions about sending nudes that you never consented to.

So girls in our study were frequently sent unsolicited images. Dick pics, random nude requests. Boys, meanwhile, were more likely to be approached by fake accounts linking to graphic content through so-called porn bots.

These forms of digital sexual violence and the technologies that facilitate their transmission trouble the idea of consent as a process between two human agents. As many youth are managing exposure and harm, consent may feel like an inapplicable concept. As one girl put it, "It's like dick pics are in your face all the time, it's just there." These moments shape how young people experience digital spaces and their own sexual boundaries. So,

What shapes young people's ability to consent online? It's not just about personal agency, it's about the platforms themselves. Apps like Snapchat don't just host communication, they shape it and mediate it. Disappearing messages, screenshot warnings and image filters all influence how users feel, respond and negotiate boundaries.

Consent becomes less a clear decision made by a rational agent and more an ongoing emotional and technical process. It's about how people tune into each other through feelings, cues, and the design on the platform they're using.

It's what some would describe as effective attunement. It's the way consent happens between people, but also between people and technology. As Dubrovsky and Levina remind us, agency is not independent from a coercive context.

In hyper-gendered, sexualized spaces, young people's agency is shaped and sometimes constrained by the platforms they use. So if we want to understand and protect young people's rights in digital sexual communication, we have to take seriously the way that consent is shaped by platforms, their design, the social norms that circulate there, and how power structures are expressed in these mediums.

and how these technologies mediate young people's capacity to choose and freely express their consent. So what does a child rights-based lens offer?

To understand sexual consent in digital youth relationships, we need to expand our frameworks. A rights-based approach is essential, as some have already pointed out, but it must be more than legalistic or individualistic. It must attend to effective gendered and technological conditions that shape young people's capacity to navigate consent. General comment number 25 that Sonia

talked about, which is on children's rights in the digital environment, puts it clearly. Children's rights are indivisible, interdependent, and interconnected. Protection, participation, and provision must all be upheld equally online and offline.

This is crucial when we think about consent, especially in environments where tech design and social norms constrain young people's choices. The Digital Futures for Children and the agenda we work with, which is within the remit of General Comment 25, reminds us to center young people's and children's voices, to understand how digital life shapes not just harm, but also autonomy and connection and young people's freedoms.

This is especially relevant when considering how young people navigate sexual consent in digital spaces where affordances and gendered norms may constrain their agency. Viewing consent through a holistic rights-based lens urges us to consider how digital design and the culture it promotes impact not just safety but autonomy, expression, participation and social connection.

At the DFC, our agenda reminds us to center young people's voices and to interrogate how digital technologies mediate rights, agency, and harm. In doing so, we move away from simple yes and no binaries and toward an understanding of consent as ongoing, situated, and socio-technically mediated practice.

A child rights by design approach, as advocated by the DFC, urges platforms to embed children's rights, including safety, participation, privacy, and evolving capacity in the very architecture of digital environments. So aligned with the General Comment 20, which is on adolescents, which recognizes adolescent sexual and reproductive rights, the design ethic can strengthen consent practices by ensuring that digital spaces support young people's agency, protect their dignity,

and promote their ability to make informed autonomous decisions in intimate contexts. So, a ceiling photo is not just a refusal, it's a form of care, it's a strategy of self-protection, and a window into the complex choreography of how young people navigate digital consent. Thank you. Thank you so much, Kim. And now we're going to hear from Giselle Woodley.

Good, and the slides are all ready. Fantastic. Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question. Like, why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or, can we afford the super rich?

Come check us out. Just search for LSE IQ wherever you get your podcasts. Now, back to the event. Hello, my name's Giselle. I'm from Australia. I'm a little bit jet-lagged and I apologise as it's 3am in Australia for me right now. But let's get on with it. So I'm a sexologist and a researcher and I'm going to talk about a project I've been working on for the last five years which was connected to an Australian Research Council project called

adolescents perceptions of harm from accessing online sexual content and this was an international study that focused on the Australian context but also did some comparative data with our partners in Norway, Greece and Ireland as well.

I was a PhD student connected to that project and so I focused on Australian teens. Teens were also interviewed in a first round of interviews with their parents in separate rooms and we were also able to cross compare their data with their parents and how they were undertaking some of the processes.

We also asked teens to define online sexual content and so we were predominantly looking for pornography but upon getting teens to define online sexual content we found that did also include sexting or sending nudes as they refer to it.

And for some young people that was their first interaction with online sexual content because a lot of young people experienced image-based sexual harassment and abuse where they were sent unsolicited dick pics or experienced cyber flashing. And so they're the findings I'm going to share today. There's somewhat of a side quest, I gained so I'm going to use that term, somewhat of a side quest from what we were initially looking for but we turned some of these findings into a paper as well and I'll talk about our follow-up study as well.

So in terms of the sample, there were 30 interviews. We had 15 males, 13 females and two individuals who identified as non-binary at the time. Our focus groups featured a wider sample of gender diversity and sexual diversity. I am going to focus on the interview data today because that's where sexting mostly came up in our interviews. And we had four Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander participants but teens were also from a range of South Asian descent and the majority were bi-Australian.

So as I said, there were quite a few instances of image-based sexual harassment and abuse that appeared in the interviews.

And teens had a range of reactions to these. So teens felt that the sharing of non-consensual nudes was apparent, as Nicola says there. And teens talked about incidences where they were threatened or bribed into sending nudes as well. So as you can see, Serafina talks about vapes and how she was asked, bribed with vapes, to send nudes, or how her friends were falling for these bribes and sending nudes so that they could obtain vapes.

I don't know how vaping goes over here in the UK, but in Australia it's been more regulated because they were rife in schools. So this was an interesting finding for us because it was something that we weren't used to and seeing that teens were bribing and threatening their peers into sending nudes.

But I would say the inter-based sexual harassment and abuse was occurring in terms of gender differences. It occurred in different ways. So the sharing of nudes without consent did happen by a variety of different sexes and genders as well.

So teens shared that leaking nudes was happening on a daily, almost weekly basis within their schools, that it had become almost normalised. And teens felt that they wanted to be prepared and it's such a shame to hear and also knowing Jessica's studies that 10 years on from some of those initial studies, teens were relaying some of the same things, that the education was occurring too little too late.

So they were already receiving dick pics, they were already engaging with this content, and they were receiving the education far too late once these occurrences had already occurred. And there were a number of teens who said that they didn't know what they were looking at when they were first looking at the unsolicited dick pic, for instance, that was usually sent by an older gentleman

on a platform like Snapchat, where they didn't know what they were looking at. They felt odd, they felt funny inside, and they knew that it wasn't good and dealt with it in their own ways, which I'll talk about. So in terms of sexting education, sadly, 10 years on in the Australian context, not a lot has changed. So teens felt that the education that was being administered to them wasn't relevant. It didn't speak in a tone and language that teens were receptive to, and the main message was don't.

And obviously that wasn't working because sending nudes was still rife and they didn't have a lot of safety parameters around how to save sext. And so teens relate consent education similar to Sweden was announced to be mandated at a similar time. It was announced in 2022 and then in 2023 it started to roll out and we managed to capture teens perceptions of their consent education. And they relayed that both consent education and sexting education

added to this fear-based narrative of STIs, pregnancy, contraceptives, and it was yet another fear-based, risk-aware form of education, including consent, which talked about sex in the context of sexual assault, avoiding unwanted sexual experiences and rape. And so it was giving them, in their view, warped perceptions of sex without any positive representations of sex and relationships. And they were wanting these positive representations

They also relayed that it was these positions, in addition to the online world, were creating fears around sex as well without these positive based representations. And it wasn't speaking to the actualities of their online sexual lives. I also want to share this particular teen's

about how the leaking of nudes had become so normalised that basically it was no big deal once nudes were leaked, both to the individuals whose nudes had been leaked as well as to those in the schoolyard because it was so commonplace. So she felt it was sort of a big whoop, there's another nude because it becomes so commonplace. And to me, that was quite surprising and...

I mean that has obviously negative and positive representations because negative because it's happening so regularly but positive in a strange way in that teens are not seeing it as that big a deal anymore in terms of normalising it. So then that can work both ways but there's some nuance and it may be that Tiffany is an anomaly and she herself had not experienced the leaking of the nude herself and can't speak to that but we felt that was an interesting perspective of worth sharing.

In terms of consent and relationships, most young people felt that sexting was more acceptable and safe within a trusted relationship. They felt that it could help build trust, and I'll let Lillia, Lillia's going to speak more to this in her presentation.

but also a great testing ground for trust and relationship and also looking at sexting as sort of digital sex in a hierarchical way of sexual activity sort of starting their starting basis and almost a safer way to practice sex without the risks of STIs and pregnancy as well. But again consent to teens was paramount and obviously consent appeared a lot in our interviews because consent education had just been mandated in Australia so it was at the forefront of young people's minds and they felt it took a dominant

almost overbearing role in their sexuality education as well. In terms of dealing with the image-based sexual harassment and abuse incidences in their lives, we found that teens were able to build resilience or almost forced to build resilience in a way because they were reluctant to go to their parents to talk about any incidences of image-based sexual harassment and abuse, mostly for fear of punitive actions of having consequences or punishment or having their devices taken off them.

So their way of dealing with things is right, okay, I'm going to block, I'm going to delete. They've built resilience to deal with this. Some teens use humour and if they have been sent a non-consensual image they felt, I can then share this dick pic with all my friends and let's have a laugh about it and rate it or something to that effect. So teens had their own ways of building resilience and dealing with these cases so that they could move on and not be too impacted.

Just to sort of wrap it up, I'm just going to very briefly talk about my PhD. As I said, their views about sexting was a bit of a side quest and as a sexologist I was really interested in how teens learn about sex and relationships and how pornography in particular featured as a source of sexual information in their spheres of sexual knowledge.

And this is relevant because teenagers really wanted anonymous sources of sexual knowledge. They gravitated towards anonymous sources. Pornography filled a gap in terms of a lot of teens were looking for ethical, romantic sources of information.

of pornographic representations, so they were looking for ethical sources or wanted to know how to obtain them. And that may be to balance some of the negative representations of sex that they were experiencing in school, but that also worked both ways because it was also contributing to fears around sex because of the aggressive representation of pornography as well. And teens also wanted visual representations of sex as well. They're living in a digital landscape. They wanted access to visual representations that were more explicit and went into the specifics of sex.

And they talked about how in the classroom there's this unspoken line where the discussion stops at pleasure or the specifics of sex when things get too explicit. They detect their teachers' discomfort around the topics that they already did have, let alone the topics that they wanted to explore. And they also felt that their parents weren't adequately trained in terms of they hadn't experienced their own sexuality education and they felt discomfort approaching their parents. As one team told me,

he's not going to learn how to go down on a woman from his mum. Which is quite fair. So, yeah, anonymity was important and also teens, we also asked teens in an ideal world, how would you learn about sex and relationships? And a couple of teens relayed to us if there was a 24/7 manned chat line or hotline that would be ideal. But they also talked about how resource intensive that would be. And one teen sort of anonymously said, you know, yeah, 24/7 manned chat line, but obviously that would be really difficult to resource.

And this is while sort of just before the advent of AI. So I'm really interested in our next project, which is going to look at this in more specifically is perhaps how teens use AI as a source of sexual information and whether they see perhaps AI companions and chatbots as a safer way to sext or have cyber sex. So our next project, which I'm the postdoc attached to with Lilia and Jessica is looking at teen informed strategies to counter sexual image abuse

And we'll be using interviews again along with arts-based methodologies and looking at sextortion and deepfakes as well. I think that's about it. Yeah. Thanks so much.

Thank you Giselle. You did very well for someone with jet lag. Thank you. It didn't show. So our final speaker is Lelia Green who's actually been visiting us in the centre of the department for the last few months and Lelia the floor is yours. Thank you very much. Thank you to Giselle. Thank you for putting all the credits in so everyone knows about the research. Thank you very much Jessica for being a partner on our research.

And thank you Kim and Sonia and the Digital Futures for Children Centre for hosting me for the last few weeks and for hosting this seminar. So we've heard how children, defined as people who aren't yet 18, in Sweden, the UK and Australia are using digital media to explore their sexuality and their possible sexual futures in much the same way as adults do. In fact, in much the same way that many adults in this room will have done.

Every four years or so, La Trobe University in Australia conducts what we call the National Survey of Secondary Students and Sexual Health. It's fondly referred to as SESASH. The most recent SESASH report was issued in December 2022 and reported on secondary students and sexual health in the time of COVID.

That report was based on 6,841 responses from secondary students aged between 14 and 18. But it was not a representative sample, so some of the findings should be taken with a grain of salt. In terms of gender, for example, 65.1% identified as female or woman, 27.8% as male or man, and 7.1% as trans or non-binary.

Looking at the same data from other perspectives, 41.9% of SASH respondents... Thank you.

41.9% of SASH respondents identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, unsure, or used a term other than heterosexual straight to describe their sexuality, while 39.4% of respondents indicated they were not yet sexually active, defined as not yet having had oral, vaginal, or anal sex.

So people identifying as a woman and people identifying as queer or gender diverse were proportionately over-represented in the SASASH sample. Thus the data is not predictive of Australia's 14 to 18 year old population as a whole, but it may be indicative. And specifically it provides interesting information on what adults call sexts and what teens often call nudes or dick pics.

SESASH indicates that 86.3% of young people have received sexts and 70.6% of Australian young people have sent sexual images or messages. We've heard previously about those who abuse teens' sexting practices, how unwanted sex or cyber flashing from some teens to others cause disgust, shock and embarrassment.

The betrayal when a teen makes private sexual communication and makes it public. Adults who exploit children's sex through catfishing and sextortion. And adults who use reciprocal sexting to seek children out as victims for abuse. It's not surprising that parents and educators tell teens that they shouldn't sext. But it's also not surprising that teens want to follow adults' examples and do just that and sext.

After all, it's sometimes easier to use a sext or image to communicate something that's hard to say in person. And it's difficult to talk about sexual intimacy when teens are still exploring exactly what intimacy means for them. And they know that adults use sext for exactly these purposes and others. Further, like adults, teens may prefer to test a relationship with a sext rather than with their whole heart and their emotional well-being.

Teens, as with adults, find that for most of the time, for most people, in a consensual flirtation or in a relationship, sexting serves as a valuable purpose in building intimacy and in helping people experience trust and connection. According to Sasash, the primary reasons teens give for sexting

is one, to feel sexy, 61.5%. Two, to be fun and flirty, 56.5%. Three, as a sexy present for a partner, 54.3%.

For young people who are claiming rights to emergent sexual citizenship, including many young people who may be sexting prior to deciding whether or not to move into their first sexual relationship, same-age consensual sexting serves a valuable purpose.

Indeed, these figures indicate that sexting is often a precursor to sex, a testing of the litmus paper, as it were, and that sexting is often sufficient to help a young person decide against making a sexual or romantic commitment to this partner at this specific point. Because the figures indicate that in all, 87% of sasash teens have been involved in sending or receiving texts,

And yet 60.6% of SESASH teens have engaged in oral, vaginal or anal sex. It's reasonable to assume that roughly two-thirds of teens who have sexted have chosen to move into a sexual relationship, while roughly one-third who have sexted decided not to go further.

Maybe that shows some wisdom in the part of today's teens. It would be interesting to know whether adults are equally cautious and discernible. I'm going to argue from a provocative point of view that we adults should work with teens as we find them, and not with teens as we might like them to be. And we should accept that teens see value in sexting as adults do.

We should recognise teens' rights to an emergent sexual citizenship that protects them from adult exploitation while being explicit about the importance of seeking informed consent, of sexting with same-aged partners, and we should support education around consent, respect, trust and privacy, and give up pretending that teen sexting doesn't happen.

I'm calling in effect for a resetting of the legislative codes that position sexual images of under 18 as potential child sexual abuse materials. In theory, police forces, at least in Australia, have discretion to decide if sexual images of under 18s break the law or whether the matter can be dealt with with cautions or with counselling.

In practice, the potential branding of sexual images of under 18s as child sexual abuse material victimizes teens who sext in three different ways. Firstly, the teens concerned are positioned to see their nude as illegal, illicit and dangerous.

In some Australian states and territories it can be illegal for a teen to have a nude photo of themselves that they took themselves on their phone or a computer, even when that photo has never been shared with anyone else. Creating a nude is seen as bad and wrong and blameworthy and that in itself also says things to teens about their sexuality.

Secondly, the child sexual abuse material classification creates a chilling effect when teens need to report image-based sexual harassment and abuse. On one hand, or sextortion on the other. After all the logic runs, and we heard this earlier from Jessica's talk, the primary fault lies in the teen's initial creation of the child sexual abuse material that has been weaponised against them.

Thirdly, the legislative setting means that something adults do quite legally and quite often is potentially illegal when teens do it, even though teens, in theory, are being protected by that position, even though, in theory, they are not old enough to know better, and even though in some cases, shortly in Australia, they are deemed insufficiently wise and insufficiently discerning to be trusted with their own social media account.

In place of the ruling around sexual images of under 18s being child sexual abuse materials, the people to be punished, chastised and othered should be those adults who use images of young people for sexual purposes and in other exploitative ways.

This recognises that children are not positioned on equal terms with adults. They cannot freely give or withhold consent when negotiating with adults. It's always adults who are to blame for abuse, not the child that created the image. And on this we follow the Digital Futures for Children mandate to avoid blaming children.

The situation at the moment where teens are, or maybe not, since it's often at police discretion, censured for making images that could be exploited by adult sexual abusers has many points of similarities with the situation where women who went out alone and were assaulted were blamed for putting themselves in harm's way. Those days are long behind us, we hope.

the days when teens live in fear of censure for consensual sexting with other teens should likewise be numbered. It's time for children's rights to explicitly include teens' rights to emergent sexual citizenship, preparing them for fuller sexual citizenship at adulthood, and for children's rights in this area to be at least as strong as adults' rights, and arguably much stronger. Thanks a lot.

Thank you very much, Julia. Okay, we have I think raised many issues and I'm going to turn it over to you now for questions and comments or maybe especially questions to the speakers. There are some

with roving mics and I'm just going to keep my eye on Luan because if you're online, do please feel free to put a question into the Q&A and for everyone if you could introduce yourself with your name and affiliation.

While you're thinking, I'm just going to say I think we've kind of raised quite a kind of entanglement of questions of consent and abuse around children's emerging sexuality as it's expressed in a digital environment.

Unless I see hands shoot up, I might just first ask the speakers, do you want to respond to anything that the others said? Do you see yourselves speaking in harmony or do you disagree in some ways or feel some clarifications are needed? Because there is some, I think, I feel there is some tension between those, the kind of the effort to recognize those

the importance that children don't become an adult on their 18th birthday. So how do we kind of recognise that process as a child rights framing says of evolving capacity or of development? And yet, how do we recognise the kind of multiple processes of abuse and power inequalities, including among children? So, Jessica, please.

I guess what stands out for me is a sort of gender neutral child being on positions like, "Oh, children are not to blame." And obviously some of the harms that we've been discussing

are between children and there's particular dynamics that are around heterosexuality or masculinity and dominance and femininity and so on. So I feel like I don't have an answer, but I'm just saying that's actually one of the key contradictions that I see playing out amongst how do we actually attend to

gendered power imbalances and harms at the same time as we also sort of, you know, say children are not to blame. So that's a conundrum that I was just dwelling upon. And I don't have any question, I don't have any answer to that, but it was just really in my mind as we were all speaking. Thank you.

Kim, yes. Well, I think the talks raise many issues, and I'm not sure if you would agree, but I think working in this field, and I think a lot of us, I mean, all of us sitting here will work kind of across the borders of different issues when it comes to kind of the exposure to inappropriate sexual material and what that might mean.

and how children might feel about that and whether or not or how it might shape their sexual experiences or their sexual development and on the other hand kind of the idea of the emergent sexual citizen as Lilia put it. And I think there's a problem with all of us working with the issue not just in research but also kind of advocates and so on where

I would say we're not in agreement as to what is age appropriate. For who, when and where. And Sonia and I have written in a paper whether there is a right age. It's a complex issue and it is very individual and it's based in different power structures and gender norms, etc.

So it's a very complex issue where I think we're all invested in making life better for young people and children and the way to get there and what that means in terms of, for example, whether children should be excluded from social media or whether we should go the other way and approach it from a child rights by design. But then there are others who will say, should we wait for that?

Or should we instead protect now and rather be very cautious? And I think there's a lot of tension in that, even though I think we all want to get to the same kind of result, which is protection, but also freedom to participate and to express yourself and to grow.

I'm listening like we're going in a row and I've got something to add. So the other thing I'd say is in response to your comment in terms of it doesn't happen when you're 18, like a flick of a switch and sexuality is all okay from there. I suppose from a biological point of view...

You know, teens are ready and sexual at a much younger age, but all these decisions around the tensions between their protection and their autonomy and their rights to sexual citizenship and agency are really culturally defined, and they differ across cultures. And so we've culturally decided, no, teens can't look after themselves, their brains aren't ready. But really, brains, we know the research has...

has developed since then in terms of we know brains aren't fully developed until 25 and now I think the research says they keep developing so what's to say that we as adults aren't ready to take on it's quite it's a bit of a conundrum I think and and

I don't think we give young people the rights to explore those issues as well as we could. In Australia, we've just agreed to the social media ban, as we've discussed. And the problem is these issues, it isn't going to make these issues go away. If anything, it makes them less equipped to deal with them in a world where other children around the world have been dealing with social media for years, and they're going to be less equipped. And it's going to send them to more unregulated platforms on the internet. So, yeah, these are complex...

that, like Jessica said, I don't have the solutions here and now, but I think we need to be talking about it. We need to be hearing what young people think. Well, I'd agree with all of that. And going back to Jessica's point...

I did say I was putting forward the provocation about the child rights approach because when you're talking to teenagers, this is another area in which they feel the adults only concentrate on the risks, the harms and the punishments of sexting and no one ever talks about what they see as the positives. And consequently, you know, it's extraordinary how nuanced their perspectives are.

And to honour that nuance, I put forward that point of view particularly. I do agree that cyberbullying is mainly, you know, the really big issues around cyberbullying and indeed through using sex and weaponising them as part of that is mainly a same age issue. But it's really important to identify that, but not necessarily same power or same positionality.

But it's really important to identify that by always focusing on what goes wrong rather than what people are finding useful, we run the risk of not looking to legislate or to regulate the things that actually are what the teenagers care about, which is more empathy training, consent, you know, calling out people that are sharing the nudes rather than the people creating the nudes and so on and so forth.

Thank you. I'm going to give the mic to Ella. Oh, sorry, please. Yes, OK. Just wait. If you could just introduce yourself. Thank you. Hi, my name is Bec Felton and I work on child safety in government.

I was really interested in all of your talks, thank you so much. Really, really interested in, I think it was Kim, you sort of described the ephemerality of certain platforms which create a sense of safety.

And I was really fascinated by this and I wondered if or what the interview data sort of also showed about the tension between the sort of the safety and the risk created by the ephemerality and indeed all the affordances of these platforms and how teens sort of negotiated that sense of safety with some of the more material risks and what you felt the understanding was of that.

Thank you, that's a great question. Something I was very interested in when

Looking at the data. I would say so they're kind of in that tension I would say all the time and as Jessica also said Snapchat as in the Swedish context, Snapchat is the biggest platform that they're using in their everyday communication and Instagram I think is the second biggest and then TikTok is used but TikTok is more for kind of viewing content and so on so communication wise it's Snapchat that they're using and

Many of them talked about things like when they were younger they'd been using Instagram, but it was more of a formalistic kind of curated vibe, whereas Snapchat was more dirty, everyday kind of you could always have ugly pictures, it didn't matter because they disappeared. So there was this sense of immediacy in the communication with other young people.

And they were clear on many things, but one thing was that it's both the platform where they're the most intimate with people and also the platform where they're the most open to having kind of contacts with whoever, somebody who's in their school, but they may not know. And they were talking about safety in the way that they felt more safe, for example, to say something

you know, a little bit emotional or a secret or whatever in, in that space because it would most likely disappear. Even though on the other hand, they knew that Snapchat was the place where they also got the most dick pics or the most porn bots or the most unsolicited, uh, uh,

questions for nudes or you know things like that so they were both aware that it was for them the place where they kind of fostered their intimate relationships both friendships and romantic and sexual but also were open to kind of having contact with anybody and they navigated safety and security in many different ways of course some of them were very restrictive in who they added some of them were very restrictive in who they you know let's see where they were on the map

they had ways of negotiating or of navigating if they saw a message from someone they didn't know and told us about different strategies of you know kind of opening the message but not really and then letting it go so that you knew who it was so you could kind of you know navigate that but they had very intricate choreographies of how to communicate with someone that you want to communicate with that you're really interested in communicating with and kind of

these very multi-modal ways of saying yes or no, or I want to continue, I'm interested. And we talked about that dynamic. How do you progress in a relationship on Snapchat that you are enjoying, that you want to pursue? And that was really the place where they would do that negotiation. And then, so we asked, but when do you, or do you ever kind of go on to another platform? And they said, yes, with like really, really close friends, for example, they might, you

also give them their real phone number and so on, but they felt, a lot of them felt like Snapchat was the place where they navigated all these kinds of relationships. So I would say there was that tension and for them it was kind of a taken for granted thing. Yes, it's both the place where there are most risks, but also the place where they had more tools to navigate the space.

So most people would say, for example, Instagram was somewhere where they would, you know, upload curated images rather than use it as a communication space to kind of foster relationships with people, whether close or not close.

There's such a tension isn't there between the kind of the nuance with which you describe what the young people themselves are doing and I'm just thinking now you know we have this new regulation in the UK, in Europe we are risk assessing platforms, I'm guessing Snapchat is going to come up quite risky.

And yet in a way some of the risk space is... Well, okay, it's a real challenge between the young people's voices and the regulation. I do want to come to Ellen and then give time for other questions if they're... Can I quickly respond to that as well?

From an Australian context, it's really interesting to hear that teens in Sweden felt safe because of the disappearing messages. Because in our study, we found that a lot of teens were actually quite questioned that because they came up with all these tech-savvy ways that they were screen capturing using apps and things that didn't necessarily notify the other user that they were taking screen captures. And so they were always on their guard about that. And then they also talked about using the streaks

where you send a picture every day to your mate as a really great way to connect and that kept them on the app. But also they said, you know, one team said, you know, Snapchat was created for nodes. That was the whole purpose of it. So they sort of knew that was the ground for it as well. But yeah, just sort of those differences. But I don't know if you saw that too. Actually, I saw exactly that too. So they were in both of those kind of spaces and...

Yes. And then they told us about very creative ways of like using someone else's phone to take a photo. You know, there are so many creative ways. But I think for the intimate relationship with someone you trust and I think...

Lilia also spoke about trust and with someone you really trust and they talk a lot about trust and when you know you trust someone and so you know sharing increasingly personal things then you would trust that person and then that fact that things would disappear and you would trust that person to not screen grab it was a very important factor so that if in case for example they weren't friends later you couldn't go back and

and use it against you. Thank you. Fantastic presentation. A lot of questions buzzing, but I'll try to keep it to one. I wanted to actually follow up on Lydia's kind of provocation and on, I understand, legally and in terms of regulation and all the things you were talking about, about this segregation of child, teen, adult...

And of course, a lot of the things that I heard in your presentation was about this fear of or lack of dialogue between people who are maybe labeled adults but have had experiences as children. And for me, it was related to this point that another...

term that I heard you talk a lot about was of course the sex aspect of it but also there is this need of intimacy and trust. And I just wondered in your research or what you had to say and you talked specifically about also talking to parents. It's like what space is there for dialogue or conversation around intimacy and how

have both fears and desires and pleasures and how we've worked through these and to position also adults in positions of vulnerability and to kind of talk around these issues as also within relationships of trust. And I understand that both teens and adults might not want to do that and that you know

you need spaces to have that separate, but I also wonder where is that space for dialogue and understanding rather than saying this is what teens want and say and adults don't understand it or they are removed from it. Like where is that space also in education but also in parent and child relationships? Well I think we'd all agree that ideally that would be part of the conversations that go on in every family.

and that they start very, very early. So the teens would tell us that the times when they want the parents to be talking about sex education, about things like pornography and such like, is in late primary, because they want to be prepared before they see the first thing, so they know what they're seeing. But of course, parents tend to think, my child won't have seen it. So they think of it as sort of 13, 14, and it will have been covered in school.

So there was a huge mismatch there. I often think that when a teen is talking to somebody like Giselle, or when parents are talking these things through, either to themselves or each other, you can see the lights going on and you can see the genuine connection. Not that I sit in on Giselle's interviews, but I can see them from the transcripts. It is, it's a dance of trust.

We know from when I first arrived a couple of months ago, and we were sitting around a table and talking about how teachers feel constrained about discussing these things in any real depth in school. And I think it was you, Sonia, who said some teachers live in genuine fear that they will be sacked if they start talking some of these conversations.

And I think what this says is that as a society we have yet to grow up to live with the reality of what we present to the world in terms of sexualised discourse.

We are not preparing young people to be informed participants and we're not preparing adults to be able to be discussants with these young people. I mean, our rule in terms of interviews is we never raise these issues, we respond to them. So children know that we're going to be talking about

sexual content and whether or not they feel harmed. And we're delighted when we're talking to kids who say, oh no, I've never seen it, but I know it's out there and I've been warned about it and so on and so forth. And then they might talk about, but my friend's seen it. And then you hear some other sort of one arm's length stuff. But the thing is that

This is an area in which we seem to go directly from taboo to full-on celebration without having a discussant middle.

And it's really important, and I think that media and cultural studies has a real value in being able to say these are discussions that everybody - parents, teachers, adults, policy makers - should be having together and with children who want to have those discussions. Because they are. They're hungry for them. Some of Giselle's interviews go on for two hours. And, you know, the kids want to talk with an adult who takes them seriously.

And who isn't scared that it's going to reflect on their parenting. A little bit of a disclaimer, I do tell teens that I'm a trained sexologist before we do the interviews and there's a bit of curiosity around that and I say there's nothing that could ever shock me and that helps to induce, I think, a sense of trust and comfort. But just to add to what Lilia said, I think that also comes with a cultural shift around sex.

the positioning of sex. And I think we do have inherent sexual shame that permeates through our culture. And we're sort of at this crossroads where we're living in a hyper-sexualised society in some ways, but then we're also...

super sexually suppressed as well and it is a taboo and there is stigma so part of being able to have these discussions is looking at a cultural shift or a systemic shift in terms of how we view sex. Traditionally it's seen as private, dirty and that's changing but in the landscape between where

and young people's sexuality sits, that's totally in this stigma zone. It needs to be protected. It needs to be shut down. And that's part of the problem of not being able to talk about it and some of the legislative things that we're talking about.

I just wanted to add that my research has mostly taken place in schools and I've been very critical of the bad sex education but reality is that relationships and sex education is very poorly resourced. It's a very low priority in schools and there's very little teacher training. So this just builds on what you're saying. You're just like the blind meeting the blind because it's like they've not been trained. They're safeguarding

huge demands around safeguarding the schools so I think it was me that was saying that you know teachers legitimately worried about being fired and teachers have been fired indeed for you know whatever mishandling misconduct or reporting it's a very fraught issue so I certainly didn't mean to make light of it

But yes, I just want to bring teachers into the mix. They may be doing their level best, but without proper training and resource, it leaves them in a very difficult situation. Thank you. We have a question at the front. Introduce yourself and ask your question. Thank you.

Hi, I'm Ellie Goodman and I am a sociology graduate and researcher. And thank you all for your time today. And I just found what you were saying, Leela, about your sentence, work with teens, we should work with teens as we find them, not as we want them. And I think this really...

hones into the representation we have of children and childhood as children as being innocent. And I feel like a lot of parents view their children as innocent and we forget that children are social actors and experience much the same as adults do. And then this has this

wall up so children feel like they can't speak about issues because they don't want to cause discomfort to their parents and also as well as a layer of maybe the backlash being punished or feeling shame from their parents but I think the point about children not wanting to cause their parents discomfort is really interesting I was wondering if anyone had any of that that came up in their interviews or their research

I think so, yeah. Because yes, a lot of children will guard their-- they don't want to. In fact, some really poignant examples of the first time a young person was received, unfortunately, like unsolicited,

sexual content and like they're like I was sitting you know beside my dad at my nan's house watching Pointless and you know I just didn't know what to do so like yeah that's sort of like you're exactly right sort of wanting to guard their

their parents from like the trauma of like realizing what's going on in the social media ecosphere and then sort of these journeys towards well actually then I ended up talking to my mom or talking to my auntie or talking to my older sister and you know getting those kind of generational supports but that's a really really interesting and good point yeah

Something that came up in our study is that teens felt they were mirroring their parents' behaviour. So if the parents were more open and progressive and receptive to discussions about sex, they felt more comfortable. Although there's a disclaimer to that, which I'll touch on. But teens where their parents didn't address any sexual topics, they didn't talk about porn, it was just not talked about. They would not even dream of going to their parents because they're mirroring their behaviours, right? They know instinctively they don't talk about sex, so I don't talk about sex with them.

And the disclaimer to the progressive parents is that there did seem to even with teens with progressive parents willing and receptive to talking about these topics.

there seemed to be this window of, I suppose, the onset of puberty where they were suddenly not receptive to having those discussions with their parents. So they were receptive up until a point of, I suppose, sexual awareness in a way. And then even as open and willing as their parents were in that sort of...the throes of puberty, they didn't want to have those discussions, even if their parents were very willing and at the door, almost too willing in some cases. So I don't know if that answers the question as well in terms of our data as well. Thanks.

Yes, and I'm going to wrap up very soon. Yes, and then you want to come back? Yes, okay. So in our study, we kind of asked them questions about when the first time maybe they heard about, because they kept on telling us about these, you know, messaging, the warning messages. And then we started asking, okay, when did you hear that the first time? And most of them would tell us that they were quite young, maybe, you know, 10 or 11 or something, and

when they first got the speech or they first saw kind of a video in school, which some others also discussed here, with the message that don't send nudes because then this and this will happen. And usually it was the girl who was at risk, of course, here. And often some of our participants talked about that

I'm one of those people who grew up in a family where I was warned early. My parents told me very early on that this was risky and so I don't do it. And we're kind of proud of that.

when kind of discussing these matters, it was very clear that the things that they had learned very early, so if you learn very early, this is really wrong if you do it, and then kind of that risk happens, or it actually turns into a harm, then it's kind of your fault, is how they interpret it. So kind of the shame of knowing I did something I knew I wasn't supposed to hinders them from then approaching their parents, even though their parents really meant well.

It hinders them from saying, OK, look, I did this, because the parents might say, well, I told you not to, why did you? I just wanted to see if there is a question online. Yes. There's quite a few questions online. Oh, I'm sorry, I thought I was looking at you. That's OK. I mean, they're mainly based around the themes of what interventions could be made. One question from Alice Joe from King's College says,

What are your perspectives on educational and cultural interventions needed to address the growing AI-enabled sexual abuse? Should sex talk be encouraged with LLMs like ChatGPT or should it be explained early on with children? And advice for parents around how to talk about healthy relationships and content online.

Thank you very much. You know, given the time, I think I'm going to give everyone one last word and take that as a kind of direction, if you'll forgive me. I think, yes, people would like to kind of know what would be your priority. I might only allow you one priority action. And I have in mind, just to frame it, how often our conversations are

begin with something in the Department of Media and Communications about something kind of media and digital, but actually where we have very quickly reached really is the difficulties of growing up

in a complex and challenging world where adults and children don't necessarily understand each other and schools are not properly resourced and yet we do have these kind of very commercial and in many ways almost weaponised kind of social media amplifying some of the problems. So I'm just curious where you would prioritise your one policy action and I think there are some people who might be listening.

able to do something shall I start with you and then we'll walk down and then we're going to everyone is invited to go up to the fifth floor for a drink and something and talk further

So given the current power dynamics in society, my main message would be to parents at this point, and I would say ignore the chatter, the fuss, the chaos, the crisis that covers digital parenting in the media.

The thing you need to do is not find out about every app that's ever existed, not put every filter in place that's ever been, not stop your child using every piece of technology that they've ever wanted to use. But what you should focus on is getting to know your child and feeling that you have created a position of trust where they can come to you.

This often happens in the younger years, but parents and children become more wary of each other as kids move towards teenage years. And that's when parents should feel even more confident and even more open, it seems to me.

kids really understand their parents are trying to do their best. And I just feel that kids have a huge amount of knowledge and wisdom that parents are trained not to give them credit for because they believe the scare stories in the media. So parents keep doing a really good job. Most of the time, most parents are getting it right. And if it's something that worries parents, the chances are they're doing it well.

If I have to pick one thing, there were quite a few questions online about intervention, so I think maybe I'll tackle that. And I talked about sexual shame earlier. And something we do as part of our sexological training is called a SAR, which is a sexual attitudes reassessment. And the idea behind that is you find where you're situated ideologically in terms of your attitudes, values and beliefs, and you have a challenge. And even for myself, I thought I was quite progressive and liberal, and I still found an area where I was, okay, this is where my boundaries sit.

And you know, a lot of people outside of sexology think, "Isn't that that course where you guys watch porn all day?" And that is sort of part of it, but the idea is through a desensitisation process so you can talk about these things. But I think some version of a mini SAR would be ideal to administer in an ideal world to educators, and maybe some mini form to parents as well because

their cultural beliefs about sex are being passed on inherently, whether they're talking about sex or not. And that can actually have quite damaging implications for people's sexuality into adulthood. So that would be my intervention is some kind of mini version of a SAR adopted for households or...

teaching spaces so that we can tackle these issues because I think that's a big part of the issue. Thank you. I agree. And I think I agree with the points that we've made in these talks. One thing that maybe we haven't talked as much about, which you made a point about as well, is we have to look to the companies, the big tech companies and their responsibilities and it's easy to put responsibilities, even when we talk to children, they look at...

who's closest to them. They look at their teachers, they look at their parents, maybe their local council or whatever. But at the end of the day, they are the ones who are creating

a platform creating designs which facilitate various forms of abuse and they're going under the radar and we're not regulating well enough. So I would say that's child rights by design. Very on message. Thank you. Jessica, you get the last word. I really agree with that. I just think actually it has to be multi-pronged.

It has to be parents. It has to be schools. It has to be, like, better regulation. Actually, you just can't throw your hands up off of them and just be like, oh, we can't regulate it. And, you know, the government. Hello? Okay, I'll say the government. The government should do something. Come on. Tax them. Do something. So...

No, I'm just ranting. But no, really a multi-pronged approach is really what is needed to actually actualise the child's rights perspective. And yeah, what a great conversation it's been. Very good. Thank you so much, everyone. And let me ask you to join me in thanking everyone for a very stimulating and provocative conversation. APPLAUSE

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