A panel discussion on teen sexting, held Sept. 25, addressed the issues of double standards, consent, privacy, and education.
The panel discussion, entitled “Teenage Sexting: Digital Cultures, Digital Economies and Crime Control” was led by professors Jessica Ringrose from the University of London, Amy Adele Hasinoff from McGill University, and Carleton’s Lara Karaian.
Ringrose, who studied teenage sexting over Blackberry messenger and Facebook, focused on the qualitative analysis of sexting.
She identified the main types of sexting as bare or sexually explicit photographs and broadcast PIN messages over Blackberry Messenger (BBM). She said once they add girls on BBM, boys would ask the girls for sexual favours and nude photographs.
Ringrose noted that it is typical for a boy to solicit oral sex from a girl, but unthinkable for a girl to do the same. This double standard also applied to pictures posted on Facebook, where girls were shamed for posting images of their body, but boys were rewarded with “likes.”
From a media studies and legal perspective, Hasinoff advocated a consent-based approach to determining the legality of such sexual images.
Hasinoff said criminalizing consensual teen sexuality lends itself to unjust results, citing an example of a 19-year-old woman sent to jail for having nude pictures of her consenting, 16-year-old girlfriend.
“The common assumption is that consent is either irrelevant or unclear,” she said.
“This is the kind of discourse that has damaging effects.”
She said the focus should not be to try to prevent sexting, but rather to reduce the abusive uses of the resulting media.
“Privacy is not dead,” she said, adding that with copyright and privacy laws as they stand, the best way to get a nude picture that you took yourself off the Internet is to make a copyright claim.
The current structure of media law is in the interest of the digital economy and media companies, not users, Hasinoff said.
User content is, however, being watched.
The Canadian Center for Child Protection runs programs like Cybertip.ca, a national tip-line for child pornography, trying to educate youth about underage sexting, or what Karaian called “the new, lesser known sex offender.”
However, the online program may not be the best for its intended audience, according to Karaian.
Karaian said the current “respect yourself” campaign run by cybertip.ca is well intentioned, but perpetuates race and class sex norms of who is or is not a victim.
Showing pictures of the site’s campaigns, she noted the over over-representation of white girls, which suggests whiteness as a marker of sexual purity, and associates racialized, poor and queer women with promiscuity.
The rhetoric undermines some girls’ credibility as a victim, she said.
“I would love to see pleasure as a discourse be put back into sexual education,” Karaian said. “Sometimes a girl is hot for something and wants to show it!”
During the question and answer period, all three advocated a new approach to sexting, emphasizing gender equality and trying to reduce the abuses rather than prevent it altogether.
“People are doing this, the question is how to reduce the potential for harm,” Hasinoff said.
Reflecting on campus events after the event, Karaian said, “I think Consent is Sexy Week is a wonderful thing, because consent is sexy.”
“I think that it’s really important to have support services for students on campus,” Karaian said.
“There are real benefits to having the student-peer support networks.”
This event, she said, was really provocative.
“It has us thinking through some really critical issues about how best to respond to teenage sexuality,” she said. “It’s about time girls aren’t policing the borders of sexuality the same way as they’ve had to in the past.”
“It’s refreshing to be able to have ‘yes’ on the table.”
