“Sexting” Recognising and responding to an emerging issue
By Gareth Cheesman
In Autumn 2010 I became increasing aware of the issue that the media titles “sexting”. The press coverage of this issue has been growing, sensationalising and focused on celebrity exposures. Under the media hype I saw a worrying core issue of the way current technology could be employed in an updated form of “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours”. Specifically I was worried about the potential long term consequences because of the digital nature of the images.
From my personal concerns I decided to do some informal research with local teachers and young people about if they thought “sexting” was an issue in their communities. Teachers in local schools all confirmed that they have already had to deal with some incidents of naked picture messaging. Young people in community youth clubs all confirmed that they had known peers who share naked or provocative images with people. Both these sources confirming the relevancy of the issue so I looked to do some more research about what materials already existed. Most articles I found online focused on the legal consequences, For example http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/technology/newsid_8181000/8181443.stm
Whilst I obviously agree the legal consequences are very important I saw a hole in the information being presented, few people seemed to focus on the emotional and social consequences, so I set out to write some material that would look at the legal, emotional and social consequences.
After doing this research I created a lesson on the issue of sexting, (which is publically available on my personal website www.blindfishideas.com). One of the local high schools agreed to trial this lesson with a year 10 year group (aged 14-15). With these 6 classes (128 students) we did monitoring before and after the lesson to try and measure what impact the lesson had. We asked these two questions. The tables below show the results.
- Do you believe a boyfriend or girlfriend sending an explicit picture of themselves to their partner is dangerous?
- Could you list 3 possible consequences of sending a sext?
After the initial success of meeting the lessons aims we reviewed and improved the lessons structure with reference to feedback from teaching staff.
This improved lesson was then offered to a second local high school, again for the year 10 age group. After the lessons for the year 10 group had been confirmed a young person in a local community youth group we also work with indicated that “sexting” was an issue at the moment for a group of students in her year. She was at the school we had just arranged for year 10 lessons with but she was in year 9. We spoke to the school about this issue and it was decided that along with following up the specific issue with individuals it would be helpful to have the “sexting” lesson with the year 9 age group as well. In total this meant delivering the lesson to 235 students aged 13-15. It was great that our team, by working in both local schools and community youth clubs, was able to act in such a responsive way to a current issue.
We repeated the same monitoring as in the first schools and recorded the same improvement in both knowledge and attitude as a result of the lesson. From conversation at the first school an element of intentional risk taking was identified. Alongside our existing monitoring we wanted to do some specific research into the possibility of intentional risk taking. By use of a simple questionnaire we produced the following data. More details of this research can be found at http://www.esteemresourcenetwork.org/risk-taking-behaviour-sexting
Whilst it is very reassuring that the vast majority know how to be safe and have not taken risk with images it is worrying that 10% claim to know how to be safe but admit to taking risks. In light of this study we have decided to update our “sexting” lesson again. Our aim is to spend more time focusing on the motives for asking and sending naked or provocative images. We hope that by raising awareness of the motives we may encourage less people to take this risk.
As with all our work we hope young people will make intelligent choices about their sexual behaviour, this requires us educators to both inform student with relevant information and encourage the development of positive attitudes and useful skills. This large aim requires us to quickly recognise and respond to emerging issues of sexual health and wellbeing
The delivery, review and development of the material is ongoing.