Preventing image-based sexual coercion, harassment and abuse among teenagers: Girls deconstruct sexting-related harm prevention messages

ABSTRACT

This paper explores teenage girls’ responses to general advice, and formal prevention messages, designed to reduce sexting-related risk and prevent harm. We conducted workshops with seven groups of girls (28 in total), aged 16–17 years, in a New Zealand city. Each group participated in a series of three workshop sessions. Drawing on a Freirean ‘problem-posing’ approach, we designed the workshops as spaces in which girls were invited to observe and critically discuss norms related to sharing nudes as well as harm prevention messages. Girls noticed the problematic gender and sexual politics that shape abstinence-based models that target girls (implicitly) to not send nudes, but which leave boys who distribute or otherwise misuse them out of the picture. Participants navigated a careful path between attending to risk and protection on the one hand, and endorsing their right to freedom of expression on the other. We argue for a subtle, but significant, shift away from a focus on sexting safety to a focus on the prevention of image-based sexual coercion, harassment and abuse. This reframing would help to direct prevention efforts to the gendered drivers and dynamics of harm perpetration, and the ways in which they are problematically socially ignored or condoned.

KEYWORDS:

• Image-based sexual abuse prevention
• Freire
• gender
• girls
• sexual harassment

Acknowledgments

We thank the students who participated in this study, and especially those members of the School’s feminist group for helping finesse its design and advising us on recruitment. We are grateful to the School for supporting and facilitating this research and key staff who helped set the project up. We thank Helen Madden, Angela Carr, Elena Zubielevitch, Madhavi Manchi and Valerie Chang for research assistance and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. ‘Nudes’ was the term girls used to refer to images that are involve ‘at least some degree of semi-nakedness and could be interpreted as sexually suggestive’ (Thorburn et al. 2021, 4); the images themselves are not necessarily literally nude.

2. The group and the girls in it are not identified due to confidentiality considerations and the preference of the School.

3. Or New Zealand European. (Pākehā refers to New Zealanders of European descent.)

4. It is interesting to observe how 50 Shades of Grey can operate as a point of reference for this kind of dynamic even for those who have never read or seen it:

Bianca: So you’ve seen 50 Shades of Grey? (laughs)

Jane: No (everyone laughing). Isn’t that like R18.

5. ‘Except when they cry they can’t cry’ (Jane, G2-W3).

6. Participants sometimes drew parallels with the ways girls continue to be held responsible for protecting themselves from rape, suggesting that instead the prevention lens should be on men and boys:

Yeah like you’re [girls] expected to make sure that it doesn’t happen to you like take all these precautions so you don’t get raped instead of saying hey guys don’t rape girls you know like that’s like the problem I think. (Abbey, G4-W1)

it’s sort of like it’s the same for [the] rape thing, like teaching girls not to wear certain things instead of teaching the boys just not to rape in the first place (Clare, G3-W2).

7. Sending unsolicited ‘dick pics’, or what McGlynn and Johnson (2021) refer to as ‘cyberflashing’, is, by contrast a form of harassment or abuse.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by the Marsden Fund Council from Government funding managed by Royal Society Te Apārangi (11-UOA-166).