‘If someone’s freaky, everyone loves it. It’s all about the drama’: young women’s responses and reactions to image based sexual abuse of other young women

ABSTRACT

The social construction of gender and sexuality is compounded by neoliberalist, individualistic and competitive notions of choice and empowerment. This study draws on small friendship group interviews with 106 self-selecting young people, aged 12–16, in three schools in Aotearoa New Zealand. Young women live their digital sexual lives in a context characterized by feelings of powerlessness. This sense of powerlessness was somewhat reduced through making connections. Responding to other women’s non-consensually shared images with horizontal hostility is one manifestation. Doing so allowed girls to understand what is sexually permissible, as well as maintaining their friendships through connection. Similar to creating and consensually sharing intimate images as a means of making sexual relationships, this process of othering victims to conserve friendships reproduces existing inequalities.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexting
• image based sexual abuse
• rape culture
• young women
• feminism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Faculty Staff Development Grant [3710641].

Notes on contributors

Claire Meehan

Dr Claire Meehan is a Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Auckland. Her research interests are in the field of digital sexuality, pornography, gender and education. She is currently involved in several research projects, working with young people in Aotearoa New Zealand to gain insights and understandings into their digital sexual lives.