‘Keep your private stuff private!’: mitigating young people’s intimate exchanges online

ABSTRACT

This article explores Finnish regulatory authorities’ attempts to mitigate young people’s participation in mediated sexuality. Previous studies have argued that both attempted regulation and education about media and sexuality are often out of touch with many adolescents’ lives. This study uses a Foucauldian inspired critical investigative method to unpack the pedagogical messages that frame official statements and the approaches used by Finnish authorities to regulate mediated sexual exchanges. Focusing on the uses of shame as an ongoing pedagogical strategy, the article reveals the limits of social policing. It also sheds light on alternative possibilities and their implications for different aspects of mediated sexuality (autonomy, privacy and consent among other things) that are currently effaced by the regulatory discourse deployed by the Finnish Police Force.

KEYWORDS:

• Young people
• mediated sexuality
• internet safety
• shame
• sexual rights

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

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

Notes

1. Europol currently recommends that the term ‘sextortion’ should no longer be used as ‘it does not convey that the act in question involves the sexual abuse and exploitation of a child, with extremely serious consequences for the victim’ (Europol 2020). Instead, Europol proposes the use of the expression, ‘online sexual coercion and extortion of children’. However, it is important to note that any kind of online sexual coercion and extortion affects adults and minors alike.

2. I understand policies as directions, guidelines, principles, rules, regulations and laws and principles that guide our actions. Following Devon Dodd and Hébert-Boyd’s (2000, 1) formulation, I understand policy as ‘[a] plan of action agreed to by a group of people with the power to carry it out and enforce it.’ For example, information, education, guidance and awareness-raising are powerful policy tools.

3. Context collapse describes the effects of social media, referring to the infinite online audiences possible as opposed to the limited groups a person interacts with. In social media, people may struggle to limit posts and content relevant to subsets of a network (e.g. some relationship moments may be more appropriate to family and close friends than colleagues at work).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Strategic Research Council at the Academy of Finland.