The Nature of Sexting and Preventing Methods

Sexting - what it is? There are both positive and negative perspectives of sexting in several studies and within a sexting essay studies are reviewed. Inevitably, sexting comes along with risks whereas, sexting is a normal way of sexual expression. Looking at the trends in the literature of sexting, it has gendered problems. For example, girls are more vulnerable to be targeted for aggression and violence of sexting, compared to boys, while boys are rather proud of experiencing sexting because they regard doing sexting as being cooler among their groups. In terms of gaps of sexting in interviews, investigating accurate figures of the prevalence of sexting is challenging because respondents may be affected by other factors such as social desirability or response biases. Therefore, people tend to hesitate to say the truth during an interview, especially adults’ groups.

According to McCormack and Wignall, pornography became generalised as a young men’s hobby nowadays regardless of serious negative impacts against women. Furthermore, ‘Young people are depicted as naive and ignorant in sending suggestive or nude images, with no awareness of potential negative repercussions in the present or the future’. Considering these studies, sexual cultures on the Internet became common to young people in the 21st century and it is no longer classified as errant behaviours.

Roberts and Ravn tried to define what is sexting in a sociological way. So, they concentrated on remarkable social change, by using social practice theory because young people are affected by social change to the understanding of sexuality and sexual culture. Social practice theory (SPT) explains how young men do conceptualise and practice of sexting. However, SPT has two limitations for the explanation of sexting, which are methodological and analytical.

Researchers carried out interviews with 37 undergraduate men students in two universities located in Australia. Interviewees were grouped with three to six people to make 10 groups, including one gay-men group. The sexual questions are sensitive, so participants may feel uneasy to answer the truth, so researchers allowed each group to get together with participants who already knew well each other for creating a comfortable atmosphere. The interviews usually were lasted for about 1 hour and 35 minutes, by recording what respondents were saying and following traditional ethical standards. The majority of the interviewees were more talking about ‘when’, ‘who with’ and ‘how’ of sexting than whether to experience with sexting or not. Hence, SPT not only framed key points that are the definition, methods, and reasons of sexting but it also clarified what is an ‘overstep the line’ of sexting and an adequate consent of sexting.

The materiality of sexting showed different meanings. Sexting has changed its form from text-based exchanges to visual items such as photographs and videos as technology has developed rapidly. Participants gave many meanings of sexting through the interviews. Two core meanings are that sexting is either for consolidation of relationship or having sex. Mutuality is an essential factor of sexting whatever the reasons are because it is reactions someone makes according to the receiver’s reaction and it is reflected by consent and confidence. Asking for consent is the only way as distinct from harassment. Hence, consent is necessary before sexting, even though it could spoil the mood. Noticing the line of sexting is required tacit knowledge such as ‘socially aware’ which is not an innate quality.

As most of the participants, except for one Chinese, are Westerners so they would have more western concepts of sexting, so the range of results is limited to definitions. However, being a good sexter with mutuality and consent was mentioned more than three times, so people may completely understand what authors want to emphasise. By giving some transcripts of participants’ interviews, it helps to get diverse perspectives of sexting. Lastly, the article is readable because it does not have many jargons.

Albury and Crawford’s study investigated how understandings of sexting should be taken into account by teenagers. The article deemed the social positions of sexting as either risky or acceptable. Sexting could lead to harassment, flirting or bullying because any restrict legal or policy of teen sexting has not set up at least in Australia. As a result, the authors stressed on consent. However, it does not mean that sexting must be prohibited because nowadays sharing their sexual images between friends or couples is normal behaviours and self-representations.

This article is easier to understand, compared to the previous one for it is not based on any social theory such as SPT, and it brought many case studies to explain results. It seems more academic than the first article because of several numeric data of sexting figures. However, the structure of the conclusion should be rewritten as it introduced new content that had not been mentioned before.

The Temple et al investigated around 950 students about measuring sexting, dating and sexual behaviours with two main aims. The two goals of the research are to figure out the prevalence and to describe the nature of sexting. Another is to find out correlations between sexting and sexual behaviours. Researchers questioned participants about experiences of sexting if they have, participants were asked again whether they have been bothered by sexting or not. Figure 1 illustrated that women are at risk of being bothered by sext, and the number of times an older group sexting is much higher than younger people groups. One of the limitations of the research is that it cannot know whether or not sexting engages in sexual behaviour or sexting behaviour.

There are vague answer forms which are ‘not at all’, ‘a little’ or ‘a lot’; ‘not at all’, ‘a little’ or ‘a lot’ and so on. Those answer formats make people get difficulties to analyse exact times. Understanding all the tables is hard because of mathematical terminology. However, this qualitative research gives the most abundant information than others, by giving one bar graph and three statistics and using diverse ranges of the sample.

To end up this essay, preventing cultural and social harms of teen sexting is required the perspective of sexting by young people. The author’s view of sexting is pessimistic as it indicated some negative consequences of sexting, which mentioned above. This research was also conducted in Australia with young people. The method is complicated to carry out and understand for it used a mixed way. However, a number of quotations and one summary were in the Results sector, so it helped to easily understand.

References

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• Albury, K., Carwford, K., Byron P,. et al (2013) Young People and Sexting in Australia: Ethics, Representation and the Law, Sydney: UNSW
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• Madigan, S., Ly, A., Van Ouytsel, J., et al (2018) Prevalence of multiple forms of sexting behaviour among youth: A systematic review and meta-analysis, Pediatrics, 172, pp. 327-335
• McCormack, M., Wignall, L (2017) Enjoyment, exploration and education: Understanding the consumption of pornography among young men with non-exclusive sexual orientations. Sociology, 51(5), pp. 975-991
• Mitchell, KJ., Frinkelhor, D,. Jones LM, et al. (2012) Prevalence and characteristics of youth sexting: A national study. Pediatrics 129, pp. 13-20
• Roverts, S,. Ravn, S (2019) Towards a Sociological Understanding of Sexting as a Social Practice: A Case Study of University Undergraduate. Sociology, 1(1), pp. 1- 17. Available from: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0038038519864239 [Accessed 4 November 2019].
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• Walker, S (2011) Sexting and Young people: Expert’s views. Youth Studies Australia. 30 (4), pp. 8-16