The Washington Post includes an article: "What parents are getting wrong about teens and sexting.”
Here are some excerpts:
Sexting – the digital sharing of sexually explicit texts and images – has become inextricably woven into the culture of adolescent life, growing ever more common and complex in recent years. Nevertheless, many parents take the simplistic approach of telling their teens, “Just say no.”
That’s a mistake, according to Carrie James and Emily Weinstein, Harvard researchers and co-authors of “Behind Their Screens: What Teens Are Facing (and Adults Are Missing).” “Saying ‘Just don’t sext’ can be really a conversation ender,” James said. And when it comes to sending nudes there is plenty for teens and parents to talk about. In their research, she and Weinstein found that teens sext for many reasons, some of which might not have occurred to adults, and that girls are coming up with sophisticated strategies to discourage the leaking of nude images.
“One of the things that we found in our conversations with teens and in our research is that so many of the dilemmas around sexting are so thorny and complicated,” said Weinstein, who, along with James, is a researcher for Harvard’s Project Zero, which explores topics in education. “If we do not show up for these conversations with teens, we are not equipping them to navigate those situations and the pressures they’re facing.”
According to a 2018 meta-analysis of research done before June 2016, about 15 percent of teens had sent a sext, while 27 percent had received one and 12 percent had forwarded one without consent. A 2021 meta-analysis of studies between 2016 and early 2020 found that 19 percent of teens had sent a sext, 35 percent had received one and 15 percent had forwarded one without consent.
Both analyses, however, looked at studies done before the pandemic — and lockdowns reportedly sparked an increase in sexting between teens.
In fact, sexting among adolescents has become such a concern in some quarters, that experts have advocated including it in sex education curriculums, decriminalizing consensual sexting between teens, and teaching “safe sexting,” which would include advice such as deleting metadata, never including one’s face, identifiable body features such as birthmarks, or jewelry in a photo; and using a plain background.
Some of the girls Weinstein and James talked to in teen advisory groups had devised their own elaborate procedures to reduce the chances that nude photos of them would be leaked by recipients. For example, they would superimpose watermarks on the images with the name of the boy they were sending the photos. Or, instead of sending a nude, they might send a Google image, while also screenshotting the search result so they could forward it as proof that the body in the photo wasn’t theirs, if it was passed along.
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