Sexting – the sending and receiving of nude pictures and sexually explicit text messages – is increasingly becoming normal among teenagers, who often don’t realise they may be acting illegally and could face police action, according to the government’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre.
The true scale of young people’s sexting activity is unclear, but Ceop is notified of a serious incident on average about once a day, with reports coming from schools, parents or pupils. All involve serious concerns about child protection.
Kate Burls, education team coordinator at Ceop, a command of the National Crime Agency, said: “Working with young people, we are finding that sexting increasingly feels like a norm in terms of behaviour in their peer group.”
The former secondary school teacher said: “There’s no one kind of sexting incident. In some incidents you might have clear elements of coercion and pressure and it may well be appropriate for a school to confiscate a phone because it may contain evidence of a criminal offence.”
In September, the legal risks were made clear when a 14-year-old boy was told his details would be held on a police database for 10 years for the crime of making and distributing an indecent image of a child. He had sent a naked image of himself to a classmate.
Authorities in the US are similarly concerned and last weekend claimed to have uncovered what was described as a “sexting ring” involving hundreds of explicit photographs of students at a Colorado high school, some of whom have been suspended and may face charges.
Many schools in the UK are tackling the issue by delivering lessons to pupils on the risks, both legal and emotional, of sending naked or near-naked images. According to one headteacher of a secondary school in south London, writing on his blog: “All schools have had to deal with the fallout from this at some point or other.”
In some cases girls fall victim to what they call “snaking” – a boy befriends them, leads them on and asks for a picture only to distribute it among his friends, and beyond.
In others, images are distributed far and wide One girl’s picture was being viewed by soldiers serving in Afghanistan, while in another serious case a 17-year-old boy was jailed for 12 months after demanding that two 14-year-olds send him indecent images of themselves on Snapchat.
At a college for 14- to 18-year-olds in Burnley, Lancashire, Simone Taylor from Brook, the UK’s largest sexual health charity, deliveried a session on sexting to a group of teenage girls. They listened as she told them that sending and distributing indecent pictures of anyone under 18 was illegal and could result in police action.
Teenagers, it seems, don’t use the word “sexting”, which the media favours, but refer instead to “nudes”, “nude selfies” or “dodgy pix”. The class of girls is small, and nearly all of them say they have been asked by boys to send a naked picture of themselves.
No one admits to having sent one, though in an earlier session for boys three own up to sending “dodgy pix” of themselves to girls. “I’ve done it once to my girlfriend, in the heat of the moment,” one boy confesses.
“It’s so common nowadays no one sees it as a bad thing any more, it happens so often,” said 15-year-old Ella. “But if you are one of the girls who don’t send them you are seen as frigid and scared. If you are one of the girls that do send them you end up being seen as one of the slags or sluts in the year.”
Year nine, when pupils are 13 and 14, is where it all begins. “Someone in my old school asked this girl for a picture,” said another girl. “He ended up sending it around the school, and she got badly bullied over it. They were making fun of her body.”
“Some girls send them for a laugh,” offers another girl. Others may feel flattered by the attention. “They say, ‘oh you’re so pretty’, then when you say no [to sending a picture], it’s like, ‘you’re a wuss, you’re a scaredy-cat, you’re an ugly slag anyway’.”
The boys tell of similar experiences. “When I was in year 11 a girl had sent an image to a lad. Within an hour it was all around the school,” said 18-year-old Tom. “Everyone had it on their phones. The teachers were running round trying to get people’s phones. She got harassed for it and called a slag. Lads see it as banter. When it happens in school they see it as a laugh.”
Tom described another incident when a boy who sent his picture to a girl found it had been shared around school. “When they first did it he didn’t mind. At first he was seen as ‘a big man’ – he’d sent it to a decent-looking girl. After a couple of weeks it started to bother him and he left.”
Some of the boys who took part in the Brook session felt it happened less than the media coverage would suggest. The girls felt it happened a lot; it was the snakingthat they really didn’t like.
When one teenage girl’s picture was shared after she sent it to a boy with whom she was in a long-distance relationship, her mother asked her why she’d sent it. “I thought we were in love,” she said. “I didn’t think he would do anything like that.”
Jules Hillier, Brook’s chief executive, fears sexting is being obsessed over by the media. “It is reported as though it were prevalent, as though every young person was doing it. It’s sensationalised and over-reported.
“We know of course that young people are using mobile devices the whole time. We know there’s a trend for sending pictures with sexual content, but the extent to which that’s happening is very difficult to fully understand.
“A recent reliable survey found that 12% of 11- to 16-year-olds have seen or received sexual messages online. That’s obviously quite a big minority, but it’s still very much the minority.
“We need to be helping young people understand some of the risks – helping them to be clear about what the law is. Whilst they quite often know that the age of consent is 16, they are not then aware they are still considered a minor if it comes to sending photos of themselves and would be in trouble for that kind of behaviour.
“It’s a nuanced ask for schools, for parents and society. The landscape is changing rapidly but young people’s coping mechanisms when it comes to online activity develop very quickly.”
According to Burls, the emphasis should be on supporting young people rather than criminalising them and on educating them before they make mistakes. “Certainly we believe the best way to keep children and young people safe from abuses and exploitation is to embed any stuff around staying safe online in a really strong personal, social, health and economic education programme.”
Ella in Burnley said it would be so much easier to be a teenage girl if sexting did not exist. Asked what advice she’d give parents of teenagers, she said: “Don’t buy your child a smartphone until they are 26.”
To other teenage girls coming under pressure to send nudes, she said: “Don’t do it. Go for a lad who takes you to Wetherspoon’s for a nice steak instead.”
Some names have been changed
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