Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

12.6.11 | Despite concerns that sexting would soon become more prevalent than note passing among school-age children, it appears that sending sexual images by phone or computer occurs less than people think.

That’s the conclusion of a new study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, that found 2.5 percent of youth “had appeared in or created nude or nearly nude pictures or videos.” The percentage is reduced to 1 percent, the study’s authors wrote, if the definition is further restricted to include only sexually explicit images (showing naked breasts, genitals, or bottoms)—images that could violate child pornography laws.

The study was based on detailed telephone interviews with 1,560 young internet users between the ages of 10 and 17. Of those, 7.1 percent said they had received nude or nearly nude images of others, while almost 6 percent reported receiving sexually explicit images. 

The numbers are lower than what previous studies have found, but those studies often included older teens and young adults among those surveyed, or included photos that might be considered racy but did not include nudity.

“The rate of youth exposure to sexting highlights a need to provide them with information about legal consequences of sexting and advice about what to do if they receive a sexting image,” the authors wrote in their conclusion. “However, the data suggest that appearing in, creating, or receiving sexual images is far from being a normative behavior for youth.”

“It only takes one or two cases to make people think this is very prevalent behavior,” Janis Wolak, one of the study’s authors and a senior researcher at the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, told The New York Times. “This has been reported as if it were something that everyone was doing, not just in the teen population, but in the young adult population. It’s really not the case.”

Pediatrics also published a separate study on Monday by three of the same authors on the number of teens arrested for sexting and the outcomes of cases handled by police.

Mail surveys were sent to 2,712 law enforcement agencies, and researchers conducted detailed telephone interviews with investigators about sexting cases handled by police during 2008 and 2009. The cases involved “youth-produced sexual images” that would be considered child pornography under relevant statutes. Arrest was not typical if no adults were involved.

Dr. Victor Strasburger, an adolescent medicine expert at the University of New Mexico, told the Washington Post that parents, schools and law enforcement authorities “need to understand that teenagers are neurologically programmed to do dumb things.”

Instead of prosecution, there needs to be more emphasis on education. Kids, Strasburger said, need to be told “that when you put things online and even when you send them via cellphone, they’re potentially there forever.”

Plus: For a look at the cultural context and legal issues surrounding sexting, read this post, which also includes links to academic research and reports. For additional analysis, here’s danah boyd’s notes for a talk she gave this year on “Teen Sexting and Its Impact on the Tech Industry.” The Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative, part of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, released this paper, “Sexting: Youth Practices and Legal Implications,” in June.

And in related news, RiFFs, the new monthly interview series from the Digital Media & Learning Research Hub, has published a Q&A with researcher Sonia Livingstone, who, along with members of the EU Kids Online Network, released a study that “exposes the top ten myths of internet safety for children to demonstrate how people’s knowledge of online dangers for internet users ages 9-16 is out of date.” The study is based on face-to-face interviews with 25,000 European children and their parents across 25 countries. Learn more about her research at EU Kids Online.