Teen sexting is an overblown moral panic, according to a new study | Hacker News Reader

Teen sexting is an overblown moral panic, according to a new study

technologyreview.com

56 pointscoloneltcb93 comments

>About 14% of middle and high school students reported getting a sexually explicit image from someone they were dating, while 11% said they sent one. Around 14% of respondents said they had gotten a sexually explicit image from someone they weren’t romantically involved with.

It's interesting how facts are used. The above 14% statistics are presented as a way of saying that there's not really a problem. After all, if only 1 in 7 kids is sending explicit imagery, it's not a big problem, right?

Putting it another way would be that 1 in 7 teens commits felony possession or distribution of child porn. That's how law enforcement views it in some states!

My son is 11, and we haven't broached this specific topic, but we do consistently remind him that he should treat any electronic communication as if he expected it to become public.

Am I the only one who sees this as kids today using the iPhone for the same thing we used to use the Polaroid for?

The technology has changed, but adolescent behavior hasn't.

A 4" square blurry Polaroid picture that can be shown to a select few friends and eventually lost or destroyed has nothing to do with a high resolution image that is trivially forwarded to the entire school by the recipient, acquired via hacking or social engineering, and can be manipulated with photoshop.

This thing that the doer perceives as harmless could be harmful. How will you know it's harmful? Because we arrest you for doing it! That's how you know it's harmful, because of the consequences we impose.

A polaroid, or the artful b&w 10x8 developed in photography class can just as easily be passed round half a school in one break or lunch time, or left on teacher's desk. Or sent in to a 1990s Reader's Wives magazine, then publication would have come down to whether they looked school age or not.

That it can spread wider, go viral, or be manipulated is a case against any electronic communication in place of paper or film photography. The choice to send it further is the problem not the medium.

Right, but every student getting a glimpse of it as it goes by is completely different from everyone having the full-fidelity copy on their device permanently. And a magazine's editorial board being the gatekeeper on wide distribution is completely different from anyone who has it being able to pull the trigger at any time.

If you really think these are in any way the same, you'll be shocked to hear what record companies thought about Napster in the early 2000s. Turns out sharing a digital file and sharing/copying a physical artifact are not even remotely the same. As tech people, we don't get to just wash our hands of these consequences and say that it's down to individual human choices any more than car companies can avoid building in safety features by saying they'd be unnecessary if only people were better drivers.

The people who wrote those laws need a stern talking to. They don't even seem to consider that some teenager could text them a photo of themselves, call the cops, and get them arrested for child pornography. Heck, they could send them a text talking about doing something with them and have the same happen in some states. The laws are exceedingly over-broad.

The people who wrote those laws are in a care home or dead. The people who haven't bothered to update them need to be talked to.

I was always puzzled by how laws that treat cases where the same person is both victim and culprit for the very same thing work. Is a failed suicide treated as attempted murder?

It's prosecutors who choose vases to prosecute. Usually prudish, slut-shaming, patriarchal, myaogynistic prosecutors.

The problem is that there will _always_ be prosecutors that abuse their power. It's the nature of people. It just so happens that certain professions abusing their power are far more devastating to the people they impact (lawyers, police, etc). As such, we should be making laws that are harder for them to abuse. We have many "we'll give them more power, so they can use it where needed and just not abuse it" laws that constantly get abused.

Perhaps our prioritization of the creation of tools which enable us to share all of our thoughts and experiences will force us to reflect on our taboos as they become increasingly public. I for one, hope that people begin to realize that these taboos are not that infrequent, nor are they particularly harmful.

Really even if teen sexting was ubiquitous it would still be an overblown moral panic as the law continues to insist on things which just aren't true - like it makes any sense to have the victim and victimizer be the same person.

I am sure everyone who grew up with the internet knows the 18+ restriction is a joke, widely flouted, and there were no benefits from actually obeying it but it is taboo to suggest considering changes as most would rather not think about that subject at all and are suspicious of those who do. And those who grew up before likely knew of secret stashes or "poor man's alternatives".

Any member of Congress who proposes reform would fear torpedoing their reputation.

The big risk of sexting seems to be idiot prosecutors going after kids for it being technically production and distribution of child pornography, leading to cases where the victims are also the perpetrators.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/juvenile-justice/minnesota-prosecu...

It becomes particularly baffling that you can be old enough to consent to sex in some states, but not old enough to consent to a naked selfie.

https://lacrossetribune.com/news/sexting-makes-minors-simult...

> Other surprises:

> Teens who identified as not straight in the survey were almost twice as likely to engage in sexting as their heterosexual counterparts.

This shouldn't have been called a surprise, and should have been broken down by gender. Gay men indulge in much more sexual behavior than straight men do, because they can. Lesbians are not known for this.

The study intentionally threw this data away:

> The clear majority of the sample said they were heterosexual (92.8%), while 0.7% said they were lesbian, 0.5% said they were gay, 2.8% said they were bisexual, 2.3% said they were questioning, and the remaining 0.9% selected “other” as a response choice. These responses were dichotomized where 1 = heterosexual and 2 = non-heterosexual.

This is a bit of a controversial comment, but I'll try to keep it objective.

I think part of this might be cultural? Maybe there's something about the "gay subculture" that encourages this? I'm no expert; some one more involved might be able to comment, but that's the external perception, any way.

I think the other part might be that the type of youth who "experiment" might have more promiscuous tendencies, leading to a higher incidence.

Perhaps there is a difference. Why is it worth looking into?

Why do you use a loaded word like "promiscuous" instead of plain "sexually active"?

If a study says something is overblown, check to see if it provides a correct level of blown-ness or a threshold for something to be a reasonable moral panic. If not, they haven't provided a falsifiable hypothesis.

In this case, they have a survey with numbers of how many teens sext. What numbers would have resulted in a different conclusion?

To me, "18% of 15-year-olds reporting that they sext" seems like a lot of people doing something extremely dangerous.

The official press release is even worse about this. It leads off with "The good news is that adolescent "sexting" is not at epidemic levels as reported in some media headlines".

18% is epidemic levels.

Also of interest in the press release:

> Among those students who were asked to send a sext by someone who was not a current romantic partner, only 43 percent complied.

Assuming that's 43% of the people who admit to participating in sexting in the first place... this still seems shockingly high. "Only" 43 percent?

press release: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-07/fau-nso07171...

SciHub: http://sci-hub.tw/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/...

Is Sci-Hub actually expected to work on mobile? It seems to just redirect to localhost.

The second link was malformed. Here is a working version: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-019-1449-y

No, the second link was not malformed. It works and it is like that intentionally.

My link shows the paper. Your link will sell the paper for $40.

Sorry! Thanks for the correction.

Second link should be https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-019-1449-y

What is extremely dangerous about sexting? Honest question.

As a parent, I feel that I have some responsibility to provide my daughters with the best life outcome possible.

Examples of failed life outcomes would be drug addiction, poverty, suicide, or dying alone with their cats. There are many more.

In general, unrestrained sexual behavior tend to be bad for your odds ratio. That's not even getting to positive life outcomes, which involve developing fully as a human being, and with full and deep relationships to the other human beings around you. Unrestrained sexual behavior tends to be bad for this too.

In case you've ever wondered, this is also why sex on television is so much worse than violence on television. Seeing a murder on television doesn't really alter my children's odds ratio for becoming a violent criminal too much. But seeing a lot of sex on television makes it much more likely that they'll take sex less seriously than is good for them.

> In general, unrestrained sexual behavior tend to be bad for your odds ratio.

On the other hand, it's great at avoiding the "dying alone with your cats" failure mode.

I've heard of fat shaming, and sex shaming, but cat shaming? Let people like their animals, damn it!

> On the other hand, it's great at avoiding the "dying alone with your cats" failure mode.

For a woman? You really think so? My impression has been that unstable relationships tend to make stable pair bonds far less likely in the future (for men too, but not quite as starkly). Further, women have a much easier time forming lifelong bonds in their 20s and early 30s than in their 40s and 50s (men too, but the effect is not as stark).

In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that if someone really wanted to maximize their chances of dying alone, unstable sexual relationships throughout their peak reproductive years is by far the best method.

> I'd even go so far as to say that if someone really wanted to maximize their chances of dying alone, unstable sexual relationships throughout their peak reproductive years is by far the best method.

Not even close. Unstable sexual relationships through the peak reproductive years mean you're likely to end up with children.

That has not really been the case ever since the advent of modern birth control.

It's still the case now. There's a very large subpopulation who aren't really capable of using birth control effectively.

Can you be more detailed about this subpopulation?

Sure thing. From Planned Parenthood:

> If you use condoms perfectly every single time you have sex, they’re 98% effective at preventing pregnancy. But people aren’t perfect, so in real life condoms are about 85% effective — that means about 15 out of 100 people who use condoms as their only birth control method will get pregnant each year.

( https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/birth-control/condom... )

This applies to all forms of active birth control, and is the major reason people push for passive forms such as IUDs and long-term implants.

So by "very large subpopulation who aren't really capable of using birth control effectively", what you meant to say that "people who report using condoms alone for birth control only have an 85% success rate?" Which in turn you are using to prove that "unstable sexual relationships through the peak reproductive years mean you're likely to end up with children"?

I think that you may wish to reinvestigate your original point.

It gets more complicated once you statify by age or income. Birth control is not free, intoxicants and general carefreeness limit how successfully birth control measures are applied.

Those are valid concerns, but I'm not convinced that sexual behavior is causative of bad life outcomes. It seems plausible to me that unhealthy sexual behavior and bad life outcomes have a common cause. I don't think the evidence is strong enough to call sexting extremely dangerous.

Do you think that it's more or less dangerous than occasionally drinking some beer while underage?

Parent poster clearly said “unrestrained sexual behavior”, which can damage any social unit. For example, you may be less than thrilled if your partner was sexting without your knowledge. The brain of a teenager isn’t fully formed, which makes the situation more dire.

When you send an image of yourself to someone, you run the risk of that image, with evidence of it being you, coming back to damage you socially. When you receive such an image knowingly, you are at risk for prosecution of child pornography. Neither is a risk that an adolescent is deemed capably mature of weighing. Very few kids are dying of alcohol poisoning due to beer. Drinking beer and driving IS a serious concern.

Why then we don't have this 'epidemic' in Europe where sex on tv isn't seen as a big boogie man. Where you can easily go places where kids will see adults of the opposite sex naked (saunas and gyms).?

I don't understand why you think seeing violence on tv (teen gangs beating a kid for his sneakers or whatever) won't affect your daughter, but seeing a couple have sex (not porn, just an overview of a sexual act) can corrupt her!

Isn't the EU-28 fertility rate only 1.58? That's actually population crash levels. You do, in fact, have a great epidemic of people who are going to die alone.

It's only a crash because we say it is.

What if it's a healthy reaction to bad conditions or overpopulation? Now note the child bearing rates in second degree immigrants (naturalized) to see how true it is. Do you consider that a crash of their population? A crash is when population actually shrinks which it has not to date. It's stabilizing thus far.

The more important crash part is of the ill-conceived social and capital programmes expecting forever exponential growth. Guess what, that's wrong.

My "sexual behavior" is pretty "unrestrained" (in the sense that I don't believe in exclusivity) and yet I have deep and fulfilling relationships with people I love. Society can be better.

> dying alone with their cats.

Wow I find this very condescending. What is wrong with living alone? What if your children are asexual and don't want to have partners?

You don't even have to be asexual to want to be single. Simply having a demanding career is enough (along with many other things).

Well sure but my point is there are people, like me, with no sexual or romantic interest in people so even if they have nothing else to do, they by default do not want to have a partner. Saying "I wish my children won't be a cat lady" sounds to me like "I wish my children won't be gay". I hope someone will write a constructive comment so that I can understand why I'm being downvoted.

I don't think it is condescending. He definitely has a point and it is not something one would want for ones' child. It is not what one hopes for.

Overzealous prosecution. Since prosecutors are local this kind of thing mostly happens to people who have low status in the community or when your daddy is on the wrong side of the local police chief (or other person with these kind of connections).

The legal framework under which this amounts to creating and distributing child pornography.

It's considered child pornography in many jurisdictions, and therefore legally dangerous. I think just that would be a sufficient answer.

It's associated with greater promiscuity, risking pregnancy and STDs and therefore medically dangerous. (And depending on your beliefs, morally dangerous.)

It's susceptible to catfishing and therefore physically dangerous.

If leaked, it can be damaging to reputation and esteem and therefore socially and mentally dangerous.

This is the version of "be careful with what you post online", but extreme and with minors.

Plenty of people have cited overzealous prosecution, which is awful but fortunately rare. The more likely risk is that the image could be redistributed without your permission, either in the form of "revenge porn" or from someone taking your phone and copying the image (think during an electronic border search, or the more banal case of lending your phone to someone else and they see something they shouldn't have.) If those images get out, you're in a situation where your nudes are floating around the internet forever.

Sure, but we’ve manufactured the danger here. There’s no inherent danger. Doing backflips off a rock is dangerous, but having your photos on the Internet only hurts you because we choose to have it hurt people. That’s completely changeable. In fact, I think we could stop that being ‘dangerous’ in a generation.

> having your photos on the Internet only hurts you because we choose to have it hurt people. That’s completely changeable.

I think you are much too casually regarding human nature and millennia of human interactions.

And I think you underestimate the degree to which social actions are mutable. Street parking, diamond engagement rings, acceptance of homosexuality, “miscegenation”, drug use, alcohol use: these are all things that became default culture within a generation in many places.

Human nature is a rapidly alterable thing. Things that were unheard of become acceptable very fast with shifts in society.

Then put your money where your mouth is, and post your nudes to some public forums with your name attached to it. Should be easy if it's no big deal, right?

I feel that would prove nothing but perhaps you could tell me what you think I'm saying so I can see if maybe I'm misunderstanding you now or if I didn't put across what I meant clearly earlier.

Just to short-circuit some things:

* I think we can change attitudes within a generation where having your nudes online isn't harmful

* I think being harmful is different from being embarrassed. For instance, I'd be embarrassed if I had my fly open all day or I had a sticker on the shirt I was wearing but it wouldn't be dangerous.

Or perhaps talk to people and raise kids in such a way that there's not tabu around other people's nudity? That may have more effect. More nudity on the internet will change much less, certainly.

How does the way I raise my children keep other people from harassing and ostracizing them?

Human nature? Cultural or regional or religious artifact, maybe.

Ever seen some tribal communities (in hotter climates), walking around half or naked naked all day. They are not human?

There are a number of non-random reasons humans wear clothes. Climate is only one. http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160919-the-real-origin-of-c...

Exactly!!!! I have been thinking similarly and wish to see the thought expressed more often. Just because an actor or actress does a naked scene doesn’t diminish their ability to act.

Everybody is naked under their clothes. Get over it society.

You can’t predict what will happen when you send a nude image of yourself to someone else and if it goes wrong, there is no undo. It isn’t much fun to go to school if the talk of the day is a set of your private pictures and it can go on and on with image macros and editing and even if you move to a new school you are easily found in today’s connected world and it starts all over again.

how is sexting extremely dangerous?

Because teens are having sex and it is upsetting to parents.

sexting is not sex.

Sexting is a form of sexual behavior. Parents get worked up over all sorts of sex-adjacent behavior - some flip out over holding hands or kissing on the cheek.

Your description is a far cry from "extremely dangerous".

Which is what prompted the question. How is sexting extremely dangerous?

I'm sure this depends a lot on who you talk to as well. If you talk a church or synagogue leader, likely any amount of texting is considered inappropriate and harmful. However, if you're talking to parents that take their kids crossdressing at gay bars, it's much more difficult to know when their compass actually hits any moral outrage.

The even more difficult take home is to understand which camp the researching and reporting groups actually represent, because either has the capability of distortion to their preferences.

If an article makes a claim about a study, check to see if the study actually makes the claim. If not the article is just clickbait and you should look at what the study actually set out to do instead.

Also unknown is whether the “panic” affects or has affected behavior or not.

Has there ever been a widespread, harmful teen phenomenon that wasn’t an overblown moral panic? Whether it’s tidepods, sexting, or fortnite bullying, it seems like journalists and politicians would rather focus their energy on this kind of nonsense than actual concerns (proper sex education comes to mind).

Vaping is one I'd like to see us put the kibosh on, however.

Vape Panic: more vestigal puritanical nonsense hysteria distraction.

except it does carry actual health risks?

If health risks are the concern the focus should be on harm reduction.

Then the question is if studying efficacy of harm reduction methods including bans or age limits or wide educational campaigns, monitoring of quality or other measures.

But moral panic wants none of that.

For real .. it has wiped away years of progress in teen smoking (kids starting to vape are then 4 times more likely to start smoking cigarettes as well).

Agreed - it is probably slightly less harmful than smoking barring exploding batteries but is still a clear case of nicotine merchants being pieces of shit about "not advertising carcinogens".

It is a cliche but they are way better off not starting in the first place.

Remember 80's metal? It wasn't evil enough until some religious nuts started playing the songs backward and heard what they tried really hard to hear. Then it leaked to pop and even mor songs.

Every generation freaks out about something.

The satanic panic wasn't confined to heavy metal lyrics. The same opportuniatic zealotry also led to misinterpretation of hypnosis in clinical settings which ruined the lives of innocent daycare workers and scrambling the lives of children subjected to the practice.

(and then there's the whole Dungeons and Dragons thing...)

In all seriousness yes but only for stuff society approved of and encouraged anyway like working in unsafe factories or serving in wars.

What is the measurement of "overblown"?

>Overall, approximately 13% of students reported that they had sent a sext, while 18.5% had received a sext. About one-third of those who sext had done it just one time.

Perhaps people who are concerned would find those numbers concerning?

If that is true... then is it "overblown"?

It depends on whether it causes harm and degree thereof. Some people love black and white thinking...

The question appears to ask about sending sexually explicit imagery. I think that would catch a lot of people who have exchanged something pornographic but not of themselves or people they know.

> Sexting was defined for respondents in the survey as “when someone takes a naked or semi-naked (explicit) picture or video of themselves, usually using their phone, and sends it to some-one else. The image is called a ‘sext’.”

how did they ask the question?

Because that's not sexting to me. sexting to me is literally just talking naughty in explicit ways. Part of that foreplay can be sending images, but I suspect most people don't limit sexting to strictly the sending and receiving of images.

Or maybe I'm just old, who knows.

Clickbait junk. Conclusion akin to "Drinking and driving probably okay usually".

I don't understand this. Are you equating teen sexting to drinking and driving?

The article only assessed the prevalence, not the consequences, of sexting and then concluded that panic is unjustified.

That can make for a poor conclusion; e.g. concluding that panic over teen drunk driving is unjustified, because <10% of teens have done it.

I don't think OP means to say they're the same, just means to illustrate a flaw in the argument.

The article essentially said "because sexting probably won't end in extortion, parents should STFU so I can see nekkid pix." ... Which I likened to another discouraged activity that "usually goes okay" and yet is ALSO clearly "not okay".

When I think of sexting I think of baby boomers like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Weiner

the teens I know today smoke pot more than they smoke tobacco and they smoke pot less than when I was growing up.

As much as older folks like to fantasize that young people do it like bunnies, I think the issue with kids today is that they aren't going to have sex enough to reproduce themselves,

> I think the issue with kids today is that they aren't going to have sex enough to reproduce themselves,

Birth rates might be a problem, but I don't think the amount of sexual acts is the limited factor.

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