Teens, Social Media and Image-Based Abuse

This Open Access book explores how teens use social media, how they produce, consume, and share sexual images, and how they understand and respond to harmful digital sexual content and interactions. Capturing the views of nearly 500 young people across the UK our book shows how image-based sexual harassment and abuse (IBSHA) impacts all young people and is a society wide problem that needs to be urgently addressed.Developing a socio-cultural and tech affordances approach to understanding social media platform economies, we show how game-like engagement features keep users on apps and expanding their networks, opening up teens to considerable online risk and harms. We argue a lack of consent in the digital environments intersects with society-wide, age old norms of gender and sexual inequalities, facilitating image-based sexual harassment and abuse (IBSHA). Educational policy and curriculum focused on abstinence anti-sexing messaging and a focus on child pornography laws, fail to address gendered and sexualised power dynamics and peer on peer abuse. We argue a multifaceted approach is needed to improve the law, technology companies and education. Better digital literacy and sex education that covers social media use, risk, harms and reporting in platform specific ways would offer better supports for youth.

Jessica Ringrose is Professor of Sociology of Gender and Education at IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, London, UK, where she co-directs the UCL Centre for Sociology of Education and Equity. She is an internationally recognized and widely cited expert on gender and sexual equity in education and youth digital sexual cultures. She has collaborated and published on these topics with colleagues in in USA, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Wales and Ireland.

Kaitlyn Regehr is Associate Professor and Programme Director of Digital Humanities at University College London. Her work has informed legislation on children’s safety online including the Online Safety Act. Dr Regehr is committed to building data empowered societies and making academic ideas accessible through broadcasting and interactive new technology and has produced and served as a topic specialist on documentaries for BBC News, BBC Women’s Hour, Channel 4 and the Economist.