Consensual sexting is an ingrained part of teen hook-up culture.
One in three teenagers have received a sext — and this number is only growing, according to a new book. “It just puts you in an awkward situation. You always have to be paranoid in these circumstances,” a 12-year old explained in, out now. “If you’re pressured but don’t want to, you might risk having someone as a friend or not,” said a 13-year-old quoted in the book.
All that data provides a necessary reality check for parents who rely on “fatalistic tech blaming” or an unrealistic “just say ‘no’” approach. When parents resort to “never sext!” lectures, parents “slip into a digital-age version of abstinence-only education, leaving teens without sufficient information to support complex, real-world decision making,” Weinstein and James write. put it in 2019: “Adults often ask what can be told to youth to completely stop them from sexting.
With so much of teen life online, what was once considered “deviant a decade ago,” now has trended “towards normalization among teens and young adults. It’s likely the pandemic hastened this shift too,” they write, as recreational screen time doubled for teens during the pandemic, Still, teens sext despite the risks. Blame the brain. Areas of cognition dealing with decision-making are slow to develop compared to the emotional and arousal systems that are in overdrive during adolescence. Teens are also more susceptible to the “personal fable” fallacy, where people believe they are too special or unique for bad things to happen to them. Add that together, and you have a kid primed to make some bad decisions.
An eleven-year-old described the situation she faced: “I don’t want to feel pressured into doing something that I know is not right.” Weinstein and James talked to girls who had found body doubles online and presented the pictures as their own. Some would take it a step further and screenshot the picture in the search results and send that screenshot to a few close friends. If anything ever leaked, they had ensured full deniability.
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