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The article talks about "safe sexting" education as a solution, but I'd like to suggest that such a thing does not and perhaps will never exist. It's great tha
by tomku 11y ago
The article talks about "safe sexting" education as a solution, but I'd like to suggest that such a thing does not and perhaps will never exist.
It's great that you trust the person you're sending the pictures to not to share them, but you also have to trust:
1) That same person with that same responsibility even after you break up, including when they're at their most angry with you.
2) That nobody (your school, your ISP, your government) is eavesdropping on your communication method.
3) The software that's being used to both send and receive the photo.
4) That the recipient will keep their phone or PC physically secure so that random people can't just click "Photos" and view them.
5) That the recipient won't get "hacked" and have your photos uploaded online somewhere without their knowledge.
There's a lot of parallels with DRM and copyright - once you've converted something into an easily-copyable form and sent it across a network, it's very, very hard to make sure that it never gets copied again. We should be telling teenagers (and maybe some older people too...) the truth - that if they sext, no matter how much they trust the other person, they're taking a risk that their photos might end up shared more widely.
- DanBC 11y agoYou assume that "safe sexting" doesn't teach 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 as reasons to avoid sexting? And that safe sexting doesn't try to move children to posting clothed instead of unclothed images but with sexual text instead of sexual images? Here's a canadian thing talking about it, and about the difficulties of abstinence only approaches: http://www.macleans.ca/society/how-safe-is-sexting/ http://www.macleans.ca/society/how-safe-is-sexting/ > For Lauren Dobson-Hughes, president of Planned Parenthood Ottawa, it’s important to teach teens about the criminality of sexting alongside the topic of consent, and offer guidance, should they choose to do it anyway. “If you tell youth not to do it, simply that it’s illegal, they hear, ‘Don’t get caught,’ and it doesn’t help them understand the actual risks involved in sexting,” she says. That’s why her organization is taking a risk-reduction approach to sexting in the sex education workshops it provides to young students in local schools upon request. This means accepting that sexting is part of teenage life. “There’s an upside to this, or they wouldn’t be doing it,” says Dobson-Hughes. “We would rather youth talk about consent in an age-appropriate way, throughout their lives, so they understand that sharing a picture without someone’s consent isn’t right.” And we've had years and years of abstinence only approaches to reducing teenage unplanned pregnancy, or to reduce HIV/AIDS, and we know it just doesn't work.
- tomku 11y agoI think you've severely misread my comment. I'm absolute NOT proposing any kind of "abstinence only education" regarding sexting. I support what you said about teaching the risks and safer alternatives. If that's what "safe sexting" initiatives are teaching, great! However, that wasn't the impression I got from reading the article you linked - it talked a lot about the legal risks, a bit about trust and consent and a bit about taking "safe" sexy pictures that people won't be able to identify you in. My point in the comment above was that even if you do all of that, a lot of the risk is simply outside of your control. That's fine - people do risky things all the time, it's part of life. I just don't like taking an approach that's essentially harm reduction and calling it "safe".
- DanBC 11y ago> I think you've severely misread my comment. Sorry! It's a bit late here. I think we agree.