Digital Sexual Violence and the Gendered Constraints of Consent in Youth Image Sharing

Abstract

This chapter discusses two qualitative studies exploring youth intimate image sharing, conducted with 191 British young people over a four-year period. We explore a discursive absence of consent in the data and discuss how image sharing occurs within inequitable gendered cultures of normalised online sexual harassment and abuse. We describe the technological affordances that create temporal and material endurance of images and explore how these affordances compromise consent in digital contexts in gender-specific ways. We discuss the pressure on girls to send nudes and how boys’ desire for girls’ nudes also drives transactional, uninvited “dick pics.” We then consider the non-consensual sharing of images of girls and boys and demonstrate how the implications are often worse and longer lasting for girls. We show how the increased risk of non-consensual sharing of girls’ nudes led to heightened responsibilization of girls for the life of their images, as well as long-lasting feelings of regret and shame for creating and sending nude images of their bodies. We argue for a change in educational messages around sexual consent to explicitly address cultures of normalised abuse that surround the life of images in digital contexts.

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