Sexting – What parents can do to protect their teen girls

Imagine this. Your teenage daughter sends a nude picture of herself on her phone to her boyfriend. (It might be a joke. Or it might be because she loves him. Or maybe he asked her to.) He sends it on to his friends. Now it’s on everyone’s phone. It’s on a social networking site. She is mortified. She doesn’t want to go to school any more. She says she can never go out in public again.

But this isn’t some imaginary nightmare. There’s growing anxiety that more and more teenagers are sending sexually explicit photographs of themselves to one another via phones and social networking sites.

Young people are increasingly using technology not only to stay in touch, but to explore their sexuality…As these images can be shared so widely and quickly online, young people may become the victims of bullying or harassment

In April this year, the Daily Mail carried the story of 13-year-old Sophie who sent a topless picture to her boyfriend.

“It’s just normal,” she said. “If a boy likes a girl, the first thing he does is ask for your picture. Some of my friends had done exactly the same thing for boys. It’s just that theirs didn’t get sent around.”
“As soon as I arrived at school, I knew most people had seen it because they were staring and laughing. When my back was turned, I heard the words slag and slut. I tried to ignore it.”

But the idea that teenagers – and even children as young as 13 and 14 – are doing this horrifies most parents.

You don’t want your teenager exposing herself to anyone and everyone. You don’t want her picture to end up on a site that could be accessed by paedophiles and perverts.

But how widespread is it? Has ‘sexting’ really become commonplace?

It’s definitely on the increase, simply because 15 years ago phones didn’t have cameras, and now they do.

Though there are no adequate reports on this subject in Nigeria, the rising number of teenagers’ nude pictures being circulated in the social media suggests that every parent should be really concerned.

A report for the NSPCC published in May this year, based on interviews with young people in years 8 and 10 in two inner London secondary schools, makes genuinely shocking reading.

In these schools, girls were being hassled and harassed all the time to send the boys explicit photos of themselves.

Boys seemed to think they ‘owned’ their girlfriends’ bodies. A girl might be asked to photograph a boy’s name written on her breast with black marker pen.

The report says, “We found considerable evidence of an age-old double standard, where sexually active boys are admired and ‘rated’, while sexually active girls are denigrated, shamed and despised as ‘sluts’.”

The researchers found there was a culture of silence around all this. The year 8s particularly didn’t get support when they were upset or confused by the pressures they were facing because parents and teachers assumed they were too young to be involved.

So if, as a parent, you want to protect your child or teenager, what can you do?

Here are top 7 tips for parents to help protect their naïve daughters against this menace

1. Talk to your child or teenager about their digital footprint. Whatever you upload on to a phone or an internet site is no longer private. And it stays out there forever.

2. Talk about sexual bullying. If someone asks you for a nude photo, it might be because they like you or fancy you. But it might be because they want to humiliate or blackmail you.

3. Discuss how hard it is not to do what everyone else is doing, whether it’s getting drunk, taking drugs or circulating nude pictures of someone you know. But you have to take your own decisions. You have to have self-respect.

4. After discussing this with your child/young teenager, talk to their mobile phone operator about filtering software to block inappropriate content and websites…

5. Don’t assume young people are able to look after themselves in their teens. There are always new challenges. Keep up-to-date with what’s going on…

6. Secretly check their phones and computers to see what they are up to. If you find out they have nude pictures, be wise in dealing with the issue because young people who want to protect their privacy will develop multiple profiles.

7. Keep talking about online safety. Encourage your child or teenager to talk about any kind of behaviour that worries them with an adult they trust – you, a teacher, or another parent.

Read it on: Passnownow