For those of us who remember being teenagers (especially at the dawn of the Internet age), the fact that young people are making use of their cell phones to send sexually suggestive content is not only unsurprising, it’s downright expected. Still, the phenomenon (tragically referred to as “sexting”) is constantly being examined in the context of cyberbullying, privacy, and child pornography laws. To that end, the Pew Internet & American Life Project has released a new report on teens and sexting in hopes of gaining further insight into why and how young people send T&A to each other.
Pew conducted a nationally representative study in the US for three months this year, surveying 800 teenagers between the ages of 12 and 17. The conclusions of the report aren’t particularly mindblowing: the growing dependence on cell phones affects teenagers just as much as adults, and since texting has become key to teenage social interactions, it is now often used to send messages of sexual nature.
Only four percent of cell phone-owning teens claim to have sent a nude photo of themselves to someone else, but 15 percent have received such a photo or video. Teens who are heavier cell phone users tend to send and receive more of these than those who aren’t very dependent upon their phones—no surprise there, since if you use your phone less, you’re less likely to be part of a circle that might induce you to snap a photo of your naughty bits.
