School of Sexuality Education’s Sophie Whitehead and Amelia Jenkinson have been working with academics - Professor Jessica Ringrose (UCL) and Dr Kaitlyn Regehr (University of Kent) – on a research project centred around young people’s digital practices and image-sharing experiences. Part of the project has involved developing and using arts-based activities which can help young people to learn about SRE issues while enabling them to refigure and talk about their lives online. In one activity, students were given templates of Snapchat and Instagram screens and were asked to draw examples of their experiences online. The team recently published a paper on some of their findings around these methods. Some conclusions from the paper are detailed here:

Our research demonstrates that many young people experience unsolicited sexual images on social media, and for girls, receiving unwanted “dick pics” or being harassed for nudes puts them in the position of passive recipient and “victim”... Drawing enabled a way of re-mattering this digital content - a reorientation of phallocentric power. The activity of drawing the unsolicited content that young people receive is easily translatable to a lesson… It can be a somewhat generic task that opens up spaces of exploring the ways complex private and public elements of pornographic content is received and experienced by young people on their mobile phones. The key is to frame this discussion explicitly within a conversation about sexual ethics, rights, and consent (Renold and McGeeny, 2018)…

Drawing the sexualised genital images to which they are involuntarily exposed demonstrates their ubiquity and normalisation for young people, but comes as a shock for many adults. We see the power of disrupting age-appropriate ideas about SRE and the jolting of adults out of complacency. Through the intra-action of seemingly childlike mediums (drawing with felt tips) with the taboo images of dick pics, the materiality of the images works to highlight the gap between “adult” perceptions of age-appropriate content young people should be taught about in schools and what young people’s lived experiences of sexually explicit imagery and pornography actually are (Mulholland, 2015). The fact that the felt tip drawings of masturbating videos and dick pics are so shocking reveals an important truth about our collective will to construct a false notion of “childhood innocence” (Renold et al., 2015) that ultimately, if maintained, works to place children in harm through lack of information and guidance in the name of protection and “safeguarding”.

We are confident that our ongoing research in this area, as outlined here, demonstrates the need for digital literacy and digital defence as components of SRE as well as highlighting the importance of incorporating the experiences of young people into curriculum design.

The full research report can be found here https://www.ascl.org.uk/ibsha

Following this research project, we co-created comprehensive guidance on tackling Online Sexual Harassment. This document provides a comprehensive understanding of online sexual harassment for anyone working in secondary schools in England. Including the relevant laws, evidence-base and best-practice approaches to understanding, preventing and managing young people’s experiences of online sexual harassment.

Illustrations by Evie Karkera, unless otherwise credited.

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