Recently, the Guardian published a story on the worrying rise of deepfake pornography and nudes in schools affecting predominantly young girls in schools. With the rise and accessibility of tech, we should be talking about the rise in deepfakes in schools and the very real harms it creates.
School of Sexuality Education’s CEO, Dolly Padalia was quoted in the article and shared an incident of harm that happened in school. While it’s important to highlight the scale of harm, it’s also important to take a nuanced look beyond dramatic headlines. We must critically evaluate any solutions posed to tackle the issue of image-based sexual abuse in young people, including suggestions to ban phones for children or the introduction of new laws. As solutions go, we should be looking at how education can be used as a tool to combat sexual violence.
Image by Evie K
We can’t depend on the law and policing to “fix” the problem
It is tempting (and a common approach) to tell young people not to share any nudes because it is illegal, but when we frame the law in this manner, we create a culture of victim blaming and inadvertently make it less likely for young people to come forward and seek support from adults by making them feel shame for using technology, or taking a nude, in the first place.
Sure, laws and policing may have their place, but can we solely rely on them? Especially when our current laws are failing to hold social media companies responsible and police are regularly found to be misogynistic, and have little success in solving cases of sexual violence.
It was also striking how the article spoke about the confusion teachers felt about tackling harm from deepfakes — do we use exclusions or restorative justice approaches? Perhaps restorative justice is worth exploring seriously in our school system. An approach that centres the voices of victim-survivors can empower them to move forward, rather than expecting young people to go back into the classroom with the perpetrators of harm, who can be fellow pupils or even friends, and continue as normal.
Phone bans are not a solution
As adults who want to protect young people, imposing a ban might make us feel better, but does it work? Let’s take the most popular policy proposal floating around in the UK at the moment: Phone bans in schools. One of the largest studies of its kind in the UK found that school phone bans had no impact on sleep, behaviour or overall phone use compared to schools without a ban.
The genie is out of the bottle now, so it’s highly unlikely society will return to a time without smartphones and AI. Even in a world where complete smartphone bans could be enforced for under-18s, eventually, they will need to learn to interact with these technologies in a healthy way. Bans may only work to delay the inevitable rather than provide any meaningful solutions to the issue of misogyny and sexual violence in our society.
And is it fair to remove access to phones for young people when this technology can give them a voice, access to information and maybe even a sense of safety, just because other people are trying to harm them? We should be targeting the people who do harm, and the companies that allow them to.
Adults need support too
In response to The Guardian, the government dutifully rolled out a spokesperson from the Department for Education to give platitudes about “new funded resources to help teachers explain the law and harms relating to online content.” So far, we’ve been unable to find any information on which, if any, Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) providers were consulted in the creation of these resources, or even where, when or how teachers can access these.
Of course, we welcome the government putting more funding into the education system, but we need clear commitments to fund educational approaches that centre young people’s needs. This could include high-quality teacher training, and even workshops for parents, so adults are better equipped to understand the tech landscape and support young people without judgement.
Educational solutions
As RSE practitioners working with young people, we tackle these issues head-on in schools. We facilitate discussion to help young people make the link between gendered norms and sexual violence, we challenge victim-blaming narratives that normalise harm, and we encourage young people to be active-bystanders in a range of situations, from being in a group chat to witnessing harassment enacted by a friend.
We also remind young people to trust their feelings about situations that make them feel uncomfortable, and to seek help from adults who, in turn, should take them seriously and offer help and support. All young people should have access to high quality RSE that covers topics like sexual health, consent, media analysis and healthy relationships that emphasise compassion and kindness, to prevent harm from happening.
The Guardian article ends its piece by highlighting how a young person knew to seek support from an adult after learning about online safety in a PSHE lesson, with the simple statement that “education works.” And we agree.
For more information about our work, email info@schoolofsexed.org.