Self-produced images and young people.

1. Self-produced images and young people. COPINE Research

2. Adolescent Context • Period of transition • Characterised as marked increase in complexity of group interactions & social behaviour • Consolidation of social self • Progressively more self conscious alongside heightened interest in others

3. What happens when we take this development online? -we’ll take the next hour or so to explore this together

4. What is the situation? • Children & young people as consumers. • Lack of agreement about language, laws and appropriateness. • Increasingly, children are depicted in a sexual way in western media. • Current gulf between knowledge of children & young people and those who are trying to guide & protect.

5. Too much hype – or not? • ‘A new generation of “multimedia” children are spending an average of seven hours a day. Glued to smartphones, iPods, TVs and video games. Research has found that youngsters aged between eight and 18 now spend almost every waking minute outside school using some electronic device’ • Sunday Times, 31 Jan 2010 in relation to the Kaiser Family Foundation Report.

6. The evidence from Europe: Children online • In Europe 15-16 year olds spend 118 minutes online per day, twice as long as 9-10 year olds • 7 is average age for going online in Denmark and Sweden, 8 in N Europe and 9 overall • 49% go online in their bedroom • 33% via a mobile phone • EU Kids Online (www.eukidsonline.net)

7. Going online is increasingly embedded in children’s everyday lives and is becoming increasingly privatised.

8. Opportunities and risks online KIDS ANYWHERE OPPORTUNITIESAND RISKS ONLINE Adapted from: Livingstone et al. (2011) EU Kids Online Final Report.

9. Opportunities

10. A ladder of opportunities?

11. Hasebrink et al. (2009)

12. Risky activities?

13. Low risk novices Young networkers Risky explorers Moderate users Intensive gamers Experienced networkers Not all children are the same…

14. Which children do risky things? • Older children, boys, sensation seekers. • Those who use the Internet more places, longer, more activities. USAGE • Children who encounter more offline risks. RISK MIGRATION. • Those with more psychological vulnerabilities. VULNERABILITY • Those who feel more comfortable online. SOCIAL COMPENSATION. • Children with more digital literacy and safety skills.

15. Are they managing? • Boy: when you are downloading music, there is a screen at the side with a girl doing dirty stuff! (Spain, Boy 14-16) • A friend sent a message that was a picture of me and I opened it and it was linked to a pornographic website (Portugal, girl, 15) • As soon as a pop up comes up, I don’t like it because things will come up on pop ups…pop ups on pop ups…a big pop up mess (UK, boy, 12) • Ads come up with girls, in underwear…you can’t put it off (Spain, boy, 14-16)

16. So what do we need to be thinking about?

17. Sexual abuse and sexual exploitation in abusive images? • A spectrum of abusive and exploitative practices: • The child who is sexually assaulted and photographed... • The child who is ‘modelling’ adult clothes and sexual poses... • The young person who shares sexual pictures of themselves…

18. Children in abusive images.

19. Image-related offending.

21. Pensioner caught with hundreds of child abuse pictures A PERVERT pensioner caught with hundreds of child abuse pictures told police that he had been advised by a nurse to look at pornography to help his recovery from cancer.

22. ChildBase study • At the time of the study, ChildBase held 807,525 unique still images. • The final total of coded images was 24,550; the majority of these images depicted children in indecent or naked poses. • Quayle & Jones 2011

24. Results • Odds of the abuse images being female versus male were about 4 to 1, and the odds of the images being of White children versus non-White children were about 10 to 1 • Significant gender difference in age distribution of all the children within the images • Male children more likely to be prepubescent or very young and less likely to be pubescent.

25. Estimated age of children in the sample.

26. Who are these children? • Largely unknown… • Context for many appears to be the same as that of other contact offences. • Some appear to be commercially produced. • Many are domestic… • Some are self-produced…

27. Abusive images?

28. NCMEC, Lees (2008)

29. By 2012, 30% of the images in the database of the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children were self-produced, approximately half of these in a coercive relationship.

31. Self-generated content? • Camera phones… • smartphones • Web cams… • Social networking sites… • Blogs...

32. Harvard Project Zero (James et al., 2010) “Through these technologies, young people are participating in a range of activities, including social networking, blogging, vlogging, gaming, instant messaging, downloading music and other content, uploading and sharing their creations, and collaborating with others in various ways” (p 220).

33. Smartphones • 2002 Nokia launched first camera phones • Over a quarter of adults in the UK (27 per cent) and almost half of teenagers (47 per cent) now own a smartphone (Ofcom, 2011). • Convergence - consolidation of information into a small number of sources, like Google, and the evolution of multi-functional hardware to handle this information, like the iPhone.

34. Teens and photographs? “… a safe place in which the teens used photo-mediated communication to consolidate existing friendships and ‘try on’ multiple, alternative selves in a critical phase of their self-development…” • Durrant, Frohlich, Stellen & Uzzell, 2011

35. Sexting • Practice of sending or posting sexually suggestive text messages and images, including nude or semi-nude photographs, via cellular telephones or over the Internet (Levick & Moon, 2010) • Mobile phone may be used to post the image to a social networking website like Facebook or MySpace (McBeth, 2010).

36. Sexting • Cross-sectional national telephone survey of 1560 young Internet users, aged 10 to 17. • 2.5% of young people had appeared in, or created, nude or nearly nude pictures or videos. However this reduced to 1.0% with reference to images that were sexually explicit. • 7.1% of young people said they had received nude or nearly nude images of others and 5.9% of youth reported receiving sexually explicit images. • However few young people acknowledged distributing these images. • Mitchell et al., (2012)

37. School-based survey? • 28% sent a naked picture of themselves • 31% reported having asked someone for a sext • 57% had been asked for a sext, with many being bothered by having been asked. • Those who had engaged in sexting more likely to have begun dating and to have had sex. • Temple, Paul, van den Berg, le, McElhany & Temple (2012)

39. Snapchat is the fastest way to share a moment with friends. You control how long your friends can view your message - simply set the timer up to ten seconds and send. They'll have that long to view your message and then it disappears forever. We'll let you know if they take a screenshot!

40. Typology of sexting • Based on 550 law enforcement cases, of two categories: ‘Aggravated’ and ‘Experimental’. • Aggravated involved criminal or abusive elements • Experimental incidents involved ‘romantic’ contexts or were acts of attention seeking. • Wolak & Finkelhor (2011)

41. SWGfL survey (Phippen, 2009) • Young people are very confident in the use of digital technology to take and distributed images. 79% of respondents saying they used such digital technologies to take images and videos, and 78% said they distributed them. • 40% do not see anything wrong with a topless image, and 15% do not take issue with naked images. • Sexting is prevalent among young people, with around 40% saying they knew friends who carried out such practice. • 27% of respondents said that sexting happens regularly or all of the time.

42. SWGfL survey (Phippen, 2009) • 56% of respondents were aware of instances where images and videos were distributed further than the intended recipient but only 23% believe this distribution is intended to cause upset. • 30% of young people knew people who had been adversely affected by sexting. • Only a minority (27%) believe young people need more support and advice related to sexting and 70% will turn to their friends if they were affected by issues related to sexting. • Only 24% of young people would turn to a teacher for help if they were affected by issues related to sexting.

43. US arrests for sexting? • 3477 cases of youth-produced sexual images during 2008 and 2009 (US)). 2/3 of cases involved an “aggravating”circumstance -either an adult was involved (36% of cases) or a minor engaged in malicious, nonconsensual, or abusive behavior (31% of cases). • An arrest occurred in 62% of cases with an adult involved, in 36% of the aggravated youth-only cases, and in 18% of the “experimental”cases (youth only and no aggravating elements). • Most of the images (63%) were distributed by cell phone only and did not reach the Internet. • Wolak et al., (2012)

44. NSPCC study (Ringrose et al, 2012) • Key messages: • Threat from peers • Sexting is often coercive • Girls most adversely affected • Technology amplifies the problem • Sexting reveals wider sexual pressures • Ever younger children affected • Sexting practices are culturally specific • More support and resources vital

45. SPIRTO ICSE DB study. • 350 UK claimed cases of identified children in the Interpol data base. • 69.7% of the cases were female and ethnicity was not evenly distributed (χ²= 1,552.69, df=5, p < 0.001) with 95.1% being White.

46. Distribution of the ages of the children in the data base

47. Relationship with the person who took the image

48. Distribution of self-produced images and those taken by others

49. What are the back stories?