Sexting Pleasures: Young people, fun, flirtation, and child pornography

Public concern has escalated in recent years over young people using digital media technologies to produce or distribute sexually explicit images of themselves. This chapter reports on a large-scale survey of young people’s perceptions of and motivations for ‘sexting’. It argues that young people who engage in sexting largely do so for reasons of romance and pleasure and that even where overt coercion and pressure are involved, the motivation is rarely if ever the production or distribution of child pornography. If harms associated with sexting are to be minimised, discursive frameworks for understanding sexting as child pornography require rethinking.