Sexting Panic illustrates how anxieties about technology and teen girls' sexuality distract from critical questions about how to adapt norms of privacy and consent for new media. Though mobile phones can be used to cause harm, Amy Adele Hasinoff notes that criminalization and abstinence policies meant to curb sexting often fail to account for the distinction between consensual sharing and the malicious distribution of a private image. Hasinoff challenges the idea that sexting inevitably victimizes young women. Instead, she encourages us to recognize young people's capacity for choice and recommends responses to sexting that are realistic and nuanced rather than based on misplaced fears about deviance, sexuality, and digital media.

In the current debate around sexting, this book gives a nuanced account of motives, contexts and possible risks of intimate digital communication. Authors discuss how social media shape new dating opportunities through apps and dating sites, how sexting fits within individual’s relational and sexual development. They examine the relationships between sexting, health and sexual risk behaviours and focusing on adolescents, further highlight which role parents can play in relational and sexual education. Chapters cover topics such as abusive sexting behaviours in the context of dating violence and slut shaming, media discourses concerning sexting and the legal framework in several countries that shape the context of sexting. This edited collection will be of great interest to academics and students of communication studies, psychology, health sciences and sociology, as well as policy makers and the general public interested in current debates on how social media are used for intimate communication.

One evening, while watching the news, Roger N. Lancaster was startled by a report that a friend, a gay male school teacher, had been arrested for a sexually based crime. The resulting hysteria threatened to ruin the life of an innocent man. In this passionate and provocative book, Lancaster blends astute analysis, robust polemic, ethnography, and personal narrative to delve into the complicated relationship between sexuality and punishment in our society. Drawing on classical social science, critical legal studies, and queer theory, he tracks the rise of a modern suburban culture of fear and develops new insights into the punitive logic that has put down deep roots in everyday American life.

A provocative feminist analysis of the moral panics of sexuality, this interdisciplinary edited collection showcases the range of historical and contemporary crises we too often suppress, including vagina dentata, vampires, cannibalism, age appropriateness, breast cancer, menstrual panics, and sex education.

It is essential that your teens understand that sending or receiving a sexually suggestive text or image under the age of 18 is considered child pornography and can result in criminal charges. With 40 percent of the female teens taking part in sexting are doing it as a joke, this joke can end up with dire consequences. Give your readers an essential guidebook into the details and dangers of sexting. This collection of essays presents a diversity of opinion on the topic, including both conservative and liberal points of view in an even balance. Readers will evaluate such topics as whether sexting is a valid form of self-expression, whether America's sex-crazed culture promotes sexting, and whether parents and adults are overreacting to sexting.

This book explores young people’s perspectives on risk and harm in youth sexting, specifically privacy violations and unwanted, pressured and coerced sexting. This book engages with key debates, academic literature and evidence, as well as findings of a study into young people’s perceptions of, attitudes toward and experiences of sexting. It challenges predominant assumptions that youth sexting is inherently risky and deviant and sets out the specific contexts in which privacy violations and unwanted sexting occur. It explores the sociocultural contexts underpinning harm, including gender, sexism, sexuality, status and power, and associated constructs of risk and shame, as well as broader youth cultural contexts that create and giving meaning to sexters and sexting practices, particularly related to victim-blaming, social shaming, bullying, harassment and abuse. Finally, it discusses young people’s attitudes and beliefs about interventions to reduce the prevalence of youth sexting. In doing so, the book critically engages with young people’s perspectives in order make practical recommendations for encouraging a ‘digital sexual ethics’ based on rights to bodily and sexual expression, autonomy and integrity, positive bystander intervention, and anti-victim blaming and abuse messages. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of criminology, education, social care, sociology and health. It will also be a valuable resource for those working in educational and social care settings such as sex educators, youth and social workers, youth counsellors and mental health professionals.

Continued public outcries over such issues as young models in sexually suggestive ads and intimate relationships between teachers and students speak to one of the most controversial fears of our time: the entanglement of children and sexuality. In this book, Steven Angelides confronts that fear, exploring how emotional vocabularies of anxiety, shame, and even contempt not only dominate discussions of youth sexuality but also allow adults to avoid acknowledging the sexual agency of young people. Introducing case studies and trends from Australia, the United Kingdom, and North America, he challenges assumptions on a variety of topics, including sex education, age-of-consent laws, and sexting. Angelides contends that an unwillingness to recognize children’s sexual agency results not in the protection of young people but in their marginalization.

This book explores the policing response to teen sexting – the digital exchange, both consensual and non-consensual, of intimate images among youth peers. With a particular focus in England and Wales, it also considers other international responses and the challenges faced in policing youth practices with legislation being applied beyond its intended scope. It uses the police responses in England and Wales as a case study of the challenges of policy evolving the digital cultural phenomenon and the tensions between enforcing the law, while knowing it’s not fit for purpose, and supporting vulnerable minors. It explores the policy responses that have developed from the problematic legislation and whether these policy interventions have helped or hindered the policing process. It draws in parallels with drugs policy and policing, and brings in progressive, harm reduction approaches in contrast to traditional solutions.

Gender, Sex, and Politics: In the Streets and Between the Sheets in the 21st Century includes twenty-seven chapters organized into five sections: Gender, Sexuality and Social Control; Pornography; Sex and Social Media; Dating, Desire, and the Politics of Hooking Up; and Issues in Sexual Pleasure and Safety. This anthology presents these topics using a point-counterpoint-different point framework. Its arguments and perspectives do not pit writers against each other in a binary pro/con debate format. Instead, a variety of views are juxtaposed to encourage critical thinking and robust conversation. This framework enables readers to assess the strengths and shortcomings of conflicting ideas. The chapters are organized in a way that will challenge cherished beliefs and hone both academic and personal insight. Gender, Sex, and Politics is ideal for sparking debates in intro to women’s and gender studies, sexuality, and gender courses.

Teen films of the 1980s were notorious for treating consent as irrelevant, with scenes of boys spying in girls' locker rooms and tricking girls into sex. While contemporary movies now routinely prioritize consent, ensure date rape is no longer a joke, and celebrate girls' desires, sexual consent remains a problematic and often elusive ideal in teen films. In Consent Culture and Teen Films, Michele Meek traces the history of adolescent sexuality in US cinema and examines how several films from the 2000s, including Blockers, To All the Boys I've Loved Before, The Kissing Booth, and Alex Strangelove, take consent into account. Yet, at the same time, Meek reveals that teen films expose how affirmative consent ("yes means yes") fails to protect youth from unwanted and unpleasant sexual encounters. By highlighting ambiguous sexual interactions in teen films--such as girls' failure to obtain consent from boys, queer teens subjected to conversion therapy camps, and youth manipulated into sexual relationships with adults--Meek unravels some of consent's intricacies rather than relying on oversimplification. By exposing affirmative consent in teen films as gendered, heteronormative, and cis-centered, Consent Culture and Teen Films suggests we must continue building a more inclusive consent framework that normalizes youth sexual desire and agency with all its complexities and ambivalences.