‘It’s like Mental Rape I Guess’: Young New Zealanders’ Responses to Image-Based Sexual Abuse

Abstract

Young people routinely create, send, receive and share a variety of non-sexual and sexual images. The meanings ascribed to these images are dependent on the sociocultural context in which young people construct norms and values. Drawing on qualitative small friendship group interview data with 106 school-aged young people and six teachers in Aotearoa, New Zealand, this chapter provides insights into their understandings of peer and school responses to image-based sexual abuse. A series of informal norms and expectations of privacy underpin young people’s understandings of these images, which disadvantage young women at all stages of the process. This results in gendered harms and victim blaming. Sex education teaches young women that abstinence from sexting is the most effective way of protecting themselves from privacy violations from young men. This is compounded by school responses to victims of image-based sexual abuse. In failing to challenge established gender roles, this approach continues to de-legitimise young women’s rights to sexual and bodily expressions and pleasure. Victims of image-based sexual abuse remain blamed and shamed.