What Is Self-exploitation? Rethinking the Relationship between Sexualization and ‘Sexting’ in Law and Order Times

Abstract

Since the early 1990s ‘sexualization’ has emerged as a ‘social problem’ whereby children, particularly white, heterosexual, middle-class girls, are purportedly being mal-socialized to deny their natural ‘innocence’, to prematurely embrace and express the characteristics of adult sexuality and to engage in ‘self-sexualization’ (APA, 2007; Smith & Attwood, 2011; Duschinsky, 2013a; Egan, 2013). In and around the same time as the public opprobrium about sexualization reached its pinnacle in the US and the UK, between 2006 and 2011 (Egan, 2013: 3–4), the West was also witnessing the rise of another representational practice, that of the sexy ‘selfie’ — semi-nude and sexually explicit self-portraits, taken at arm’s length or in a mirror, using a cellphone or digital camera, and then posted to social networking sites such as Facebook, Instagram or Tumblr. Also referred to as ‘sexts’ by academics and those in the media, although not typically by youth themselves (see Karaian, 2012; Ringrose et al., 2012; Albury et al., 2013; Peskin et al., 2013; Strassberg et al., 2013), sexy selfies have met with a great deal of international attention, if not enthusiasm, by parents, pundits, legal scholars, childhood sexualization critics, child protection and policing agencies, many of whom cite an increasingly sexualized culture as a key cause of the practice (Hasinoff, 2014). The Canadian context is no exception. Members of the Canadian Senate have expressed concerns about the links between ‘the social realities that drive the hyper-sexualisation of girls in modern culture’ and the sexual exploitation of youth via the creation of child pornography (Jaffer & Brazeau, 2011: 4).