SEMINAR: 'Victim, perpetrator or simply unwise? A comparison of judicial responses to 'teenage sexting' in the US, Canada and the UK'

When?

Wednesday 31 October 2012, 16.00 to 17.00

Where?

08 AC 03

Open to:

Staff, Students, Public

Speaker:

Jo Moran-Ellis, University of Surrey

'Victim, perpetrator or simply unwise? A comparison of judicial responses to 'teenage sexting' in the US, Canada and the UK'

In the last few years there have been periods of high levels of media interest in concerns about teenagers who send and receive visually erotic texts over their mobiles or post similar pictures on social networking sites. This phenomenon has been labelled 'sexting', and more specifically the extensive involvement of young people in this practice has led to terms being coined such as 'Generation  Sext' (Marshall, 2009) and the naming of a 'sexting craze' (Pilkington, 2009). In the USA the law has been used to regulate this practice in ways which implicate both the sender and the recipient(s) of sexts as perpetrators of an illegal act, whilst in the UK regulation has tended to remain at the level of social interventions framed morally or via child protection discourses. Using studies, case material and newspaper reports from the USA, Canada and the UK, and drawing on some ideas from actor-network theory (Latour, 1987), I look at how teenage sexting has been legally and informally regulated. I argue that the governance of sexting is the outcome of processes of 'translation' which shape both sexting and teenagers for scrutiny, classification and control, but that the form of translation varies in different contexts and in different networks. At the same time, the processes of governance are themselves part of the production of the social category of 'sexting teenagers' in these networks and contexts.