Shocking! "Sexting" Study Finds That Teens Are...Blasé

Arts Technica reports: For those of us who remember being teenagers (especially at the dawn of the Internet age), the fact that young people are making use of their cell phones to send sexually suggestive content is not only unsurprising, it's downright expected. Still, the phenomenon (tragically referred to as "sexting") is constantly being examined in the context of cyberbullying, privacy, and child-pornography laws. To that end, the Pew Internet & American Life Project has released a new report on teens and sexting in hopes of gaining further insight into why and how young people send T&A to each other. Pew conducted a nationally representative study in the U.S. for three months this year, surveying 800 teenagers between the ages of 12 and 17. The conclusions of the report aren't particularly mind-blowing: The growing dependence on cell phones affects teenagers just as much as adults, and since texting has become key to teenage social interactions, it is now often used to send messages of sexual nature.

Only four percent of cell-phone-owning teens claim to have sent a nude photo of themselves to someone else, but 15 percent have received such a photo or video. Teens who are heavier cell-phone users tend to send and receive more of these than those who aren't very dependent upon their phones—no surprise there, since if you use your phone less, you're less likely to be part of a circle that might induce you to snap a photo of your naughty bits.

The reasons for sending "sexts" are obvious too: Some teens send them to their romantic partners, some send them to people they want to be in a relationship with, and some are forwarded to others outside of the relationship. The reasons for the latter range from simple curiosity to downright blackmail—interestingly, many of the teen quotes included in the report portray this attempt at blackmail as no big deal and something that just happens every so often. (For the record, I would be mortified if something like that happened to me, but I would absolutely try to pass it off as no big deal. Don't give the blackmailer the power, kids!) Many teens in the report agreed that the content is often sent out of peer pressure, but others supported the notion that it's a safer alternative to real-life sex.

Pew noted that kids whose parents regularly looked at the content of their phones were no more or less likely to be involved in sexting, but did note that restriction of text messaging in general did seem to cut down on the behavior. And, despite the teens' somewhat blasé attitude toward the whole thing, there are reasons to be concerned—after all, there have been some cases this year in which law enforcement has tried to file charges against the sexting teens themselves for, well, possession of child porn. Add in the blackmailing and cyberbullying element, and there's potential for quite a mess.