From Sexting to Sexpreading: Trivialization of Digital Violence, Gender Differences and Collective Responsibilities

Abstract

This article starts from a pedagogical disambiguation around sexting elaborated from the socio-educational cooperatives edPAC and CANDELA. This nuanced definition understands sexting as the practice of voluntarily and consensually sharing intimate and sexual content through different platforms and devices. In contrast, sexpreading is understood as the practice of disseminating sexual content without consent. We conducted short-term ethnographic research with adolescents in Barcelona with the objective of understanding how they perceive sexting and sexpreading based on their own experiences and social context. The research was carried out in three education centers in Barcelona and its metropolitan area and involved 59 diverse young people from 14 to 18 years old with different gender identifications. Our results point to three main dimensions: 1) the trivialization of violence and the creation of men spaces; 2) the gender differences involved in practicing sexting and preventing sexpreading; and 3) the consequences of sexpreading experienced by young people, including roles of intermediaries and responsibilities associated with them. We provide empirical and ethnographical support for the idea that merging sexting and sexpreading is problematic, especially for educational interventions, as it can detrimentally generalize issues and negatively impact adolescent sexualities, in particular those of girls and women. We believe that it is very important to incorporate discussions about sexting and sexpreading practices into educational contexts and to consider the high degree of media skills young women already have for a pedagogy of sexting and a community intervention against sexpreading.