Teens Are Early Adopters Everywhere – Both in Tech and in Sex

There’s an interesting study released about how teens deal with nudity when it comes to their online activities. The irony is that while parents work so hard trying to prevent exposure of their children to inappropriate content made available online by adults, they should in fact be more worried about their children willingly distributing sexually suggestive content themselves.

The study has been carried out by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy (the organizer) and CosmoGirl.com (the site where children were invited to answer the questions) and was intended to see how teens and young adults (aged 13 to 26) handle their private information in their online communications. The publicized results are more than disturbing with children seemingly unable to keep it discreet at all.

The thing is that one in five teen girls (21% to be specific) made a revealing photo of herself available to others via various tools: sent it via a cell phone or an email or posted nude or partially nude photos online. 11% of these girls are 16 or younger. When it comes to boys, the situation is not much different with almost as many boys (18%) admitting doing the same.

But if you think the situation is bad enough with photos, this becomes even worse with texts - sexually explicit emails and SMS messages about themselves were sent by 49% of the respondents in the study. What’s even worse is that 15% of those admitting they did send sexually suggestive content said they only knew the people such photos or texts were intended to from their online communications - no personal contacts involved at all.

The reasons the girls surveyed have for sharing sexually suggestive content seem to be quite innocent - they either wanted to do it as a joke or to give something of a sexy present to their boyfriends. But unfortunately these boyfriends can hardly be considered reliable to keep the private things private as many of them admit seeing photos shared by their friends that were initially intended to be kept private by their sender.

Of course teenagers are often natural early adopters of the latest technology tools - both when it comes to new websites and the latest gadgets like camera phones. In fact, they regularly adopt these tools much earlier than their parents who are in many cases not even aware of all the possibilities the tools offer - and can’t prevent dubious use as a result.

At the same time with the time changing younger people may have very different understanding of what should be private and what can be made public without risk and they will easier do something that their parents could consider absolutely unspeakable. But the problem is that digital flirting may easily transform into real-life dating that will have frivolous nature from the very beginning - and this is exactly what parents should be more than concerned about. So trying to prevent even the fact of such flirting as a reason for potential problems could be a good idea - at least by trying to explain the risks to their children. And the risks are obviously here: both the risks of unplanned pregnancy and of having your nude photo distributed all over the web for anyone to see, including your teachers or future husband.