Sexting and Sexual Grooming

Ann Coffey Excerpts

Wednesday 25th April 2012 Westminster Hall

[Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Caton. I welcome the Minister to this debate; he has a very strong commitment to safeguarding children.

I want to begin by supporting the excellent recommendations to protect children from online pornography that were contained in last week’s report on the independent parliamentary inquiry into online child protection, led by the hon. Member for Devizes (Claire Perry). Today, I want to focus on one aspect that the online inquiry mentioned was of great concern to parents: the growing phenomenon of sexting.

Sexting involves the sharing of sexually suggestive messages or images electronically, primarily between mobile phones. According to Ofcom, about 50% of eight to 11-year-olds and 88% of 12 to 15-year-olds own a mobile phone. The speed with which children and young people are gaining access to the internet—accelerated with the advent of smartphones, enabling children to access the internet from their mobile phones—is unprecedented.

The problem is growing, according to the children’s charity Beat Bullying, which is very concerned that there is increasing peer pressure to send sexting images; and the age is getting younger. Its research, carried out in 2009, showed that 38% of children aged 11 to 18 had received a sexually explicit or distressing text or e-mail. Those figures are backed up by research from Plymouth university, which found that 40% of 14 to 16-year-olds said their friends engaged in sexting. In addition, a survey by Beat Bullying in 2010 revealed that more than 54% of teachers were aware of pupils creating and sharing sexually suggestive messages and images via mobile phones or the internet. In Manchester, each week two schools are turning to e-safety groups for help about sexting incidents.

I congratulate the Manchester Evening News and its reporter Amy Glendinning on recognising this issue. The newspaper’s excellent series about internet safety has examined the dangers that lurk online and the traps that children fall into, including sexting. The coverage included recommendations and advice from local police and schools. That is another example of public service journalism at its best from the Manchester Evening News and follows its groundbreaking campaign last year about children missing from home, which was of great interest to me as the chair of the all-party group on runaway and missing children and adults. In many ways, the missing people and sexting issues are linked, and charities such as the Children’s Society feel that sexting should be recognised as part of the sexual grooming process that many vulnerable, runaway or missing children fall victim to.

Our children’s lives, including their experiences at school, are very different from our childhood and experiences of school, but one aspect of childhood remains the same. Throughout the ages, as children have grown up, they have wanted to push boundaries at an age when they are more sexually and socially aware; they want to experiment and tread their own path to independence. That is normal. But what is different today is that, with new technology, the risk that children and young people are exposed to as part of that process has risen dramatically.

Today’s phenomenon of sexting involves children and young people taking pictures of themselves, perhaps to send to established boyfriends or girlfriends, to create romantic interest or for reasons such as attention seeking. There is often no criminal behaviour beyond the creation or sending of images, no apparent malice and no lack of willing participation by young people who are pictured. The problem is that, once the pictures are taken and sent, the sender loses control of them and they could end up anywhere, from being passed all around school to being viewed and passed on by paedophiles. In addition, children’s charities fear that young people are being coerced into providing explicit images online, which are then shared without their consent via phones and social networking sites—a process known as doxing.

According to Sherry Adhami of Beat Bullying, sexting has become an epidemic. She says:

“We are seeing it more and more—we’ve even seen it in primary schools. It is 100 per cent classless and this affects children whether they are in deprived or affluent areas.”

Beat Bullying says that sexting can be used as a form of cyber-bulling, when an individual or a group of people deliberately attempts to hurt, upset, threaten or humiliate someone else. That includes situations when a recipient of images or text is made to feel uncomfortable as a direct result of that content or is asked to do something that makes them feel distressed.

Sexting becomes problematic when it leads to criminal or abusive behaviour, such as sexual abuse, extortion, threats, malicious conduct arising from interpersonal conflicts, or the creation, sending or showing of images without the knowledge or against the will of the person who is pictured, or if it becomes a tool for sexual grooming. Such grooming involves not just adults grooming children, but increasingly children grooming other children.

A Beat Bullying survey of 11 to 18-year-olds found that 45% of text messages were from their peers, but the problem is that young people are very vulnerable to suggestions from their peers. There is a fine line between young people voluntarily sharing images and their feeling under pressure to do so. The recognition that children and young people can be sexually victimised by other young people is reshaping our understanding of the issue.

It is part of the growing-up process for both girls and boys to decide what sexual behaviour they feel comfortable with. However, some young girls are particularly vulnerable to pressure—for example, girls with low self-esteem, those from dysfunctional families or those living in care. Such girls are particularly vulnerable to sexual exploitation, both by adults and their peers.

Sexual grooming happens when someone is enticed to do something that they do not want to do, and the link between sexual grooming and sexting is becoming increasingly apparent. The Children’s Society has told me that its practitioners around the country are finding that sexting is a growing method of sexually grooming young people. It has said of sexting:

“It becomes a tool of coercion, threat and power, as young people are encouraged to take pictures or videos of themselves, initially often for a financial reward or because they are groomed into thinking the person is their boyfriend. The sexting then becomes a tool of manipulation and the young person is threatened that the images will be shared with their friends and teachers. A key problem is that young people see these texts as harmless fun but they quickly lead to sexualised conversations and grooming.”

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this debate, which is very timely. She has hit on an important point. Young people, particularly vulnerable young females, quite often look at sexting as a fairly innocent, normal exchange of either messages or images, and they do not realise the seriousness of what they are doing and how others could use that material. That is what we have to concentrate on today, and I am glad that the hon. Lady is making that point. Does she agree?

[Ann Coffey]

I certainly agree with the hon. Gentleman, and I am very pleased that there is a growing body of support among parliamentarians about the fact that we must address this important issue.

The Children’s Society has also said of sexting:

“Because it is not face to face interaction, young people will also behave in a different way without realising the risks that they are exposing themselves to, until it is too late.”

The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children will publish further research into sexting next month. It gave me an extract from a ChildLine call from a girl aged 16, which demonstrated the risk and potential harm to young people from sexting. She said:

“I have been in contact with a man who is a lot older than me. At first, he was nice, complimented my pictures and we became friends on a social network site. I forgot my phone number was on there and he started texting and calling me, saying explicit things and sending me sexual photos. He wants me to…have sex and I’m scared. I really don’t want to, but what do I do?”

As I have said, today’s young people live in a very different world due to the rapid pace of technological change that we have seen during the past 20 years. It has given them unprecedented access to global communication and information. However, as I have outlined, there are accompanying risks as a result. Those risks range from private photos shared between two young people becoming public property and leading to humiliation, bullying and blackmail to the use of those images for sophisticated online sexual grooming.

I reiterate that I support the recommendations in the online child protection inquiry as a step forward in protecting children, and I welcome the child sexual exploitation action plan that the Minister published last year. Local safeguarding children’s boards need to be aware of sexting as a tool for sexual grooming, so that they develop strategies in their areas to help them to safeguard children.

What more can be done? Of course sending sexual images is a criminal offence. However, I support the guidance of the Association of Chief Police Officers, which says:

“ACPO does not support the prosecution or criminalisation of children for taking indecent images of themselves and sharing them. Being prosecuted through the criminal justice system is likely to be distressing and upsetting for children, especially if they are convicted and punished. The label of ‘sex offender’ that would be applied to a child or young person convicted of such offences is regrettable, unjust and clearly detrimental to their future health and wellbeing.”

I agree that, in most instances and depending on the circumstances, sexting should be dealt with under general safeguarding.

Children and young people need to be supported by their parents, teachers and peers to ensure that they are empowered to manage new technology. Charities such as Family Lives offer valuable advice and help to parents who are concerned about their children’s sexual behaviour. A lot of good work is going on in schools and police forces to raise awareness and to recognise sexting as part of the grooming process. The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre provides an excellent education campaign called Thinkuknow and has produced a film about sexting. It is important that education and awareness-raising programmes focus on children who send images or exert pressure on other children to produce images without realising the extent of the damage that they can cause. Charities such as Beat Bullying have a great deal of expertise in that respect.

More needs to be done, however. I want the mobile phone industry to do more to highlight some of the dangers of its products, in the same way as the gambling and alcohol industries provide help for people who encounter problems arising from their products. The gambling industry provides funding for education and the treatment of problem gambling and the drinks industry funds the charity Drinkaware.

The mobile phone industry has a great responsibility, given the profits that it makes and its targeting of young people to buy its products, to set aside money to inform young people of the dangers of sexting. The industry should provide an information and advice leaflet with each new mobile phone, warning of the dangers of sexting. It should also pay for advertising on TV and in the press and for the promotion of helplines, such as the NSPCC’s ChildLine. The leaflet with each new mobile phone should explain how, at the click of a button, an image intended for private use can lead to public humiliation and even fall into the hands of sophisticated sexual predators. I should like retail sales people to be trained to discuss the risks of sexting when selling phones to young people or to adults buying them on their behalf.

The UK Council for Child Internet Safety, which the Minister jointly chairs and on which charities and some mobile phone operators sit, has been involved in debates about online safety for some time, so I am sure that something is being done to make progress. However, I hope the Minister will take my specific ideas about how mobile phone industries can do more and raise them at his next meeting with those industries.

As I have said, what can be seen by young people as the relatively harmless activity of sexting can lead to quite serious consequences for the young person involved. It is important to prevent that, and I feel strongly that by giving more information and increasing awareness among children and young people, we may prevent further harm coming to them, whether from bullying, blackmail or sexual exploitation or grooming. We must do what we can to educate and inform children and young people about the risks of sexting, so that their choices are based on an understanding of the consequences of their actions. The mobile phone companies must take their share of responsibility to help safeguard children and young people.