Sending and receiving sexually explicit messages is more common among teens than people might think. The latest representative study of Czech teenagers, conducted by researchers from the Interdisciplinary Research Team on Internet and Society (IRTIS) at the Faculty of Social Studies, reveals how many teenagers are sexting, as well as how they feel afterwards.
Sexting is a topic that many parents dread and is shrouded in myths. “It means sending and receiving messages containing sexually explicit text, pictures or videos of partially or fully naked people,” explains Michaela Šaradín Lebedíková, lead author of the study published in the prestigious journal New Media and Society. Sexting is a relatively widespread phenomenon among adolescents worldwide and is closely linked to psychosocial and sexual development. “Researchers believe that consensual sexting – an activity that takes place with the consent of everyone involved – is now a common part of growing up. But we also distinguish non-consensual sexting, which includes, for example, receiving unsolicited sexual content from others,” she adds. In her opinion, the latter can have far-reaching negative consequences.
In a representative study of 2,500 Czech adolescents aged 11 to 16, the IRTIS team examined how many had received sexual messages with and without consent, how many had sent such messages themselves, and the characteristics of those who engage in this behaviour. “In our research, we identified two types of sexual messages: those that teenagers expected to receive, and those that arrived unexpectedly and without warning. In the past six months, 15.4 per cent of teenagers received an expected sexual message, and 18.4 per cent (or about one in five) received an unexpected sexual message. Girls received unexpected messages slightly more often than boys,” says Šaradín Lebedíková. However, sending sexual messages is not very common among Czech teenagers: only 8 per cent of them sent a sexual message in the last six months. “The same factors are related to all three types of sexting behaviour. Adolescents who are older, show symptoms of depression and loneliness, have high levels of sensation seeking and lower levels of satisfaction have more experience with sexting,” says Šaradín Lebedíková.
Feelings after sexting
The new study also looked at the effects of sexting on short-term psychological well-being. “Existing qualitative studies asked adolescents how they felt after sexting, but there was a lack of systematic research linking the findings to individual factors,” says Šaradín Lebedíková, explaining the importance of the new study. “We found that up to a third of those who expected a sexting message – specifically 33.8 percent – felt upset about the message at least once a month afterwards. Of those who received a sexting message unexpectedly, 45.3 percent felt upset at least once a month,” she adds. By contrast, 26.5 percent of teens felt satisfied after an expected message and only 10.2 percent felt satisfied after an unexpected one.
The researchers also found significant gender differences in feelings after receiving the messages: while boys were more likely to report feeling satisfied after receiving the message, girls were more likely to feel angry, regardless of whether the teens received the message expectedly or unexpectedly. “Boys are more likely to see sending sexual messages to others as a joke, and such behaviour is more normalised among them. Therefore, receiving such messages may be perceived as something ordinary. International research suggests that boys perceive receiving sexual messages from girls as an affirmation of their masculinity, and this increases their status among their peers. Girls, on the other hand, are faced with a dilemma: if they do not want to participate in sexting, they are seen as prudish, but if they do, they are seen as promiscuous,” explains Šaradín Lebedíková. The researchers did not find gender differences in feelings after the sending of sexual messages. As many as 34.7 per cent of adolescents felt satisfied after sending and 17.8 per cent felt upset.
The researchers then looked at individual factors that are also related to feelings after sexting. “In line with media theories, we expected similar factors associated with sexting, such as age or loneliness, to also explain feelings experienced after sexting. But it turned out there was no clear pattern in the results: this is important because it points to the fact that there is no “sexting” as a single phenomenon and different sexting behaviours should be understood as separate phenomena. How adolescents feel after sexting is probably closely related to motivations for sexting and also to context-dependent factors, like with whom they sexted, under what conditions and so on,” concludes Šaradín Lebedíková.
The study was supported by the DigiWELL project (Research of Excellence on Digital Technologies and Wellbeing), which supports researchers from eight partner institutions across different disciplines who are studying the use of digital technologies in relation to people's physical, mental and social well-being.