Is consent possible in a world where female sexuality has been hijacked by forces such as porn, patriarchy and male entitlement? That’s the the big question Chanel Contos’ new book, Consent Laid Bare , wants to answer. The following is an excerpt that unpacks the inadequacies in how we handle image-based abuse – a problem that begins years before kids get ‘consent education’.
Sexting
Every time I speak to teenage girls, without fail I hear about either their own experience, or a peer’s experience, of image-based abuse. The narrative is so classic, I would argue it’s universal in contexts like Australia and the UK. It goes like this:
- Girl sends consensual image of herself (although, to be honest, a lot of the time coercion or sexual extortion is employed – for example, ‘if you don’t send me a photo of your tits, I’ll send the one you sent me of you last week in a bra to your friends’ or ‘if you don’t send me a naked photo then I’ll break up with you’).
- Photo of girl is sent into a group chat of boys, which exists for the purpose of distributing ‘nudes’; essentially, a public trophy wall of image- based abuse, for the purpose of elevating their social status as ‘men’.
- Girl is embarrassed, but cannot report it to the school because the blanket rule and education around naked images or ‘sexting’ is that ‘the creation of child pornography is illegal’. If it does get back to the school, the girl almost always gets in trouble for sending the nude, even if she was pressured, forced, tricked, threatened or blackmailed into doing so. The boys’ group chat continues.
From what I hear, this usually starts to happen around age 12.
A nine-month study of 54 million texts and 1.5 million hours of phone usage in the US found some disturbing results. Namely, that 15.5% of eight-year-old girls were exposed to ‘sexting’ compared to 5.9% of boys the same age, and that by age 13, 24% of children were either asked to send nude photos of themselves, or had requested them. Another study on self-generated child sexual abuse material (SG-CSAM) found that 14% of children aged 9–12 and 19% of children aged 13–17 have shared their own SG-CSAM.
A 2022 study in Australia found that 86% of students aged 14–18 had received sexual messages or images, and 71% had sent them. It also found that 23% of students had sent images to someone they only knew online. As expected, this study found that young women and LGBQ+ young people were more likely to send or receive sexual images or messages than young heterosexual men.
I’ve been told that it’s common for boys to ask for nudes from girls before they’ve even met in person. By the time they’re 15 and I’ve been called into a school to talk to them about image-based abuse, they laugh at me and say that they’ve ‘grown out of that’. Data backs this up. In another study in 2020, 16% of 9–12-year-olds said their close friends ‘often reshare’ another kid’s SG-CSAM (note this is a large increase from 7% in 2019), yet only 13% of 13–17-year-olds believed this (a slight decrease from 15% in 2019). The most recent study in Australia found that 21% of girls and 11% of boys aged 14–18 have had naked images of them shared without permission.
I wonder if this speaks to the fact that schools and parents are starting to have these conversations more frequently with teenagers, but are unaware of how early these conversations are actually required. Moreover, I assume that the 15-year-olds who say they have ‘grown out of it’ don’t mean that the boys have suddenly developed healthy attitudes towards girls and learned of the implications of image-based abuse, but instead that they have moved on to physical sexual activity, where stories are shared in the change room instead of in the group chat.
‘Leaked’ nudes
“Jennifer Lawrence nudes leaked!” “Megan Thee Stallion NUDE!” “Snapchat teen EXPOSED!” Websites exist where you can access ‘every celebrity leaked nude EVER’.
These all position the idea of confidential sexual images as some fault in security and plumbing, a hoodwink of greater society in order to have accessed them. ‘Revenge porn’, it’s called, implying the victim of the ‘leak’ has done something that warranted this violation.
There is even a category on Pornhub for ‘leaked nudes’. It would be much closer to the truth for it to be labelled ‘image-based abuse’.
Our society polices women’s bodies so much, and gives so little attention to violations of consent, that when a girl or woman has her nudes ‘leaked’, the embarrassment is on her. We shame people for taking photos of their own body (which were probably requested by and/or leaked by someone else).
Why does the media try to embarrass celebrities who have been the victims of image-based abuse? Why do we act as if taking a naked photo of yourself is something that most people under 30 haven’t done at some point? I can only imagine how many naked film photos and polaroids exist of older people. Why are we not drastically more concerned with the fact that consent has been violated, either by a person who was trusted with the image, or by a hacker?
When the Teach Us Consent petition started really kicking off and I was doing dozens of media appearances a week, at least three ex-partners (who I was and remain good friends with) made jokes about how they could ‘cancel’ me if they leaked my nudes. I laughed along, and said, ‘I dare you,’ because I trusted none of them would. On reflection, it’s strange that it was acknowledged by all of us that a naked photo of me released to the public by them would be detrimental to my career, and my message as a consent activist.
Consent Laid Bare by Chanel Contos (published by Macmillan Australia) is out now
Smart people read more
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