Young people’s perceptions of harm from accessing online sexual content

Abstract

Harm—and the ways in which it is interpreted, negotiated, discussed, and unpacked by adolescents themselves—is a key term in almost all debates about young people’s experiences with online pornography. This essay situates the topic of this special issue—adolescents’ perceptions of harm from accessing online sexual content—within a broader context of the discourses and practices that inform research in this field. We show how discourses of harm and risk circulate around the figure of the innocent child in need of protection and argue for more nuanced understandings of and research about childhood that take into account the lived experiences and perspectives of young people themselves. The papers in this special issue cover a range of academic perspectives and reflect diverse epistemological, methodological, and academic cultures. The special issue underscores the complex nature of the topic and the need for nuanced, rigorous, and robust empirical research.

The topic of this special issue emerges from a larger project that engages with the Australian government’s April 2017 response to the Senate Environment and References Committee report (November 2016) on the Harm being done to Australian children through access to pornography on the Internet (Government Response, 2017; Senate Report, 2016). In the larger project “A comparative investigation into Australian adolescents’ perceptions of harm from accessing online sexual content,” funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), researchers from Australia, Greece, Ireland, and Norway interviewed adolescents and their parents to query what meanings adolescents construct around online sexual content and to ask whether or not they perceive of themselves as being harmed by consuming sexual content online.

To expand this research, we circulated a call for papers inviting researchers to submit manuscripts that address—but are not limited to—the following questions:

• How do young people unpack the notion of harm when talking about online pornography?

• How do young people who acknowledge a degree of harm in their own experiences with online pornography talk about it?

• To what extent is harm working as an umbrella concept including negotiations about representation, consumption, intimacy, consent, or rights?

• How do young people account for online pornography in the broader context of sex education and porn literacy?

• How is the notion of harm in young people’s experiences with online pornography conceptualized in different cultural contexts and the current historical moment?

• What are the methodological and ethical challenges in researching young people’s experiences with online sexual content?

We situated these questions within the context of the broader field in which discussions about young people’s access to or experiences with online pornography underpin most conversations and concerns about adolescents’ experiences online more broadly, and we summarized current approaches to the topic as follows:

Effects-laden approaches assuming online pornography’s effects on young people dominate the debates around children’s sexuality more broadly and online pornography specifically, while approaches drawing from cultural studies and porn studies contextualise young people’s negotiations with online pornography in historical, cultural, and social terms. Growing academic research is putting play and consent in the research and sex education agendas (McKee et al., 2020) and also using porn literacy as an analytical framework to understand how young people transform their experiences and their knowledge of the conventions of the genre into a discourse about sexuality (Buckingham and Chronaki, 2014). Discussions about sexting (Albury, 2016), pornography’s position in sex education, and porn literacy education (Goldstein, 2020) are being shaped more systematically and are informing current debates.

The papers we received in response to our call cover a range of academic perspectives on the matter and reflect diverse epistemological, methodological, and academic cultures. The special issue aims to underscore the complex nature of the topic and the need for nuanced, rigorous, and robust empirical research. Papers derive from cultural studies and cultural feminist approaches, and also from mass communication and effects approaches. In this sense, it is a volume acknowledging that a fruitful academic dialogue on the contested topic of youth, media, and sexuality emerges through a constructive debate among different, and often contrasting, epistemologies.

Harm discourse: an unchallenged orthodoxy?

A key term in almost all debates about young people’s experiences with online pornography is “harm” and the ways in which it is interpreted, negotiated, discussed, and unpacked by young people themselves. Concerns about children’s access to pornography and sexual content are present in everyday discourse. Whether in the form of lay discussions about children and the family, or in news about childhood violence, bullying, or perceived risks around children’s use of social media, such anxieties abound across cultures and discursive arenas. For instance, Australia’s initiative to pass legislation banning social media for young people under the age of 16 (Ritchie, 2024) generated worldwide publicity and provided a convenient platform for media across the European Union (EU) to discuss similar legislative acts in their national contexts. From September to December 2024, there was an intensification of media discourse in Australia, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Greece, Norway, and France (Reuters, 2024) welcoming such legislative acts (Ritchie, 2024). National media across these countries presented the topic as a long-awaited initiative toward the protection of children from a number of online risks, with pornography and sexual content ranking on top. As the papers in this special issue show, abstract legislative frameworks and related public discourse seem disconnected from the adolescents who they purport to protect. Rather, they erase the positive aspects of young people’s everyday practices with social media and obscure what young people themselves consider bothersome, problematic, or even harmful. In addition, young people took issue with the word “harm” used in relation to pornography, finding the term too extreme (See and Woodley, 2024).

An abstract orthodoxy about the risk to children and the harm caused by online technologies is endemic in media, and partly in academic discourse. Representations of violence and pornography—often discussed in tandem—become convenient vernaculars about what is considered harmful for children, and these anxieties shape the discourse about childhood and (social) media. Anxieties of this sort, or what Marwick (2008) calls “technopanics,” reflect a fear of new technologies and a view of technology as an unregulated evil with “hypodermic” powers to harm children (Bragg et al., 2011). Whether termed as “technopanics” (Marwick, 2008), moral panics, “media panics” (Drotner, 1992) or otherwise, those narratives encapsulate a view of children as inherently innocent and at the same time somehow sexual and unruly. In this context, discussions about children’s access to sexual content (reductively labeled as “porn”), young people’s sexual communication, and the sexualization of childhood are shaped in such a way that calls for children to be protected from the threat of technology and from their own “unruly” selves.

This rhetoric of anxiety speaks to broader morality tales about children and media which center primarily around social media, entertainment media, and the entertaining aspect of social media. Moral campaigning feeds an unspecified anxiety about children’s consumption practices, especially consumption of different forms of pop culture, as has been articulated in Daunton and Hilton’s (2001) “politics of consumption.” These practices include but are not limited to the use of social media for communication, content production, activism, flirting, coming out, sexting, consuming sexual information, and consuming popular texts. In other words, adolescents’ use of social media is seen as paradoxically playful and harmful. It is the harm component, however, that takes precedent, and as a result, this vast array of practices is potentially assumed as risky or harmful.

Childhood sexuality, harm, and risk

Historically, the fear of harm goes hand in hand with concerns about childhood sexuality and both are accompanied by the notion of risk with harm as a result of risk and childhood sexuality as a status of risk itself. These fears can be seen in the Victorian middle-classes’ teachings about masturbation leading to insanity (Kehily and Montgomery, 2009); in the 1950s psych-oriented formulation of the child molester in the form of the “sexual psychopath” (stereotypically a homosexual) (Tsaliki, 2016: 86); in the 1980s and 1990s sexual abuse moral crusades; and in recent day campaigning about the potential harm from accessing sexual content online. Across times and cultures, the harm component in the discourse about childhood sexuality demonstrates adults’ acknowledgment of children’s sexuality and the belief that children need to be regulated for their own safety and well-being.

Indeed, risk and harm problematically become part of how childhood and youth are understood. Childhood equates with innocence while sexuality connotes the opposite (Jackson, 1982): sexuality signifies promiscuousness, irrationality, something uncontrollably and uniquely pleasurable, which renders it potentially dangerous, too. In addition, sexuality is constructed as part of the neoliberal self, enveloping everything that is expected to be kept private because of the discomfort it causes when it becomes public. On the other hand, innocence is associated with being precious and helpless. According to Fischel (2016), this idea of the innocent child leads to a politics to preserve a romanticized idea of childhood.

Childhood innocence is premised on the conception of children as ignorant of sex and for this reason any account or representation of infantile sexuality “threatens our sense of what children should be” (Buckingham and Chronaki, 2014: 303). Since the 18th century, children’s sexuality was problematized in educational and religious contexts (Foucault, 2003 [1975]: 117), for children were considered inherently asexual and yet somehow sexual. Children’s sexuality was used as a boundary to distinguish between normal and abnormal and thus between what is rational (and therefore in accordance with a human being’s social nature) and irrational (and thus instinctive and lacking social existence). The medicalization and scrutinization of children’s sexuality has reinforced related concerns, with experts across the spectrum of psychology, medicine, and sexology emerging as voices of authority that justify the regulation of the young sexual body (Egan and Hawkes, 2010).

Rose (1999 [1989]) argues that childhood has become an object of scientific scrutiny, particularly of psychology, since the 19th century, while a number of related professions centering around childhood and its care became the voices of authority about children’s protection, supervision, and regulation. Together with families that bear most of the child-rearing responsibility, the child had to be taught self-governance by brokering the information provided by the family and the experts (Tsaliki, 2016). Different cultures of the formation of “character” emerged as a result, from the Victorian “turn-to-character” education where virtues like honesty and perseverance had to be ingrained into the self to the mid-20th century pursuit of “personality” perceived as a process of self-formation through self-discovery (Hunt, 1999: 4; Tsaliki and Chronaki, 2020). In such a state of diverse yet consistent rhetorics of concern about childhood across centuries, the forbidden and yet deeply fascinating figure of the sexual child emerges as one of the most pre-eminent concerns in social, academic, and policy discourse (Kehily and Montgomery, 2009).

In this child-at-risk discourse regarding sexuality, calls to regulate childhood stem from adult fears that children will lose their innocence and become sexualized. Nevertheless, they also reflect movements and calls for reforms constructing childhood in terms of class, gender, and race such as 19th-century campaigns excluding children from underground work in the mines on the grounds that the working conditions mobilized representations of semi-nude children and encouraged vulgar behaviors in those spaces (Jackson and Scott, 1999). Middle-class anxieties about gender and class are also reflected in contemporaneous campaigns about child purity and masturbation phobia, or the sexual hygiene movement during the early 20th century and the child-rearing advice manuals of the 1930s and 1940s (Egan and Hawkes, 2010). The pedagogization of children’s sex has been one of the dominant discursive strategies defining the construction of sexuality in modernity: “the pedagogization was especially evident in the war against onanism, which in the West lasted nearly two centuries” (Foucault, 1978: 104). In fact, the protection and social reform discourse validated different forms of governmental intervention to childhood through science, surveillance, and discipline (Egan and Hawkes, 2010).

Contemporary assumptions about harm potentially deriving from sexual content are directed toward children as individuals but also toward specific populations and practices: girls are at risk of harm more than boys; young children more at risk than older children; low socioeconomic status (SES) children more at risk than middle and upper SES young people (see Smahel et al., 2020); and black children and black girls more at risk than their white peers (see Rothman et al., 2014). In other words, so-called sensitive, marginalized young populations, in particular, are assumed to be at more risk of harm than dominant cultural groups and are framed as in need of safeguarding or guidance toward appropriate sexuality. According to Cradock (2004), the intensification of the child-at-risk discourse was the result of the limitations of liberal governance and the emergence of the neoliberal culture of “responsibilization” of the family and the individual. In the late 1990s, the term “risk”—previously used in child welfare discourse to describe families in need of investigation and supervision—became a term to describe an individual and specifically the figure of the child (Cradock, 2004; Tsaliki, 2016). A subsequent prevalence of risk assessments about childhood reflected an intensification of quantified approaches to risks for children and was exemplified in policy and academic discourse (Tsaliki, 2016).

It is not surprising then that the figure of the sexual child is placed at the conjunction of a sensibility about risk awareness and management, a call for governmentality and self-governmentality of the sexual individual, and temporal shifts in the cultural politics of childhood reinforced by technological change. In a state where risk runs across the ways in which we understand how subjectivities are being constituted and performed, anxieties specific to childhood become part of a more general anxiety about a world that is not stable or predictable and is thus more dangerous (Jackson and Scott, 1999). Risk awareness and management in this process make the world and the social condition more manageable. Expectations for risk management on behalf of the citizenry and heightened risk awareness are intrinsic characteristics of neoliberal societies, at the center of which sits the figure of the child who reflects prospects, dreams, and expectations of the future. In this context, child protection cultures within the family are characteristic of how governing the young and self-governance of the young is expected to mitigate potential risks or harm (Rose, 1999 [1989]). Such discourses of anxiety deriving from risk-avoidance, risk-mitigation, and protectionist cultures contribute to the expectations of young people to internalize self-governing principles that will protect them from risk and harm. Simultaneously, parents, “as legally and in essence responsible for them, instill and apply those self-governing principles for them” (Tsaliki and Chronaki, 2020: 12).

Risk and harm can also be related to what Lesko terms “confident characterisations” with which adults make sense of youth (Lesko, 2012). Her cultural analysis of adolescence and youth at the turn of the 20th century as a status of constant becoming, and in effect of constant scrutiny and regulation, may effectively be extended to discussions about younger children. Lesko contends that adults make sense of adolescents as “naturally occurring.” She identifies four characterisations of adolescence which operate across different spaces of social life “including education, law, medicine, psychology and social work, as well as in popular culture” (2012: 4): (1) homiletic discourses about adolescents “coming of age,” where adolescence is defined through an ‘ideology of emergence’; (2) adolescents as controlled by ‘raging hormones’; (3) adolescents under the influence of peers, one of the most dominant discourses within the space of common sense; and (4) adolescence as signified by age, implying that time shapes the performance, expectations, and construction of their status. These characterizations are not just discursive formulations allowing adults to understand adolescents; they are also becoming the platforms upon which the moral regulation of youth takes place. This regulation extends to their behaviors, actions, and engagement, which we explore within the context of access to online sexual content.

Media, leisure time, and the concern about young people’s “risky behavior”

Adult discourses about children’s consumption practices reflect views of what is good or bad uses of media and what is understood as productive or unproductive leisure (Blackman, 2011). Practices with sexual media or sexual practices with and through social media are understood as risky and potentially harmful activity emanating from “self-directed” and “unstructured” leisure (Chronaki, 2021; Tsaliki, 2016). Concerns about children’s unstructured leisure emerged as an anxiety of Victorian middle and upper classes to regulate the young poor in an attempt to safeguard middle- and upper-class children from juvenile deviance and moral deprivation and was often defined not only as a social but also as a health problem (Blackman, 2011; Tsaliki, 2015). Contemporary assumptions about children’s self-directed leisure as risky usually concerns mundane, everyday, casual, playful, and potentially private social practices which are not ascribed with any pedagogical or ethical significance, such as gaming, social media communication, producing content on social media, or series binge-watching. Tsaliki (2016: 211) explains how leisure deriving from certain forms of pop culture consumption is often marked as inappropriate, promiscuous, and problematic since it means time spent out of the regulatory context of the family or school but also time not spent wisely.

The significance of time in organizing both young and adults’ social practices—including working, learning, dining, sleeping (Lesko, 2012; Schatzki, 2009)—means it is also significant in emotional, moral, and political ways (Shove, 2009: 2). Essentially, time has an ethical component contributing to how individuals govern their everyday routines (Slater, 2009). Lesko (2012) introduces the term “panoptical time” to explain the temporal narrative in which adolescence is being contextualized, demanding a moratorium of responsibility yet expecting adolescents to act as if each moment of the present is consequential (p. 91). One may then understand that disruptions in this sociotemporal organization of youth through pleasurable and unstructured entertainment signifies a disruption of the ethically oriented ways in which we think about those constructions and how they operate.

Time spent on sexuality-related practices is seen as problematic not just in terms of ethics and their nature as “self-directed” leisure but also because of their relation to pleasure. Foucault (2003 [1975]) provides a conceptual framework on how certain practices and acts related to pleasure have acquired an ethical value through the technology of confession. Confession and the prominent Catholic imperative about self-regulation have contributed to the transformation of sex into a discursive idea wherein people are prompted to speak about their bodies, relationships, symptoms, experiences, pains, and pleasures to a number of experts. Sex becomes seen as good and bad, with good sex being procreational, classed, adult, gendered, heteronormative, private, and subjected to norms of propriety (Rubin, 1984). In such a context, thinkers like Rose and Foucault explain how children’s sexuality has been conceptualized in terms of health and morality, while sexuality has also been subjected to binaries of propriety and health. The discursivity of sexuality in modernity, where “good” defined what normative sex meant, contributed to the production of certain “conducts of conduct” (Rose, 1999 [1989]) and children’s sexuality (Foucault, 1978, p. 49) became constructed as the “sexual Other.”

Researchers’ approaches: a fruitful dialogue

Research on children’s experiences with sexual content online—whether these are labeled pornography, explicit material, sexualized content, or sexual communication—emanate from an enquiry to look for or problematize a notion of harm. Researchers in this field represent largely three epistemological traditions: psychological, communication risk, and cultural studies approaches. Psychological approaches aim to prove a causal relationship between young people’s experiences with sexual content online and media influence. “Communication risk” approaches (Chronaki, 2013) look at the extent to which certain online experiences defined as risky are potentially engendering harm. Cultural studies, cultural feminist, anthropological, and porn studies approaches attempt to challenge dominant cultural constructions of harm and underscore the need to focus on pleasure, play, and children’s nuanced constructions of sexuality to address issues of sex education, consent, and sexual health.

Effects-laden and communication risk approaches are the most influential in the field. Critical approaches about the social construction of sexuality and childhood remain under-represented in mainstream discursive arenas (policy, public, and academic), and more in some cultures than others (especially those with a strong religious history and in the global south). We do not mean here to position cultural approaches against media effects and communication risks approaches and to reproduce another binary logic pertaining to whether children’s experiences with sexual content online should either celebrated or frowned upon. On the contrary, the aim of this special issue is to offer space for all perspectives to unfold.

The pervasiveness of certain epistemological approaches, however, has a historical explanation. As Rose (2002: 234) has aptly argued, with the significance of the growth of psy expertise across all aspects of social and cultural life and activity in the 20th century, human beings have become psychological selves:

From 1950s onwards, [our feelings, beliefs, desires, hopes and fears] have been overpowered by new “experts of experience.” These experts rest their authority upon claim to truth, to science and objectivity, to facts, experiments, findings and statistics, to long hours in the consulting room and the hospital. They impress us because their advice seems to rest on evidence within reality itself, although evident only to those who know how to look.

To be able to offer an inclusive critique of ongoing research means looking at the evidence currently informing different public and policy agendas and also looking at the evidence that is missing from it. Systematic research reviews on the topic and a large amount of scholarly critique allow us to point at key difficulties in current psychological and communication risk research: (1) a lack of clarity in defining the terms at hand, such as pornography (or even sexual content) and harm (Buckingham and Chronaki, 2014; McKee et al., 2020); (2) a set of recurring assumptions about the content examined and the populations investigated (Vertongen et al., 2022); (3) assertive assumptions about a causal relationship between sexual content consumption and perceived effects on young audiences (Dudek et al., 2021; Tsaliki, 2016; Vertongen et al., 2022; Woodley et al., 2024); (4) methodological challenges related to the nature of the population investigated, the methods and tools administered, and the assumptions implied within the tools of data collection (Buckingham and Chronaki, 2014; Tsaliki, 2016); (5) a lack of participatory research or at least of research offering a space of claim-making, identity building, and negotiation of intimate citizenship to children in matters directly related to their everyday lives (Mulholland, 2015; Scott et al., 2020); and (6) a lack of attention to academic research that engages with more progressive approaches to children’s sexuality and sexual rights (Albury, 2014; Dudek et al., 2021; McKee et al., 2021).

One of the key issues in both effects-laden and communication risks approaches is how these approaches define pornography, sexual content, and/or explicit content. One person’s erotica can obviously be another person’s pornography, but the issue becomes more complex if we look at definitions across cultures, across generations, and also through a comparison between legacy and online media. The issue becomes even more complex when policy papers or public discourse obfuscates discussions about pornography or sexually explicit content with illegal and deeply problematic content, such as material featuring sexual abuse of children (Buckingham and Chronaki, 2014). The content is usually termed as sexually “explicit” (implying a representation that goes beyond some invisibly defined boundaries); or as sexually inappropriate (implying something is not acceptable); or as “adult content” (a reminder that it has not been designed for children’s consumption); or as “pornography” (a catch-all term with negative connotations). Overwhelmingly, researchers and participants rarely agree upon what terminology should be used. As McKee et al. (2019: 1089) note, film/media researchers usually favor culturally and temporally specific definitions while psychologists tend to assign “pornographicness” to the text itself.

Research in this area is further complicated by assumptions about who suffers harm and the severity of that harm. As we discussed earlier, populations perceived as sensitive are seen to be most at risk to lose their innocence and to suffer mentally or physically (Peter and Valkenburg, 2016) and alleviating such risk is discussed as a discourse of guidance. We here need to clarify that communication risk approaches adopt a nuanced child-centered methodological and epistemological approach, and they are not making direct assumptions about effects from children’s access to sexual content. Problematically, however, positioning children’s online practices within a binary of risk and opportunity, wherein sexuality is considered a risky behavior, excludes research showing how young people learn from pornography (Albury, 2014; Byron, 2024; Chronaki, 2019) and use it to talk about the politics of consumption (Tsaliki, 2016) and about gendered power relations, sexism, sexual rights, and sexual subjectivities (Scott et al., 2020). Rather, children’s sexuality within a racialized, gendered, classed, and context-specific condition is often neglected (Tsaliki, 2016), and pleasure, knowledge, self-expression, and identity management are often not acknowledged (Scott et al., 2020; Woodley et al., 2024).

Teaching porn literacy is one way of engaging young people in conversations about their sexuality. Although porn literacy is at times discussed as a way to learn what pornography is and how to avoid it (Byron, 2024), in practice, it is a form of capital through which young people talk about the politics of sexuality, including the ethical self, taste and aesthetics in popular culture and sexual representations, and sexual health and sex education. Being versed in porn literacy is a way for adolescents to claim their position in the discourse of adults and to perform modes of citizenship (Byron et al., 2021; Chronaki, 2019), including what Plummer (2002) terms “intimate citizenship.”

Most research about young people accessing sexual content online draws from quantitative approaches which by default limit our ability to provide a broader contextualization of children’s understanding of sexual content. Although they offer large and very significant mappings of what young people do with sexual content and some demographic data, administering large quantitative tools that young people are expected to fill and cannot use to express themselves does not motivate them to participate in research. This approach is critiqued for offering inconclusive results to the academic discourse (Barker, 2013) since abstract assumptions about what young people do without further contextualization through qualitative research may not lead to robust evidence. Also, apart from intensifying participants’ assumption that when scientists ask about sexual content through such long questionnaires, “there must be something wrong with it”, it also limits the opportunities of such a method being considered as a way of giving voice to children. Although research has progressed from a decades-long tradition of using college populations in sexuality research (Buckingham and Chronaki, 2014), the need to engage more fully with participatory research when it comes to youth sexualities and digital intimacies (pornography consumption included) is of paramount importance (Scott et al., 2020), and many of the papers in this special issue embrace this research philosophy.

To understand concerns about children’s experiences with sexual content means understanding how social factors like race, class, and gender shape experiences and performances but also why pragmatic elements relating to sexuality and sexual knowledge remain at the margins of academic discourse. Those elements are often overlooked in mainstream research in favor of a more uniform approach to childhood as an at-risk state of being. This position assumes that risks and the associated harms are the same for all children or as if they are being understood in the same way across cultures and times (Tsaliki and Chronaki, 2020). Researchers on children’s experiences with sexual content undoubtedly mean well when it comes to children’s well-being and are part of an undeniably fruitful dialogue on the topic. However, academic research must speak to children’s and young people’s needs and cultures. It must move toward more inclusive and participatory research. More broadly, it needs to embrace research offering a more balanced approach to young people’s sexualities (Woodley et al., 2024), which acknowledges that children’s safety and sexual knowledge derives from their having a say about pleasures from sexual knowledge, sexual communication, and consumption of sexual content (e.g. Attwood et al., 2018; Mckee et al., 2020; Mulholland, 2015; Tsaliki, 2016). During the last two decades, progressive approaches to young people’s digital sexual literacies, digital intimacies, sex education (Scarcelli and Mainardi, 2019; Scott et al., 2020; Woodley et al., 2024), porn literacies, and sexual citizenship (Buckingham and Chronaki, 2014; Byron, 2024; Chronaki, 2019; McLelland, 2016) prove that a more inclusive approach to young people’s accounts of sexuality is of paramount importance.

Childhood encapsulates adults’ and societies’ expectations of the future and a reaffirmation that what is unstable and unpredictable used to be better and will be again. To unpack the orthodoxy of harm and explain how it is firmly immersed across different rhetorics about childhood and sexuality, researchers need to focus their attention on those distinctive elements that not only formulate the discourse of harm but also obscure the specificities of childhood and sexuality. Such work requires that researchers ask themselves and their data difficult and unsettling questions and that they interpellate their own epistemological work so as to avoid deterministic or overtly polemical approaches (Buckingham and Jensen, 2012). It also requires asking questions that might compel researchers to think reflexively about their own everyday ideologies regarding childhood and sexuality, their gender or sexual identity, their own childhood recollections and experiences, their relationships, bodies or power relations, and those of their offspring (see Egan and Hawkes, 2010). Such reflexive thinking will inevitably lead to questions about the key claims made about children and sexual content online (and broadly about childhood sexuality) in different arenas. What kind of evidence is neglected in mainstream research and public arenas and why? Who are the claims-makers shaping this “emotional rhetoric” (Buckingham, 2013) at the time they conduct their research and to whom are those claims mainly addressed? And finally, to whom are their own findings addressed and what do they feel their knowledge holders are expecting to learn from their research (Barker, 2013)? Many of the papers in this special issue attend to such questions and encourage further research into these areas.

Contributions to this special issue

Despite the diversity across the manuscripts, overwhelmingly the findings call for a more nuanced understanding of adolescents’ use of sexual content, which is based upon young people’s own articulation of their lived experiences. Rather than a debate shaped by adults, these papers often draw upon the voices of young people themselves and how they negotiate the harm discourse across different countries and cultures such as Australia, Czechoslovakia, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, and Spain.

Given this attention to young peoples’ participation in the debates that influence their lives, it is appropriate that the first article outlines some of the challenges of including children in research about sensitive topics. In their paper, Niamh Ní Bhroin, Elisabeth Staksrud, Nora Botten Englund, and Jenny Krutzinna propose exclusion, exploitation, extension, and empowerment as four dimensions that shape the ethics of research that includes children, and they present 10 recommendations for conducting research that respects and empowers children.

The next articles are based upon participatory research with adolescents to gauge young people’s perceptions of risk and harm. Robyn Cherie Vertongen, Clifford van Ommen, and Kerry Chamberlain interviewed male adolescents in New Zealand, who believed that harm from pornography: applied to others but usually not to themselves; was unlikely and short-lived for themselves; and was less likely to cause harm than what adults claimed. In his interviews with young Italians, Cosimo Marco Scarcelli found an oversimplification in the public discourse related to young people’s relationship with online pornography. The participants expressed an understanding of porn as unrealistic but also connected this misrepresentation of reality as an aspect of pornography that might cause harm. Similar to Vertongen et al.’s findings, teenagers in Scarcelli’s study also expressed a belief that other people, such as children younger than themselves, were more at risk. The next article also challenges a simplified definition of pornography and porn practices. Laura Fernández, Maria-Jose Masanet, and Sergio Villanueva Baselga conducted workshops and interviews with young people in Barcelona about their experience with pornography. The study emphasizes a need to consider pornography as an evolving sexual category that stems from the participants’ own definitions of it. As with other articles in this special issue, the findings also suggest gendered differences in how boys and girls consume and experience sexual content, with boys co-viewing pornography and finding it humorous and girls often experiencing porn for the first time accidentally and watching it more critically.

The next three articles move away from qualitative research. The first study uses an integrative media effects framework to analyze the responses of 2365 Czech adolescents in relation to their experience of sexting and well-being. Michaela Lebedíková, Rubén Olveira-Araujo, David Šmahel, and Kaveri Subrahmanyam argue for a more nuanced definition of sexting that takes into account sending sexts; unexpectedly receiving sexts; and receiving expected sexts. Their findings noted gendered differences about the experience of receiving sexts but no differences after sending sexts, with all respondents expressing a feeling of happiness. The second paper also investigates content created by young people, but in this case, YouTube videos. In their analysis of digital narratives created by and for young people, Jessica Robinson and Khalid Azam found that the biggest risk connected to watching pornography that was expressed by the video makers was the threat of getting caught and punished by parents. Confessional narratives are also the focus of the third study in this section. Using a media content analytical approach informed by discourse analysis, Despina Chronaki, Liza Tsaliki, Debra Dudek, Elisabeth Staksrud, Giselle Woodley, and Thi Bich Thuy Dinh examine how global media outlets reported Billie Eilish’s confession that watching porn as an 11-year-old damaged her brain and affected her early dating experiences. Studied within the context of Eilish as a celebrity pedagogue, Chronaki et al. show how media deployed uniform narratives of anxiety about youth sexuality, reiterating public anxieties about children’s experiences with sexual content online.

The final two papers examine the topic of this special issue from the perspective of the parents of adolescents. Based upon their interviews and focus groups with 40 Australian parents, Catherine Page Jeffery, Alan McKee, and Catharine Lumby argue that while these parents expressed some concern about their children’s access to online pornography, most parents were unaware of their children’s experiences with porn and had not had conversations with them about it. Furthermore, many parents articulated their concerns using dominant—and often gendered—discourses of risk, such as we outlined earlier in our introduction, rather than basing their opinions upon knowledge of their children’s experiences. The special issue concludes with a study based upon interviews conducted separately with parents and their adolescent children in Australia and Ireland. As with the previous study, in this research, Harrison W. See, Lelia Green, Kjartan Ólafsson, Brian O’Neill, Carmen Jacques, and Kelly Jaunzems found that accessing online sexual content was only one of many concerns parents have about their adolescent children. Rather than seeing themselves as worried about harm caused by consuming pornography, parents generally said they were responsible—and better equipped than policy makers—for helping their children have a healthy understanding of gender and sexuality.

We hope this special issue contributes productively to the ongoing research about young people’s experiences with sexual content, with research from across different national and research cultures.