Navigating Intimate Image Sharing: Youth Experiences with Technology-Mediated Sexuality in a New Legal Landscape

Cyberbullying and intimate image sharing have become topics of grave concern for policy makers in several jurisdictions, including Canada. Intimate image–sharing controversies have aroused debates between policy approaches that primarily seek to protect young people from potential harms in digital spaces and those that endeavour to recognize, legitimize, and support young peoples’ legal and ethical rights to sexual self-expression in digital spaces—what might be termed, their rights to sexual citizenship. This dissertation aims to do the latter, to give space to youth voices to understand how they negotiate risk, well-being, and sexual pleasure in digital contexts and cultures.

This dissertation illustrates the processes involved in creating a new legal landscape around intimate image sharing in Nova Scotia against the backdrop of the Rehtaeh Parsons case and the impacts that the landscape has had on both young peoples’ legal consciousness and their sexual citizenship. The legal response following Parsons’ death reveals that anxieties about youth sex and technology prompted swift state action that was more focused on responding to the “problem” of teenage technology-mediated sexuality than to sexual violence itself. My study examines the navigational work that youth do and the choices that they make, and how these are sometimes shaped by this legal landscape. I employ sexual citizenship as a conceptual framing in that it opens space to challenge a long history of technopanics and fears about child and youth sexuality that have informed policy that impacts young people.

Analysis of art workshops and face-to-face semi-structured interviews with Nova Scotian youth ages 13–18, which I conducted in 2017, revealed new findings that start to fill a gap in Non-Consensual Distribution of Intimate Images (NCDII) work by exploring questions about legal consciousness and sexual citizenship. I found that youth participants’ offer nuanced understandings about NCDII that vary from the dominant narratives that they receive, and while the adult world might consider a criminal justice response the most appropriate in cases of NCDII among teens, young people do not believe that they or their peers would mobilize legal redress and are instead more likely to employ extra-legal approaches in these cases. This study uncovers a variety of reasons that teenagers are unlikely to mobilize criminal law in these cases including: perceptions of the law’s failures to support victims/survivors of sexualized violence; fear of sexual shaming and blaming; negative perceptions of police; and fear of personal criminalization and/or the criminalization of their peers.

I argue for youth-centred approaches to policy and curriculum development around digital sexuality and image sharing that include consultations with young people themselves. Further, these approaches need to move toward a positive sexual rights framing that would recognize and legitimize young people as sexual citizens.