The one question you must ask your teenage kids

Swear to god, it was hard enough parenting teenagers when they only had one life. Now they have two: a physical life and a digital life.

Not sure how I would have managed the chat about dick pics, but the National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollonds says we have to bite the bullet. I could barely get through conversations about sex, drugs and bike helmets. This is a whole new task of terror: “Have you ever sent or received an inappropriate image?”

We have to talk to our kids about body parts, both offline and online. When’s a good time to start the chat? Sigh. Kindy.

We know one in four women between the ages of 18 and 24 has been on the receiving end of something resembling a dick pic. But it starts much earlier than that. Much, much earlier.

It’s never too early to start talking about intimate photos. Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

And it’s all perfectly fine if it’s an act of consensual flirting. Not so fine if it’s unwanted.

Oh god, the prospect of getting an image of a penis as part of courtship is horrifying. But then I’m a Boomer. We did things so old school, such as picking up the phone and having underage sex. And researchers in this area tell me to harden up. It’s part of teenage ritual and there is a perception that it is a lot safer than actually meeting up and transmitting STIs.

That’s precisely what Edith Cowan University’s sex researcher Giselle Woodley tells me about the interviews she did with young people aged from 11 to 17. Eleven. And that kids asked to be included in the research. By this stage, I have steam coming out my ears.

What Woodley tells me surprised me. The girls in the survey said receiving dick pics was absolutely common. And what did the girls do?

I’ll tell you what they didn’t do. They didn’t go to the school to complain. And they 100 per cent didn’t go to their parents. Why? I can tell you from my own experience of almost everything teen related – parents overreact. They ban social media. They take the devices. As if these unwanted images are the fault of the girls. Plus, it won’t make the little squirmers go away. Pictures of penises are now pandemic.

Woodley also tells me that the young ones are totally familiar with legislation around such images – but regurgitating the law doesn’t help them deal with their feelings. And those laws and those feelings aren’t helping our teenagers deal with what is a weekly, even daily, influx of phalluses. It’s a lot. And some schools do not do a very good job of helping young people navigate what are regular relationship realms for them.

Illustration by Dionne Gain

A few weeks ago, I was chatting to Sofia Brassington, now 21 and an actuarial science student. She says that when she went to school, at St Andrew’s Cathedral School, dick pics sent by male classmates started to arrive in year seven. She thinks most of the girls in her class had received them by year eight.

“The boys at that school – and at many schools across Sydney – have a strange tendency to over-sexualise the girls and pursue sexual advances with girls (primarily online) without an indication that this is wanted at all.”

Dear god. I guess consent education of some kind needs to start in preschool. Brassington says: “Better consent education would help young girls realise how wrong this is from the beginning, from day one of year seven.”

Because consent is not just consenting to touching. It’s also about consenting to receive sexual images. Woodley says equipping teenagers with digital sexual literacy that includes education around porn is crucial because dick pics are part of their everyday lives (oh god, I can’t believe I just wrote that).

“Teens are seeing this as part of a repertoire of sexual activity. It’s how they build their relationships, and they feel it’s safer within a relationship.”

Nicola Henry of RMIT describes dick pics as cyberflashing and tells me one study says about two-thirds of men have sent an unsolicited image. I completely freak out, but then she reminds me that there are many people who use this form of communication as relationship chit-chat.

“Exchanging intimate images can be a normal and fun thing to do in romantic relationships or in dating contexts. Many people send intimate images and those who receive them might not be upset about them,” she points out.

She is sensibly critical of some of the legal implications of sending such images. No point criminalising the behaviour of an underage kid who’s doing it as a lark, a dare, a moment of vulnerability. Far better to use what researchers call “restorative justice”. Get teenagers to have conversations with each other about how receiving one of these made them feel. Parents are far more likely to want to rush off to the cops with no real understanding of the way young people live their lives now.

But Henry also says that sometimes people share sexually explicit images as a form of cyberflashing and sexual harassment, “to try and cause fear, shock or distress”. And there are plenty of girls who don’t want to see male genitalia in that context.

Sending those images can often be a result of peer pressure.

“In the classroom, it may be that boys are egging each other on or that they feel pressure to send dick pics to others. They may also be trying to prove themselves to other boys or be under the assumption that people want to see their genitalia,” she says.

I reckon dick pics are a weird flex. She has a more nuanced response.

“To some extent, at least in heterosexual relationships, it’s a mismatch between what boys think girls want and what girls actually want. For example, it may be that in sending an unsolicited sexual image, the boy hopes he’ll receive an intimate image in return. For some people who send unsolicited sexually explicit images, the motivation is to communicate sexual interest, with the hope of hooking up. It’s not always meant as a form of harassment, although it can have that effect.”

Hollonds says we need to understand that we have a new set of responsibilities.

“It’s changed for adults, and it’s changed for kids. We talk about limiting screen time and putting devices away, but when it comes to the very serious and potentially risky and dangerous effects of living in the online world, well, those risks and dangers need to be considered in the same way as those in the physical world.”

I once wrote that we needed to teach our kids how to sext safely. Consent education is meant to start in kindergarten. We need to back teachers in these tough conversations. That means parents stepping up too.

Jenna Price is a regular columnist.

Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.