Recognizing and addressing how gender shapes young people's experiences of image-based sexual harassment and abuse in educational settings

This paper explores findings from a study with 150 young people (aged 12-21) across England, which employed qualitative focus groups and arts-based methods to investigate young people's experiences of digital image-sharing practices. In this paper, we explore how gendered pressures to send nudes experienced by girls is a form of Image-Based Sexual Harassment (IBSH) and how pressures upon boys to secure nudes and prove they have them by sharing them non-consensually is Image-Based Sexual Abuse (IBSA). In addition, we argue boys’ sending nudes (dick pics) non-consensually is a form of image based sexual harassment, which can be compounded by harassment of girls to send nudes back. We look at the gendered nature of combined practices of Image-Based Sexual Harassment and Abuse (IBSHA) and how sexual double standards create sexual shaming and victim blaming for girls who experience IBSHA. We also explore young people's perspectives on their digital sex and relationship education and their suggestions for improvement. We conclude by arguing that schooling policies and practices would benefit from adopting the conceptual framework of IBSHA. We suggest this would be a good first step in better supporting young people in managing and negotiating digital gendered and sexualized consent, harms, and risks

Understanding and Combatting Youth Experiences of Image-Based Sexual Harassment and Abuse

This report presents findings from qualitative and quantitative research on digital image-sharing practices with 480 young people aged 12 to 18 years (336 in the survey and 144 in focus groups) from across the UK. Although our study examined a wide range of digital sexual behaviours, we found that non-consensual image-sharing practices were particularly pervasive, and consequently normalised and accepted among youth. Through our discussion of young people’s everyday experiences we demonstrate how nonconsensual image-sharing practices constitute forms of image based sexual harassment and abuse. We introduce the term image-based sexual harassment (IBSH) to describe unwanted sexual images (e.g. cyberflashing or unsolicited dick pics) and unwanted solicitation for sexual images (e.g. pressured sexting), and image-based sexual abuse (IBSA) to describe the non-consensual recording, distribution, and/or threat of distribution of sexual images (e.g. revenge porn). Our central aim is to improve the support available for young people by helping parents, teachers, and policymakers to identify and respond to diverse young people’s experiences with image-based sexual harassment and abuse

'Wanna trade?': Cisheteronormative homosocial masculinity and the normalization of abuse in youth digital sexual image exchange

This paper draws upon a qualitative study with 144 young people in seven different research schools in England, exploring how cis-heteronormative homosocial masculinity practices shape digital sexual image exchange. We examine three types of practices: 1) boys asking girls for nudes (pressurized sexting, which we position as online sexual harassment); 2) transactional nude solicitation (boys sending dick pics and asking girls for nudes, which we position as image based sexual harassment and cyberflashing); 3) non-consensual sharing of girls and boys nude images (which we position as image based sexual abuse, showing the differential impacts with lasting sexual stigma worse for girls). Our findings confirm earlier research that demonstrated homosocial masculinity currency is gained via the non-consensual sharing of images of girls’ bodies. We also investigate the more recent rise of male nudes (dick pics) and how a homosocial culture of humour and lad banter tends to lessen the sexual stigmatization of leaked dick pics. We argue providing boys with time and space to reflect on homosocial masculinity performances is crucial for disrupting these practices and our conclusions outline new UK school guidance for tackling online sexual harassment, cyberflashing and image-based sexual abuse

Teen Girls' Experiences Negotiating the Ubiquitous Dick Pic: Sexual Double Standards and the Normalization of Image Based Sexual Harassment

A range of important studies have recently explored adult women’s experiences of receiving unwanted dick pics (Amundsen, 2020). However, to date there has been limited research that has explored teen girls’ experiences of receiving unwanted penis images in depth. To address this gap we draw upon our findings from a qualitative study using focus group interviews and arts based drawing methods to explore social media image sharing practices with 144 young people aged 11–18 in seven secondary schools in England. We argue that being bombarded with unwanted dick pics on social media platforms like Snapchat normalises harassing practices as signs of desirability and popularity for girls, but suggest that being sent unsolicited dick pics from boys at school is more difficult for girls to manage or report than ignoring or blocking random older senders. We also found that due to sexual double standards girls were not able to leverage dick pics for status in the same way boys can use girls’ nudes as social currency, since girls faced the possibility of being shamed for being known recipients of dick pics. Finally we explore how some girls challenge abusive elements of toxic masculinity in the drawing sessions and our conclusion argues that unwanted dick pics should always be understood as forms of image based sexual harassment

Young people's experiences of image-based sexual harassment and abuse in England and Canada: Toward a feminist framing of technologically facilitated sexual violence

This article reports on a qualitative research study Sharing Networked Image Practices (SNIP) among young people. We explore our findings from 37 focus groups with 206 young people aged (11–19) in London and South East England and Toronto, Canada conducted in 2019 and 2020. Drawing on feminist legal and criminological scholarship (Powell & Henry, 2017; McGlynn et al., 2017; McGlynn and Johnson, 2020) we develop a framework to clearly identify how and when image sharing should be constituted as forms of: (1) Image-Based Sexual Harassment (IBSH) (i.e. unsolicited penis images (‘dick pics’) and unwanted solicitation for nudes), and (2) Image-Based Sexual Abuse (IBSA) (i.e. non-consensual image creation/sharing). We argue that categorizing non-consensual image sharing, showing and distributing as image-based sexual harassment and abuse rather than ‘sexting’ is an important conceptual shift to enable young people, schools, parents and all relevant stakeholders to recognize and address new forms of technology-facilitated sexual violence

Functional Coupling of Ca2+ Channels to Ryanodine Receptors at Presynaptic Terminals: Amplification of Exocytosis and Plasticity

Ca2+-induced Ca2+ release (CICR) enhances a variety of cellular Ca2+ signaling and functions. How CICR affects impulse-evoked transmitter release is unknown. At frog motor nerve terminals, repetitive Ca2+ entries slowly prime and subsequently activate the mechanism of CICR via ryanodine receptors and asynchronous exocytosis of transmitters. Further Ca2+ entry inactivates the CICR mechanism and the absence of Ca2+ entry for >1 min results in its slow depriming. We now report here that the activation of this unique CICR markedly enhances impulse-evoked exocytosis of transmitter. The conditioning nerve stimulation (10–20 Hz, 2–10 min) that primes the CICR mechanism produced the marked enhancement of the amplitude and quantal content of end-plate potentials (EPPs) that decayed double exponentially with time constants of 1.85 and 10 min. The enhancement was blocked by inhibitors of ryanodine receptors and was accompanied by a slight prolongation of the peak times of EPP and the end-plate currents estimated from deconvolution of EPP. The conditioning nerve stimulation also enhanced single impulse- and tetanus-induced rises in intracellular Ca2+ in the terminals with little change in time course. There was no change in the rate of growth of the amplitudes of EPPs in a short train after the conditioning stimulation. On the other hand, the augmentation and potentiation of EPP were enhanced, and then decreased in parallel with changes in intraterminal Ca2+ during repetition of tetani. The results suggest that ryanodine receptors exist close to voltage-gated Ca2+ channels in the presynaptic terminals and amplify the impulse-evoked exocytosis and its plasticity via CICR after Ca2+-dependent priming

Observational Limit on Gravitational Waves from Binary Neutron Stars in the Galaxy

Using optimal matched filtering, we search 25 hours of data from the LIGO 40-meter prototype laser interferometric gravitational-wave detector for gravitational-wave chirps emitted by coalescing binary systems within our Galaxy. This is the first test of this filtering technique on real interferometric data. An upper limit on the rate R of neutron star binary inspirals in our Galaxy is obtained: with 90% confidence, R< 0.5/hour. Similar experiments with LIGO interferometers will provide constraints on the population of tight binary neutron star systems in the Universe.Comment: RevTeX, minor revisions, exactly as published in PRL 83 (1999) p1498, 4 pages, 2 figures include

Limits on Gravitational-Wave Emission from Selected Pulsars Using LIGO Data

We place direct upper limits on the amplitude of gravitational waves from 28 isolated radio pulsars by a coherent multidetector analysis of the data collected during the second science run of the LIGO interferometric detectors. These are the first direct upper limits for 26 of the 28 pulsars. We use coordinated radio observations for the first time to build radio-guided phase templates for the expected gravitational-wave signals. The unprecedented sensitivity of the detectors allows us to set strain upper limits as low as a few times 10^(-24). These strain limits translate into limits on the equatorial ellipticities of the pulsars, which are smaller than 10^(-5) for the four closest pulsars