Abstract
This chapter explores an international comparative case study of children’s experiences of online sexual content. It suggests that the dominant ‘risk’ framework commonly used to understand these experiences is not the most useful way to construct the uses to which young people put these materials, or the role that online sexual content may play in young people’s healthy sexual development. It suggests that conceptualising ‘risk’ for young people as necessarily negative and as something to be avoided is counterproductive, and that the national and cultural context will impact the likelihood of ‘risk’. This particular example also indicates that risk itself might be positioned as something to be embraced; as a necessary part of learning personal boundaries and behaviours. It also contributes to the development of resilience, one of the key aspects of healthy sexual development.
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Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the foundational work done by the EU Kids Online network, led at that time by Professor Sonia Livingstone, London School of Economics and Political Science, and funded by the European Commission’s Safer Internet plus Programme, predominantly SIP-2005-MD-038229. They also gratefully acknowledge a grant from the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, which funded the matched research in Australia with 400 families.
Conflict of Interest Statement
The authors affirm that they have no conflict of interest with regards to this paper, although all have benefited from nationally or internationally competitive funding in the past to research children online, pornography and/or a combination of these areas.
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Green, L., Lumby, C., McKee, A., Ólafsson, K. (2020). National Contexts for the Risk of Harm Being Done to Children by Access to Online Sexual Content. In: Tsaliki, L., Chronaki, D. (eds) Discourses of Anxiety over Childhood and Youth across Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46436-3_11
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