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This article explores the criminalisation and governance of sexting among young people. While the focus is on Australian jurisdictions, the article places debates and anxieties about sexting and young people in a broader analysis around concerns about new technologies, child sexual abuse, and the risks associated with childhood sexuality. The article argues that these broader social, cultural and moral anxieties have created an environment where rational debate and policy making around teen sexting has been rendered almost impossible. Not only has the voice of young people themselves been silenced in the public, political and media discourse about sexting, but any understanding about the differing behaviours and subsequent harms that constitute teen sexting has been lost. All the while, sexting has been rendered a pleasurable if somewhat risky pastime in an adult cultural context lending weight to the argument that teen sexting is often a subterranean expression of activities that are broadly accepted. The article concludes that the current approaches to regulating teen sexting, along with the emergence of sexting as a legitimate adult activity, may have had the perverse consequence of making teen sexting an even more attractive teenage risk taking activity.

O ver the past two decades police media units have played an everincreasing role in managing the dissemination of information between the police and media organisations. Using the example of the New South Wales Police Media Unit in Australia (hereafter NSW PMU) this article assesses the journalistic deployment of PMU information and develops a broader sociopolitical argument explaining the growth of PMUs more generally. We analyse qualitative research data, in the form of interviews with journalists and NSW PMU staff (n = 29), and quantitative data from an analysis of two Sydney-based daily newspapers. We suggest that the growth of PMUs can be explained with reference to new programs of governing crime that developed throughout the last quarter of the 20th century as well as significant changes to the global media landscape.

In this paper we analyse the kidnapping, rape and murder of Jill Meagher to highlight a range of issues that emerge in relation to criminalisation, crime prevention and policing strategies on social media, issues that, in our opinion, require immediate and thorough theoretical engagement. An in-depth analysis of Jill Meagher's case and its newsworthiness in traditional media is a challenging task that is beyond the scope of this paper. Rather, the focus for this particular paper is on the process of agenda-building, particularly via social media, the impact of the social environment, and the capacity of 'ordinary' citizens to influence the agenda-defining process. In addition, we analyse the depth of the target audience on social media, the threat of a 'trial by social media', and the place of social media in the context of pre-crime and surveillance debates. Finally, we call for more audacious and critical engagement by criminologists and social scientists in addressing the challenges posed by new technologies.