Children’s Sexuality in the Context of Digital Media

Performing smart sexual selves: A sexual scripting analysis of youth talk about internet pornography

“…According to this discourse, by virtue of their development, young people are unable to negotiate sexual content because they are, in the first instance, asexual or sexually innocent and, in the second, inevitably lack the capacity to view media critically in order to resist its negative influences (Bragg and Buckingham, 2009). Based upon this view of an inherent inability to discern reality from fantasy and their consequent propensity to be deceived by unrealistic and/or harmful representations of sex, bodies and gendered relations, young people are commonly seen as vulnerable, at-risk viewers of IP, requiring adult intervention and protection from themselves (Tsaliki and Chronaki, 2020). Furthermore, their views on the subject are also routinely discredited and overridden by those of adults, who often fail to recognise that young people hold valid knowledge on this topic (Jarkovská and Lamb, 2018).…”