Teenagers have limitless opportunities to explore sexuality online. A new study indicates those experiences can predict whether a teen will become a victim of sexual assault one year later.
The findings are part of a study, the first of its kind, to investigate online sexual experiences using a person-centered approach, which identifies specific patterns of behaviors in sub-groups of people rather than general observations across a large group.
The approach allowed researchers to track girls’ online experiences—and subsequent offline experiences—more intricately than prior studies.
“It makes sense that engaging in risky behavior online would translate to offline risks,” says Megan Maas, research author and assistant professor of human development and family studies at Michigan State University.
“But we were able to identify specific online behavioral patterns that correlated with susceptibility to different offline outcomes—which was never captured from conventional approaches before.”
Four categories
For the study, which appears in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, Maas and colleagues assessed data from 296 girls between 14- and 17-years-old, who self-reported their online and offline sexual experiences over five years. Additionally, the girls would visit a lab each year for a trauma interview to measure experiences such as sexual abuse, assault, or violence that a survey may not detect.
“By assessing the teens’ online sexual experiences using the person-centered approach, we were able to group the teens into four classes of experience patterns, which predicted sexual health and victimization outcomes one year later,” Maas says.
The four classes were:
- Online inclusive: These teens have a high probability of having several online sexual experiences, including looking at internet porn, chatting with strangers about sex, sending nude photos, and posing provocatively on social media. This class often has strangers posting sexy comments on their social media accounts, requesting nude photos, and soliciting them for sex.
- Seekers: These teens purposefully seek out internet porn, chat with others about sex, and post sexy photos on social media, but purposefully do not have a sexy profile picture and do not receive a lot of online attention from others.
- Attractors: This class of teens gets attention from others online, though they’re not explicitly looking for it. They have a sexy social media profile, have people requesting nude photos, receive comments about how sexy they are, and have strangers solicit them for offline sex.
- Online abstinent: This group had little probability in having online sexual experiences.
The goal was to pinpoint online patterns of sexual experiences related to three offline outcomes one year later: HIV risk, sexual assault, and intimate partner violence, Maas says.
The researchers discovered that attractors were more likely to be sexually assaulted than the seekers; online inclusive were more likely to be sexually assaulted or engage in risky sex, especially if they’d experienced prior sexual abuse or assault; the seekers were more likely to have a physically violent romantic partner, especially if they’d experienced prior sexual abuse or assault.
What schools and families can do
The findings demonstrate how critical it is for teens to receive education to understand how online sexual experiences may shape their offline experiences, Maas says. Specifically, she hopes that schools and families will educate youth on sexual health and consent as well as healthy relationships, as their online experiences could have serious consequences.
“Rather than trying to tackle the impossible—like eliminating teens’ exposure to porn or ability to sext—we can and should educate them about these realities and risks and offer alternatives for learning about and expressing sexuality,” Maas says.
Maas hopes that the findings will inspire parents to proactively talk to their kids about risks they face online, as well as to establish rules early in their lives that can prevent girls’ from putting too much emphasis on a sexy social media presence.
“The best strategy for parents to follow is to limit time and space for internet usage,” Maas says. “Establish a time limit they can be on a device, and don’t allow screens in bedrooms. There are apps for parents that can help control screen time—and plenty of ways to involve their kids in activities that don’t rely on the internet at all.”
Next, Maas plans to explore why these online experiences predict offline risk and victimization. For instance, if teen girls feel obligated to engage in unwanted sexual activity if they have already sent a nude photo, or if boys feel entitled to sex from girls with sexy social media profiles. She hopes this follow-up study will clarify these findings to provide more specific guidance for sexual health and internet safety programming without attributing blame to survivors.
The National Institutes of Health funded the work.
Source: Michigan State University
