As part of her recently completed PhD, Ms Monique Mulholland undertook a study involving children aged 13 to 16 from three Adelaide high schools.<\/p>\n The study used a series of whole-class activities designed to elicit the response of adolescents to sexualized images popularly available in mainstream media, advertising, music video clips, and internet cultures. (No pornographic imagery was viewed as part of the study.)<\/p>\n While the study confirmed that young people are finding sexual images readily accessible, Ms. Mulholland said they did not seem to be \u201ctaking over their hearts and minds\u201d.<\/p>\n She said, however, that strong concerns must remain about the long-term effects of such exposure.<\/p>\n Thanks to the Internet and social media, \u201csexual images are definitely out from under the bed\u201d, Ms. Mulholland said, but she also found that one of the dominant ideas of the public debate \u2013 that sexualized imagery had become \u201cnormal\u201d and was causing a loss of moral sense with regards to sexuality \u2013 was not borne out by the teenagers\u2019 responses<\/strong>.<\/p>\n \u201cThey weren\u2019t saying that anything goes. They haven\u2019t normalised it: rather, they are keeping it at a distance, often by using humour<\/strong>,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe young people are saying that they\u2019re laughing at it, and it seems that they still have very conventional ideas of what\u2019s good and bad.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the teenagers drew a parallel between sexualised imagery and video games, and said that young people are well aware of the difference between fantasy and real life.<\/p>\n \u201cThey are saying they have some agency in this, that they are quite savvy about it,\u201d Ms. Mulholland said.<\/p>\n But because her study was conducted in broad, collective terms on widely available sexualized images, Ms. Mulholland said it could not assess the long-term and individual effects of \u2018raunch culture\u2019 on the actual sexual practices of teenagers<\/strong>, which, she said, remain an issue of major concern.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile young people are not blindly mimicking what they see, it has to affect them somehow, and the ease of access is still deeply concerning,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Ms. Mulholland believes that more research is needed to help in formulating policy about a practical response.<\/p>\n She said that parents, authorities and schools need to deal rationally with the existence of the phenomenon, since the effect of \u2018protective panics\u2019 is that children are denied proper practical support and advice in dealing with what they may see.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Flinders University press release via Physorg: School-age teenagers are widely exposed to sexualised and raunchy imagery, but are developing their own ways of dealing with it, a Flinders… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[70,193,12,214],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3537"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3537"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3537\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3591,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3537\/revisions\/3591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/Eyerolling.jpg\" "\\"eyerolling\\"")
School-age teenagers are widely exposed to sexualised and raunchy imagery, but are developing their own ways of dealing with it<\/strong>, a Flinders University sociology researcher has found.<\/p>\n