The Problem Was Never Nakedness
Sexting, RSE, power, and what children need adults to understand
Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash
This is a reflective blog essay, written from lived experience rather than as formal safeguarding guidance. It sits with the difficult overlap between bodies, power, sexting, RSE, pleasure, shame and online harm.
I am not frightened of bodies.
I have worked as a life model. I have stood in rooms while artists looked carefully, not greedily, trying to understand weight, line, shadow and flesh. I have chosen, as an adult, to be seen. Once, I sold photographs of myself, on my own terms, for money. I like erotica. I understand the difference between the erotic, the artistic, the playful, the private and the chosen.
But I also know that the language of freedom can be used to hide coercion.
I was sexually abused as a child in a world where naturism and openness about bodies were presented as enlightened, freer and less hypocritical than ordinary English shame. That was part of what made it so confusing. The language was freedom. The reality was power.
The problem was never nakedness. The problem was power.
That is why I find much of the current argument about children, sexting, phones and relationships education both urgent and inadequate. Too much of the debate asks the wrong question: whether children should know about sex at all. The harder question is what kind of knowledge helps them recognise pressure, keep hold of their boundaries and understand that being wanted is not the same as being safe.
Silence does not protect children. Shame does not protect them either. But neither does a culture that mistakes exposure for liberation, or treats the language of consent as though it automatically produces freedom.
Consent is a fragile word when power is unequal. Children can appear to agree. They can feel special. They can seek attention. They can be curious. They can send the picture. They can say yes. But where the surrounding conditions include things like fear, admiration, grooming, peer pressure, adult authority, status anxiety, loneliness, neurodivergence, shame or the threat of exclusion, then “choice” becomes much less clear.
Coercion rarely arrives announcing itself as coercion. It can begin with flattery, attention and the feeling of being specially chosen; with a request framed as proof of trust; with fear of disappointing someone; or with the gradual rearrangement of what a person believes they are allowed to refuse. Research on online grooming describes a similar process of deceptive trust-building, in which ordinary conversation, compliments and apparent intimacy become part of sexual persuasion.
Adults can be vulnerable to coercion too. In the BBC Radio Wales documentary Fab Swingers, Ruth describes being pressured within her marriage into sex with strangers through a swingers website more than a hundred times. Her account is upsetting because it shows how control can be hidden inside a language of sexual openness, experimentation and consent.
That is not a reason to strip children of all agency. It is a reason for adults to grow up.
The current Government response is moving towards technical controls: age checks, platform restrictions, stronger duties on technology companies, and plans to stop children taking, sharing or viewing nude images on their devices. I understand the instinct. Children are being exploited, blackmailed, groomed, humiliated and pulled into sexualised online spaces before many have any real way to understand what is happening to them.
But there is a danger in pretending this is only a technology problem.
That danger is visible in the current policy moment. In June, Ofcom strengthened its expectations that platforms should prevent and respond to unwanted sexual images, while the Government set out plans for device-level systems intended to stop children taking, sharing or viewing nude images. These measures may reduce some immediate harms. They do not answer the harder question of why a child felt unable to refuse, why someone believed pressure was love, or what happens after shame has already closed in.
Phones did not invent shame. Snapchat did not invent coercion. Porn sites did not invent male entitlement, adolescent longing, status anxiety, loneliness, cruelty, curiosity or the desperate wish to be wanted. Technology has accelerated all of it. It has made the private public, the impulsive permanent, the intimate searchable and the embarrassing endlessly reproducible. It has changed the scale and speed of harm. But the roots go deeper than the device.
This is where Relationships, Sex and Health Education becomes so contested. Children need RSE because they need words. A child who cannot name pressure, coercion, grooming, consent, bodies, shame, manipulation or abuse is not innocent. They are undefended. A child who has never been helped to think about pornography, unwanted images, online blackmail, group-chat cruelty or the difference between attention and care is not being protected by adult silence. They are being left to learn from the worst available teachers: peers, porn, algorithms, influencers, older children, strangers and whatever happens to arrive on a screen.
But RSE cannot be a magic spell. It cannot repair a whole culture on a Tuesday afternoon between maths and lunch.
A few lessons are now expected to counter pornography, misogyny, algorithmic design, disappearing messages, AI-generated nudes, peer coercion, family discomfort, weak youth services, overstretched safeguarding systems, and a wider adult culture that sells sexual visibility as empowerment while punishing girls and vulnerable children when that visibility is used against them.
That is not education. It is emergency repair.
The problem is not that children are being taught about sex. Many children already know more than adults want to admit, though often in distorted, frightening or half-understood forms. The question is whether they are being helped to understand sex, bodies, desire and pressure in ways that are developmentally appropriate, morally serious, trauma-informed and rooted in reality.
Good RSE should not be embarrassed by bodies. Nor should it import adult sexual politics into childhood and call that neutrality. It should help children recognise the difference between affection and pressure, secrecy and privacy, curiosity and coercion, desire and demand. It should teach them that a nude image is not proof of trust; that pornography is not a manual for intimacy; that being asked repeatedly is not the same as being asked freely; and that someone who threatens to leave, expose, mock or shame you is not offering love.
It should also teach children what to do if something has already happened.
This is the part adults often mishandle. We talk as if prevention is the only story: do not send nudes, do not talk to strangers, block and report, tell a trusted adult. All of that may be true, but adolescence is not lived as a safeguarding poster. It happens in heat, panic, longing, confusion, embarrassment, bravado, loneliness and fear. A child may know the official answer and still be unable to act on it when the request comes from someone they fancy, someone they fear, someone popular, someone older, or someone who knows exactly which emotional button to press.
So RSE has to work in the gap between knowledge and action. It has to rehearse refusal. It has to talk about shame before shame becomes a trap. It has to name the person who asks, flatters, pesters, threatens, saves, forwards, sells, laughs or looks away.
Too much public discussion still circles around the child who sends the image, as if the central question is why they were foolish. The better questions are: who asked? Who pressured? Who stored it? Who forwarded it? Who watched? Who profited? Who turned humiliation into entertainment? Who taught the child that sexual exposure was the price of belonging?
Even the word “sexting” is too small for what it is being asked to hold. It can mean flirtation between teenagers. It can mean coercion. It can mean sexual bullying. It can mean grooming. It can mean extortion. It can mean a thirteen-year-old trying to keep hold of a relationship. It can mean a boy collecting images for status. It can mean an adult offender engineering a child’s compliance from behind a false profile. One casual word is being stretched over desire, danger, abuse, stupidity, crime, play, fear, pressure and exploitation.
No wonder adults are confused.
I have been sent unsolicited images by men. Not many, but enough to know the small jolt of it: the phone in your hand, the image you did not ask for, the assumption that someone else’s desire gives them permission to enter your day. That is not erotica. It is not intimacy. It is not flirtation. It is a small act of trespass.
Children are having to work this out in harsher conditions.
And something else is being lost here too: joy.
Not the packaged, performative version of “sex positivity” that can become another demand on the body, another instruction to be confident, adventurous, liberated and unashamed before you have even discovered what safety feels like. I mean the smaller, slower things: friendship, flirtation, curiosity, laughter, the charged awkwardness of sitting too close to someone you like, the first kiss that is clumsy and astonishing because it belongs to both of you and nobody else is watching.
How are children meant to know what they want when so much of what reaches them is already scripted by porn, peer pressure, influencer culture, group chats and the fear of being left behind? How can a child understand desire if they meet demand first? How can they understand pleasure if their first lesson is performance?
This is one of the reasons I found myself thinking about Channel 4’s Virgin Island, a programme about adults who have reached their twenties without having sex and are trying, under therapeutic supervision, to understand intimacy, touch, shame and fear. Whatever one thinks of the format, it points to something real: sexual content is everywhere, but embodied confidence is not. Exposure is everywhere, but ease is not. We have created a culture in which young people may see almost everything before they have experienced almost anything.
This should sit at the heart of RSE. Children do not only need to be warned about harm. They need help imagining good things too: friendship, tenderness, mutuality, privacy, humour, desire that is not coercive, pleasure that is not performed for an audience, intimacy that does not become evidence. If education only says “danger, danger, danger”, children will look elsewhere for the parts adults are too embarrassed to name. If it only says “consent”, without talking about joy, attraction, uncertainty, disappointment and care, it leaves them with a legal minimum rather than a human map.
For neurodivergent children, socially anxious children, excluded children, traumatised children, lonely children and children desperate to belong, the risks can become steeper. The rules of adolescent sexuality and status are already unstable; online, they become even harder to read. One day a message feels flattering. The next day it is evidence. One day a picture feels like intimacy. The next day it is leverage. A child who struggles with social nuance may not understand the trap until it has closed.
I do not trust the story that says children can be protected by keeping them ignorant. Ignorance is not innocence. It is vulnerability dressed up as purity.
But I also do not trust the story that says every boundary is repression, every discomfort is bigotry, every adult hesitation is prudery, and every sexual script becomes harmless once it is wrapped in the language of choice. Some things are not made safe by calling them consensual. Some children comply because refusal feels impossible. Some children perform confidence while carrying fear. Some children say yes because they cannot imagine surviving the social cost of no.
The task for adults is not to panic and not to abdicate. It is to discern.
That means parents need to know what schools are teaching, and schools need to be transparent enough to rebuild trust. It means teachers need training, not just resources. It means RSE has to include pornography, coercion, image-sharing, misogyny, online blackmail, AI-generated images, shame and repair. It means neurodivergent children may need explicit teaching about pressure, manipulation, screenshots, secrecy, status and the difference between friendship, flirtation and exploitation.
It also means children who request, pressure or share images need serious intervention. Not only a kindness talk. Not only a restorative worksheet. Not only “boys will be boys” in updated language. Asking, pestering, threatening, saving, displaying or forwarding someone else’s intimate image is not banter. It is not romance. It is not normal teenage mess. It is harm.
Some of those children will also be harmed children. Some will be immature, frightened, ashamed, copying what they have seen, or trying to survive their own peer hierarchies. That does not remove responsibility. It makes the adult response more difficult. We need accountability without annihilation, support without minimising, and repair without pretending nothing happened.
The same is true for children who have sent images. If the adult response is only punishment, they may hide. If the adult response is only softness, the seriousness of the harm may disappear. A child who has been blackmailed may already believe they are ruined. A child whose image has circulated may feel life has narrowed to one screen. A child who sent something impulsively may need both compassion and a clear boundary. Shame is where children get trapped. Shame is also where predators work.
Technical controls may help with some of this. Stronger age checks on pornography may help. Platform duties may help. Better reporting and image-removal tools may help. Device-level nudity detection may reduce some immediate harms, though it raises serious questions about privacy, misclassification, surveillance and false reassurance.
But technical systems cannot teach a child why they felt unable to refuse. They cannot rebuild youth services. They cannot give a lonely child somewhere else to go. They cannot undo a culture in which adult sexuality is everywhere, childhood privacy is thin, and humiliation has become content.
Children need more than a blocked app.
They need adults who can talk about bodies without disgust, sex without embarrassment, pleasure without pressure and risk without panic. Adults who can say that desire can be good, funny, tender, awkward and joyful, but that none of this is created by coercion. Adults who can help them distinguish wanting from being wanted, curiosity from compliance, intimacy from exposure, and pleasure from performance.
They need adults who can say: your body is yours. Pressure is not love. A nude image is not proof of trust. You are allowed to disappoint someone. You are allowed to leave a chat. You are allowed to ask for help even if you made a mistake. You are not destroyed because someone has seen you. You are not responsible for another person’s coercion. And if you harm someone else, there will be consequences, because their dignity is real too.
The problem is not RSE. The problem is what RSE is being asked to repair.
We have blurred adult and child spaces online, then asked schools to restore the boundary. We have allowed phones to become bedrooms, playgrounds, mirrors, diaries, marketplaces and hunting grounds, then acted surprised when children struggle to know which rules apply. We have sold exposure as freedom, then panicked when children are exposed.
The problem was never nakedness.
The problem was power.
Until adults can tell the difference, children will keep being left alone with a screen, a request, a threat, a thrill, a secret, and no clear way back.