North West Secondary: Snapscore Micro-Celebrity, WhatsApp Wanking, & Sex Subscriptions Porn Push: Barriers to Platform and School Reporting
摘要
This chapter documents experiences at Northwest Secondary, a state school in a mixed urban area, with multi-million-pound homes near to a large council estate. A high achieving single sex girls’ state (former grammar) school in the area meant there were three times as many boys at NWS than girls, which greatly impacted the gender dynamics at the school. We look at one working class 11-year-old girl cultivating microcelebrity status on Snapchat to gain value and attention, which meant that she received a barrage of sexual content that came to be seen as a marker of prestige and status. Acceptance and tolerance of unwanted sexual content on social media apps fed into normalisation of sexual harassment from male peers at the school. The boys at the school were also avid social media users, with the boys navigating porn push (paid for sex subscription sites) and expressing concern about being catfishing (being targeted for money) but have received inadequate internet safety videos and advice about child pornography and nothing on sextortion. Failure to report image-based harassment and abuse (either to barriers from platforms or at school) emerged strongly at this site a dilemma we argue must be urgently addressed.