Q&A :: The deceptive appeal of sexting

While the boundaries of what is socially acceptable have long since shifted to embrace risqué images omnipresent in the public sphere, activists seek to warn teeenagers about the longstanding, and possibly tragic, consequences of sharing one’s sexually explicit images with others.

“It’s common that in school girls go during breaks to the bathroom and they take [nude or half-nude] pictures of themselves,” Ewa Dziemidowicz, member of the Nobody’s Children Foundation in Warsaw, which authored an awareness-raising campaign on the issue, run under the slogan ‘I think, therefore I don’t send.’

“It’s very common that boys have files of such pictures on their phone and they circulate them, and it’s actually ‘cool’ to have a lot of them,” the activist tells Q&A host Alicja Baczyńska.