Secondary sexting among adolescents: The origin and issues of a source of cyberbullying

The practice of sexting, a word formed as a contraction of the words “sex” and “texting”, consists of sending and exchanging suggestive or sexual content. While the initial images are usually produced voluntarily by the person who appears in them and are sent privately, they are sometimes reproduced without his/ her consent. The images which are made public and redistributed widely may occur in a cyberbullying context. Although many studies and books have focused on the practice of secondary sexting, they have often limited themselves to describing this phenomenon without trying to distinguish its components. This article aims to understand the origin of the phenomenon of sexting and its derivatives as well as the issues for the criminal justice response. Analysis of related literature makes it possible to highlight three central elements of this practice: the virtual environment and its characteristics; the authors of secondary sexting, who are young people whose partial maturity does not allow them to grasp the consequences of their actions; and victims who sexualize their exchanges and place great trust both in their interlocutors and in the online tools used to send materials. The concurrence of these three elements is what we call a pernicious combination, which the judiciary have tried to control using a range of measures from decriminalization to the arrest of victims and suspects.