Why Punishing Teens For Sharing Nudes Can Make The Harm Worse, Researchers Say

A teenager shares a private photo with someone they trust, and it gets forwarded, posted, or used to pressure them, all without consent. According to a new academic review, the response that follows can compound the harm instead of easing it.

Image-based sexual abuse, or IBSA, includes sharing an intimate photo without permission, pressuring someone to send images, or threatening to expose private pictures. A paper published in the journal Sexualities argues that in England, the systems meant to protect young people from this kind of abuse are often making things worse. Researchers describe current responses as “fragmented, punitive and often ineffective,” shaped by moral lectures, confusing laws, and risk-averse child-protection practices that can put procedure and institutional self-protection ahead of the support a young person actually needs.

Instead of zero-tolerance rules and scare tactics, the researchers propose a framework they call “safe uncertainty.” It centers on taking emotional trauma seriously, respecting young people’s rights, and accepting that these situations rarely have simple answers. Rather than forcing every case into a box labeled either “victim” or “perpetrator,” the approach asks adults, educators, and professionals to make judgment calls based on context and relationships instead of fixed rulebooks.

How Researchers Studied Image-Based Sexual Abuse Responses

This paper is not a study that surveyed hundreds of teenagers or tracked outcomes over time. It’s a review: Researchers pulled together existing critical research on image-based sexual abuse and combined it with what they heard at a February 2025 workshop that brought together 38 professionals from education, law enforcement, frontline services, academia, policy, and the tech sector. Their goal was to examine how the current response to this kind of harm works in practice and to design a better model for handling it.

Their starting point is blunt. The existing system in England, they argue, is shaped by three forces that work against young people rather than for them: moral lessons that treat sharing images as inherently shameful, laws that are unclear about what counts as abuse versus poor judgment, and child-protection practices that are so cautious about blame that they end up being rigid rather than helpful.

Put together, these forces create a system where a young person who shares an image, even under pressure, can be treated more like a suspect than someone who needs support. Meanwhile, the real harm, the broken trust, the loss of control over one’s own image, the social fallout, can get lost in procedure.

What ‘Safe Uncertainty’ Means for Image-Based Sexual Abuse Cases

Instead of trying to erase uncertainty with rigid rules, the researchers suggest something almost backwards: build a framework that makes room for not knowing everything up front, and train professionals to act ethically anyway.

Safe uncertainty is described in the paper as “a practical approach for operationalising” principles that focus on trauma, young people’s rights, and a young person’s actual environment and relationships rather than abstract rules. It’s meant to give teachers, social workers, and others a structured way to “navigate complexity, resist binary framings and support ethical, relational and context-sensitive professional judgement.”

In plain terms, that means moving away from treating every case as either clearly a crime or clearly a mistake, and instead asking what actually happened, who was hurt, what pressures were involved, and what response would genuinely help this specific young person. The researchers describe this kind of abuse as a “relational and structurally embedded harm,” meaning it never happens in isolation. It’s tied up with peer relationships, power dynamics, and the digital world young people live in every day.

How This Could Change the Way Adults Respond

Its main practical contribution is a model for how adults and institutions might respond. The authors argue this approach could apply across education, child protection, and justice, the three main places young people currently encounter responses to image-based sexual abuse.

For schools, that could mean moving away from blanket lectures about the dangers of sexting and toward conversations that account for pressure, consent, and the way teenagers actually use technology. For child protection workers, it could mean having more room to make judgment calls instead of defaulting to the most cautious, often most punishing, option. For the justice system, it could mean recognizing that how a young person ends up with an image, and what happens to it afterward, matters more than whether a strict rule was technically broken.

Nothing about this framework suggests ignoring harm or skipping consequences when they’re warranted. The point, as the researchers frame it, is replacing fear-based rigidity with care that still takes the seriousness of the harm into account.

Why Blame-Based Systems Fail Victims of Image-Based Sexual Abuse

Telling teenagers to simply avoid sharing images has never matched how young people actually communicate, build relationships, or get pressured by peers and partners. This review makes a case that clinging to that message, backed by punishing systems, protects institutions from blame more than it protects the young people involved. If image-based sexual abuse is going to be taken seriously as the harm it is, the response has to center on the people experiencing it rather than on the comfort of a simple rule to follow.