How to stop teenagers sexting | Dean Burnett

Jeremy Hunt has proposed a ban on sexting for under-18s. But there's only one realistic option when it comes to curbing teen sex drives: don't even try.

Jeremy Hunt has proposed a ban on sexting for under 18s. As any reasonable person might have predicted, this has been met with a great deal of criticism. Most of the arguments appear to be based on the technical practicalities, given how Hunt never truly explained how tech companies are supposed to filter specific types of messages on countless platforms and devices based on date of birth. However, an even bigger hurdle would be the sex drive of teenagers themselves.

One time when I was in school, we'd heard that someone had abandoned a pornographic magazine in a nearby field (for any teenagers reading this, this was a common phenomenon in the era when porn had to be printed). So, obviously, we set off to find it. Took a few hours but it was eventually spotted in a ditch. It ended with us just staring at it for a while, focussed on cheaply-printed images of naked breasts, spattered with mud, rainwater and animal effluent (I hope nobody developed any weird fetishes as a result of this, but you never know).