This article describes the prevalence of receiving online sexual requests and producing online sexual images among adolescents, thereby focusing on the differences between problematic and non-problematic incidences. Data was used from a national survey conducted in 2011 among 4453 Dutch adolescents (51.2 % male), aged from 11 to 18 (M = 13.9, SD = 1.48). Results indicated that receiving sexual requests is quite common and that producing sexual images is relatively rare. From adolescents’ perspective most of the incidences were non-problematic. Negative experiences were more likely to occur when adolescents interacted with people they did not know and when an intrinsic motivation for engaging in sexual interaction was missing. There was a strong relation between bothersome experiences and being cyberbullied. Adolescents with a higher level of online disinhibition and with low self-control were more likely to engage in both sexual communications as well as in sexting. Identifying which incident characteristics and characteristics of adolescents are related to problematic online sexual interactions is a prerequisite to design more personalized tools for vulnerable adolescents.
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Kerstens et al. (2014) studied this question.
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