A new study, published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, finds that teen boys were almost twice as likely as teen girls to have forwarded a received sext.
Researchers surveyed 1,000 black and Latino 10th graders in a southeast Texas school district about their sexting habits. Among black teens, 27 percent of girls and 23 percent of boys said they had snapped a nude photo of themselves and passed it along. Among Latino teens, 20 percent of boys and 17 percent of girls had done the same.
Although this study focused on minority teens, researchers said their sexting numbers lined up with rates recorded among “white private high school students” as well as more diverse groups of minors.
It was in the distribution of these images that boys and girls’ behavior begins to diverge. When an explicit photograph hits their phones, the teen boys in the study were almost twice as likely as the teen girls to have forwarded it beyond its intended audience. And boys were much more likely than girls to have received one of these errant sexts from an oversharing peer.
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