Half of young people surveyed at a music festival reported having sent sexually explicit photos of themselves via mobile phones or the internet, but most agreed the practice was risky.
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A survey of 509 people aged 15 to 29 years attending the Big Day Out in Melbourne this year found 46 per cent had participated in "sexting", highlighting how widespread the practice has become. Of those surveyed 86 per cent agreed "it's risky for a girl to send a naked picture of herself", but only 76 per cent said the same for boys.
Lead researcher Megan Lim, of the Burnet Institute, said focus groups with young people attending the festival in 2013 revealed that young people were mostly concerned about the risk of the photos being widely distributed. She said there had been cases in the US of girls committing suicide after being bullied about nude pictures initially sent to a boyfriend, then made public.
Almost a third of young people surveyed agreed that they might show friends "if someone I'd just started seeing sent me a sext".
Only 14 per cent said they would show friends a sext from a boyfriend or girlfriend.
More than three-quarters of young people agreed it should be illegal to pass on a sext without permission, and almost half thought sexting should be illegal for people younger than 18 years.
Dr Lim, who is due to present the findings at the Australasian sexual health conference in Sydney on Friday, said they suggested that young people supported new laws on sexting currently before the Victorian parliament.
The laws are the first in Australia to deal specifically with sexting and make it a crime to distribute – or threaten to distribute – explicit images of another person without their consent, with penalties of up to two years' jail.
Under previous laws, sexts could be classified as child pornography even when the subject of the photo took the image and willingly sent it to others.
The new laws mean sexting will not be illegal if it takes place between consenting minors with no more than two years' age difference between them.
In other findings from the same survey, Dr Lim's team found more than 70 per cent of young people surveyed had viewed pornography and first did so at a median age of 14 years. The survey found that people who watched pornography at a younger age were more likely to have sex younger but Dr Lim said that did not show causation.
"Young people who are more sexually mature and interested in sex are probably more likely to watch pornography and have sex early," she said.
Dr Lim said indications that sexting and viewing pornography were becoming common among teenagers, and potentially influencing their sexual behaviour, highlighted the need for up-to-date education to prevent risky practices.
