Dr Kate Milnes

Changing attitudes towards female (hetero)sexuality throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are generally storied within Western societies as a move away from regulation and towards liberation. This narration of the (hi)story of female (hetero)sexuality is underpinned by a taken-for-granted assumption that in terms of sexual freedom, liberty and autonomy, these changes have been progressive and beneficial for women. The narrative study presented in this paper explores the ways in which a group of young women make sense of and narrate their unique sexual experiences and relationships. The implications of these findings are then discussed in terms of the options for negotiating sexual encounters that are made available or denied to young women by their appropriation of different narrative frameworks. This discussion raises questions about the degree to which young women in contemporary society can be considered to be sexually liberated. © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd.

This paper will discuss one aspect of the research findings from a recent two-year EU funded project on sexual bullying among young people (the ASBAE project). The aims of the research were to explore young people’s awareness and understandings of sexual bullying (including sexist, homophobic and transphobic bullying) and their ideas on how to combat and prevent it. Thematic analysis of focus groups with 253 young people aged 13-18 from 5 European countries identified a number of different explanations for sexual bullying which constructed it as: being biologically or developmentally driven; a reaction to ‘difference’; a form of revenge or retaliation; a result of poor upbringing, problematic background or peer influence; being harmless or unintended; and stemming from the (in)actions of the person experiencing the bullying. These individualistic and interpersonal explanations for sexual bullying were underpinned by a number of problematic assumptions that we will argue should be discussed and challenged within interventions designed to raise awareness of and tackle sexual bullying.

This paper will discuss research findings from a recent EU funded project on sexual bullying amongst young people (the ASBAE project). The research aimed to explore young people’s awareness and understandings of sexual bullying (including sexist, homophobic and transphobic bullying) and their ideas on how to combat and prevent it. Thematic analysis of focus groups with 253 young people aged 13-18 from 5 European countries identified that gender was central to young people’s understandings and experiences of sexual bullying. Throughout the data, young men and women were frequently constructed as essentially different in terms of their characteristics, the types of sexual bullying behaviours that they engaged in, and their reactions to sexual bullying. For example, homophobic bullying was identified as being a particularly ‘male problem’, with young men tending to experience and engage in this more often than young women and with the bullying often focusing on what was perceived to be ‘feminine’ behaviour. Sexual harassment on the other hand, was experienced more frequently by young women and this appeared to be related to female objectification, with young men frequently making comments about, touching or requesting/taking photographs of young women’s bodies or body parts. Gendered ideas around reputations and responsibilities (e.g. the sexual double standard) were also seen as leading to different pressures and forms of sexual bullying for young men and women (e.g. young women being called ‘sket’ if they were perceived to have had sex and young men being teased if they were perceived not to have had sex). In this paper we explore how taken-for-granted assumptions about gender and sexuality can give rise to and perpetuate diverse forms of sexual bullying and argue that encouraging young people to scrutinise such assumptions should be prioritised within interventions to tackle and prevent sexual bullying.

The research findings presented in this paper are from a novel, two-year, EU-funded project on sexual bullying amongst young people (the ASBAE project). The aims of the research were to explore young people’s awareness and understandings of sexual bullying (including sexist, homophobic and transphobic bullying) and their ideas on how to combat and prevent it. The analysis presented is part of a large-scale thematic analysis of data collected during forty 3-hour focus groups with a total of 253 young people aged 13-18 from five European countries (Bulgaria, Italy, Latvia, Slovenia and the UK). This paper will explore some of the gendered explanations that young people draw upon in making sense of sexual bullying and argue that these lead to both young men and young women excusing problematic behaviours in ways that blame those experiencing sexual bullying for their own victimisation. The data suggest that interventions designed to reduce sexual bullying and sexual harassment in schools need to challenge explanations and solutions that lead to victim-blaming and involve young people in questioning the kinds of gendered assumptions underlying them.

Purpose: This paper will explore the gendered assumptions that young people draw upon in making sense of sexual bullying and sexual harassment and argue that these lead to both young men and young women normalising or excusing problematic behaviours in various ways. Background: The research findings presented in the paper are from a two-year EU funded project on sexual bullying amongst young people (the ASBAE project). The aims of the research were to explore young people’s awareness and understandings of sexual bullying (including sexist, homophobic and transphobic bullying) and their ideas on how to combat and prevent it. Methods: The analysis presented is part of a large-scale thematic analysis of data collected during 40 3-hour focus groups with a total of 253 young people aged 13-18 from 5 European countries. Conclusions: The data suggest that interventions designed to reduce sexual bullying and sexual harassment in schools need to challenge the kinds of gendered assumptions that we have identified in our data, but which we believe are also widespread in society more generally.

Poor mental health among undergraduate students is often addressed through interventions which aim to improve resilience, mindfulness or similar qualities. This shifts the responsibility of improving student mental health onto students themselves and obscures the effect of institutions and societies. This scoping review aimed to identify what is known and what gaps exist in the literature about institutional and societal risk and protective factors for UK undergraduate student mental ill‐health. Eleven databases, Google and reference lists were searched for journal articles and grey literature published between 2005 and 2024, which examined institutional or societal risk or protective factors for UK undergraduate student mental ill‐health. Forty‐four publications met the inclusion criteria for the review. Institutional factors identified related to studying, getting support, university life and interventions. Societal factors identified related to state finance and immigration systems, travel and transport, and the COVID pandemic. These factors are not culturally specific to the UK but rather represent issues of concern for university policymakers and practitioners internationally. This review highlights the importance of student‐centred policies, particularly for financial and study‐related factors, and providing training for university staff on undergraduate mental health and changes they can make to teaching, support services and the campus environment for students generally and sub‐groups of students with particular needs. Potentially fruitful avenues of further research for improving undergraduate student mental health include the impact of campus culture, specific university policies, university facilities and built environments, specific national/regional policies and laws, structural inequalities, cultural norms and local environments or communities.

Everyone Knows Me as the Weird Kid is a performance text created from collaborative narrative interviews between the first author and a 15-year-old participant named Max who identifies as bisexual and genderfluid. The performance explores how Max negotiates a range of challenges—including homophobia, transphobia, bullying, and harassment—on a day-to-day basis. It offers evocative insights into life as a young person with an intersecting identity across school, community, online, and family contexts. By choosing to represent Max’s experiences as a performance text, we offer a living, breathing resource that can be performed in educational settings not only to young people but also by young people. We share Everybody Knows Me as the Weird Kid as a resource to help others respond to sexual and gender-related bullying and discrimination in their own lives.

Available in English, Bulgarian, Slovenian and Italian

Traditionally, women's eating disorders are thought to be strongly influenced by media images idealizing a normative thin female body. Taking a different approach, The Anorexic Self critically examines diagnostic and popular discourses on anorexia that construct narrow and ideal notions of the female self. Paula Saukko analyzes the personal and political implications of discourses on the anorexic self in multiple contexts, including her own experience of being diagnosed anorexic; psychiatrist Hilde Bruch's postwar research on anorexia; and media coverage of Karen Carpenter, Princess Diana, and other women with eating disorders. Saukko traces the history of the discourses from postwar idealization of masculine autonomy to postindustrial valorization of feminine flexibility, and also explores their politically progressive and psychologically healing--as well as sexist and humiliating--dimensions. Drawing on narrative therapy, dialogic theory, and multisited ethnography, The Anorexic Self cultivates a less judgmental and more self-reflexive way of relating to ourselves, others, and societies in which we live.

Introduction There is increasing focus in the UK on the so-called ‘risky practices’ that young women are engaging in which serves to problematise a range of individual behaviours. The aim of this paper is to explore the way that young women talk about health and risk within this context and to examine the implications for policy and practice in public health. Methods Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were carried out with twenty-two young women aged 18 – 24 years in post-compulsory education settings in the north of England. Data from the interviews was analysed using a post-structuralist type of discourse analysis drawing on a feminist perspective. Findings and Discussion The young women constructed their accounts of health and risk by drawing on idealised feminine constructs and there are three central and closely related discursive patterns in the data. The first one draws on moral constructions of what it means to be healthy; the second draws on representations of a socially constructed westernised feminine ideal; and the final one constructs risk taking in terms of health as resistance to dominant discourse. These three discursive patterns will be explored. We argue that the way in which the young women talk about health and risk has implications in contemporary western society for policy direction and the future of research in this area. A shift in focus is required away from pathologising individual behaviours and towards taking into account a) the meaning that young women attach to their health practices and b) the wider context in which these are carried out and experienced.

Legal definitions of sexual consent emphasise ‘freedom’ as central to valid consent; however, power inequalities may complicate freedom. This paper discusses findings from a two-stage focus group study with young people (aged 13–23) in England exploring the implications of power inequalities for sexual consent. In Stage 1, 77 participants explored and ranked the types of power inequalities they felt were common within young people's sexual relationships, with age, gender and popularity being identified as the most common power inequalities. In Stage 2, 43 participants discussed power inequalities using scenarios based on the Stage 1 findings and considered their implications for sexual consent. Thematic analysis of the data produced two themes: powerless and powerful roles in consent communication and power inequalities implicitly constrain freedom to consent. Consent communication was constructed as a unidirectional process whereby those with more power initiate, and those with less, gatekeep. Such roles require deconstruction to position consent as mutual and actively negotiated by partners. Further, since power inequalities were seen to place implicit constraints on freedom to consent, we advocate for an explicit exploration of power and privilege within Relationships and Sex Education to equip young people to recognise, challenge and negotiate these constraints.

Sexual bullying refers to bullying or harassment that is sexualised, related to sexuality, and/or related to gender expression (Duncan, 1999). Research on sexual bullying is disparate and still developing as a field. This study extends on this research through a mixed-methods analysis of the different forms of sexual bullying and the relationships between them across five European nations. Participants were 253 young people (aged 13-18) from Bulgaria, England, Italy, Latvia and Slovenia. As part of focus groups on sexual bullying, participants individually and anonymously completed a Sexual Bullying Questionnaire (SBQ), comprising closed- and open-ended questions about their experiences of victimisation and bullying their peers. Factor analysis identified five forms of sexual bullying victimisation and two forms of sexual bullying towards peers. The quantitative and qualitative findings indicated that bullying or harassment that is sexualised, related to sexuality, and/or related to gender expression are associated with each other. Further, sexual bullying was found to be common to all five European countries indicating that it is a cross-national issue. The associations between sexualised, sexuality and gender expression bullying or harassment support the use of the term sexual bullying to unite these forms of peer victimisation in research and practice. Further, all countries studied require initiatives to address sexual bullying, and the gender and sexual norms that may contribute to it, with tailoring to the country context.

Bullying has typically been defined and studied separately from other forms of gender- and sexuality-related harassment and violence such as dating and relationship violence and sexual harassment, arguably obscuring the complex interrelations between these phenomena. This article is based on an EU-funded project which explored young people’s understandings and experiences of sexual bullying (bullying related to gender and/or sexuality). Data collected via 41 focus groups with young men and women (N = 253) aged 13–18 across five European countries (Bulgaria, England, Italy, Latvia, Slovenia) were analysed using thematic analysis. Participants highlighted intersections between bullying, dating and relationship violence and sexual harassment. They also drew upon notions of consent to determine whether and when certain actions constituted bullying. We argue that applying this lens of consent to young people’s peer relationships illuminates the extent to which bullying (like other forms of gender- and sexuality-related harassment and violence) is culturally situated and embedded within hierarchical gendered power relations. We therefore advocate that Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) and anti-bullying initiatives treat consent as a ‘common thread’ in discussing and challenging a range of gender- and sexuality-related forms of bullying and harassment within peer relationships.

Involving participants/intended audiences in discourse analysis may help to avoid overemphasising the structural effects of discourse and silencing participant voice. Yet, involving participants in complex analytic processes effectively can prove difficult. In this study, the authors undertook a Foucauldian discourse analysis of sexual consent material within eight (predominantly UK) wide-ranging, youth-focused campaigns to identify the discourses relevant to sexual consent and produce a collage for each discourse. Then, 43 young people from West Yorkshire, UK, helped to identify the underlying messages in the collages (i.e. the discourses), and consider who was constructed as powerful, and who benefited and ‘lost out’ from these messages. This paper explores the benefits and challenges of involving young people in a discourse analysis in this way, and concludes that, a ‘both/and’ approach should be employed to acknowledge both young people’s perspectives and the academic researcher’s desire to retain a critical stance toward problematic discourses.

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. We present an analysis of young masculinities based on young peoples’ perspectives derived from a project on sexual bullying. Our qualitative data are based on 41 focus groups with 253 young people (male and female) aged 13–18 across five European countries (Bulgaria, Italy, Latvia, Slovenia and England) as well as questionnaire responses. The data were analysed using thematic analysis (Braun, V., and V. Clarke. 2006. “Using Thematic Analysis in Psychology.” Qualitative Research in Psychology 3 (2): 77–101). Our analysis pointed to the prevalence of sexist and homophobic behaviours among young men, who were themselves concerned with their ‘masculine’ reputations by appearing physically tough, (hetero)sexually active and emotionally closed. The young women in our sample also depicted many young men as immature, naïve and superficial. At the same time, the young men were portrayed as more calm, rational and resilient compared to their female counterparts, with young men insisting that any ‘problematic’ or ‘bullying’ behaviour amounted to harmless fun. Our analysis suggests that young men are performing gender and sexuality under the influence of conventional norms which prioritise homosociality, humour and status, which shy away from challenging sexist or homophobic practices, and which inhibit reporting themselves as victims of bullying. The implications for young masculinities and social change are discussed.

In this article we outline methodological considerations for conducting research interviews with couples. We draw from two qualitative men’s health studies, both developed to explore social interactions between men and their partners of either sex in relation to their health practices. We utilized a combination of separate interviews and joint couple interviews. From these studies we offer insight into our experiences of using both types of interview styles, addressing four key areas which span elements across the research project journey: (a) choosing a mode of interview; (b) ethical concerns in couple research; (c) the interview as a platform for disclosure; and (d) analyzing data from couple research.

Poster

The recent focus in the UK on young women’s ‘risky’ health practices as problematic lends itself to an examination of how they make sense of health and risk themselves. In relation to the conference theme of (dis) embodiment, this paper discusses a central discursive pattern within the data from 22 in-depth interviews with young women aged 18 to 24 years about health and risk. We will present data showing how young women construct risk taking in a more resistant and agentic, rather than problematic, way. Lupton’s (1999) definition of risk as ‘that which threatens the integrity of the body’ will be used to explore the young women’s understandings of the embodiment of risk in health and health practices. This includes risk experienced as both a threat to the integrity of the healthy self as well as embodied feminine identity but also as a means of experiencing being ‘alive’.

Objectives: In recent times attention has focused more and more on the so-called risky health practices that young women are engaging in and this serves to problematise a range of individual behaviours. The primary objective of this paper is to examine the discursive constructions young women draw upon to make sense of their experiences of risk in relation to health. Design: This was a qualitative study using in-depth interviews. Methods: 22 interviews were carried out with young women aged 18 to 24 years in further education settings. Drawing on a feminist perspective, a post-structuralist type of discourse analysis was used to analyse the data. Results: This paper focuses on two overarching, and closely related, discursive patterns within the data which are central to how the young women present themselves in relation to risk and health. The first one is significantly moralised and, using this, the young women negotiate the territory between what it means to be good and bad. The second discursive pattern draws significantly on representations of a socially constructed feminine ideal and heavily gendered notions of health and risk. Conclusions: Both discursive patterns can be seen as illustrative of the way that young women do health and gender and how they negotiate risky health practices in and through their talk whilst trying to resist a stigmatised identity. A consideration for both current public health policy and future research is that a change is required away from a focus on individual behaviour to exploring the meaning of different health practices and the implications of this.

The Internet is a space where the harassment of women and marginalised groups online has attracted the attention of both academic and popular press. Feminist research has found that instances of online sexism and harassment are often reframed as “acceptable” by constructing them as a form of humour. Following this earlier research, this present paper explores a uniquely technologically-bound type of humour by adopting a feminist, social-constructionist approach to examine the content of popular Internet memes. Using thematic analysis on a sample of 240 image macro Internet memes (those featuring an image with a text caption overlaid), we identified two broad, overarching themes – Technological Privilege and Others. Within the analysis presented here, complex and troubling constructions of gendered identity in online humour are explored, illustrating the potential for the othering and exclusion of women through humour in technological spaces. We argue that this new iteration of heteronormative, hegemonic masculinity in online sexism, couched in “irony” and “joking”, serves to police, regulate and create rightful occupants and owners of such spaces.

While psycho-medical understandings of ‘eating disorders’ draw distinctions between those who ‘have’/‘do not have’ eating disorders, feminist poststructuralist researchers argue that these detract from political/socio-cultural conditions that invoke problematic eating and embodied subjectivities. Using poststructuralist discourse analysis, we examine young women’s talk around food and eating, in particular, the negotiation of tensions arising from derogating aspects of hetero-normative femininities, while accounting for own ‘feminine’ practices (e.g. ‘dieting’) and subjectivities. Analysis suggested that eating/dieting was accounted for by drawing upon neo-liberalist discourses around individual choice; however, these may obscure gendered, classed and racialized power relations operating in local and wider contexts.

New technologies for representing and communicating autoethnographies make it possible to be publically visible in new and interesting ways that weren’t possible prior to the digital revolution. An important ingredient in this process is the internet platforms that can make the digitisation of performances accessible across the world, even for short, modest creations from less experienced digital storytellers and film makers. As an illustration of the potential applications of digital technologies for ‘taking’ autoethnographic research to the ‘public,’ and making our research accessible to a wider audience we share ‘Reverberations,’ a collaborative autoethnography exploring bullying, homophobia, and other types of sexual harassment and associated feelings of shame, embarrassment and fear which often surround these topics.