Sexting does not pose health threat: study

"Sexting" - an increasingly popular practice of sending sexually explicit texts to a romantic partner - does not appear to pose a public health threat, scientists say.

Researchers found that sexting may not affect sexual activity, adding that existing studies on the topic have significant shortcomings.

"There's a lot of work being done on the phenomenon of sexting and how it may influence sexual behaviour, but the work is being done in a wide variety of populations by researchers from many different backgrounds," said Kami Kosenko, associate professor at North Carolina State University (NC State).

"We wanted to analyse this broad body of work to see what, if anything, can be gleaned from all of these studies," said Kosenko.

The scientists found 234 journal articles that looked at sexting.

They removed studies that did not look at the relationship between sexting and behaviour, as well as any studies that did not include clearly defined quantitative measures of sexting or sexual behaviour.

This process left them with only 15 studies that looked at whether there was any link between sexting and sexual activity, unprotected sex, or the number of sexual partners.

Researchers found that there was a weak relationship between sexting and all of those categories. However, it was not possible to tell if sexting actually influenced behaviour at all. In fact, there's not even an agreed-upon definition for sexting, researchers said.

"There are two take-home messages here," said Andrew Binder, an associate professor at NC State. "First is that sexting does not appear to pose a public health threat to America's youth," said Binder. "Second, if this is something we want to study, we need to design better studies. For example, the field needs a common, clear definition of what we mean by sexting, as well as more robust survey questions and methods," he added.