Pressure to take nude selfies spikes

Hawke's Bay police say Bay teens are posting an alarming amount of inappropriate material online. Photo / File

Nude "selfies" and videos shared among young people are continuing to cause major concern to Hawke's Bay police after a girl as young as 11 reportedly posted inappropriate material online.

Detective Sergeant Mark Moorhouse said the behaviour was nothing new, and blamed peer-pressure as the main cause for nude online videos and posts.

"A lot of teenagers are living their lives through social media; there's a huge problem with education around relationships.

"There needs to be a lot of work done collectively around all the agencies on providing education for young people on healthy relationships," Moorhouse said.

He said young people were constantly exposed to sexualised behaviour and had easy access to online pornography, which blurred lines around healthy relationships. He urged parents, caregivers and education centres to take drastic action.

"Parents and caregivers have to take an active role in the online life of their children, because this is also a global issue and it's really hard to legislate against. The internet isn't going anywhere, there's a good side and a bad side to it. Kids can be easily lured into chat rooms and all sorts of other problems that can arise. You just need to turn on the music channels to see how sexualised everything is.

"Kids are really good at parroting behaviours and we're finding that there's been an increase in sexualised behavior in very young kids and essentially that could be to what they're being exposed to online."

Detective Sergeant Heath Jones said a number of Hawke's Bay schools are facing issues with students sending nude pictures and videos. One teacher said it happened every day.

"Parents right across the country need to wake up," he said.