In terms of how to frame this up, for your son and for yourself, we would encourage you to see it as chance for a good person to learn about himself and what can lead him astray. Let him know that you are not furious with him and that you have faith in him. Sending a dick pic to this girl may have been a mistake but that does not make him no longer a good person. Making mistakes is a necessary part of learning and growth, it does not define us as good or bad, to do that is to generate shame. Shame breeds silence and hiding and that is the last thing you want to do with your son.
However, to benefit from our mistakes, we have to both acknowledge them fully and delve deeply to understand as much as possible about what went wrong and what to do differently in the future. So, part of your frame up to your son may be to warn him that processing this incident is going to involve some lengthy conversations that he is likely to find awkward and, probably, painful. Sometimes that’s what learning about ourselves requires.
We would say that the young woman and her mother have done your son a great favour – first by speaking up and secondly by giving you a chance to deal with it on your own terms. Make sure that you reassure them that you are taking it seriously and tell them how you plan to ensure your son never does anything like this again.
No matter how you approach him, your son is likely to be embarrassed and defensive. He also may not have much conscious understanding of why he sent the picture. A typical response is to try to dismiss and minimise it as “a joke”.
If this is where your son begins, it’s important to recognise that he is under the influence of that part of our society that is attempting to sustain male privilege, and minimising the abuse and oppression of women. He is likely in a peer culture where this kind of offensive behaviour is normalised and trivialised. If he has a Dad or other adult man actively involved with him, it would be helpful if they talked to him about treating women with respect and how relationships and sex need to operate to be safe and fun for both parties. The notion of full and on-going consent needs to be stressed as a bedrock for all human interaction.
In our understanding of the law, sending an unsolicited explicit image to a minor is a “harassment” offence under the Harmful Digital Communications Act. However, psychologically, it’s a form of sexual assault (and is treated that way legally in some other jurisdictions like the UK or Finland). The young woman he sent that picture to is likely to feel violated.
The first task is to see if your son is able to exercise some empathy. If your son is a good person, he will care about the impact on that young woman. However, good people may still try to protect themselves from the guilt and shame that empathy can evoke. That’s a place where you can help him. If he is going to avoid doing more harm like this, he needs to emotionally connect with the impact of what he’s done by putting himself in her shoes.
Statistically, it’s likely that either you or someone you know well (e.g. sisters, daughters or female friends) has been the victim of men flashing, groping, or other unprovoked sexual assault. Talk to him (or get someone else he cares for to talk to him) about what it feels like to be on the receiving end of overt sexual behaviour with no warning and no context. Help him to try and connect with that at an emotional level, not just an intellectual “yeah, I get it, I broke a rule”.
Once he has a grasp of the seriousness of what he’s done, the next task is to help him try to understand how he got to a place of harming someone (especially someone he sees every day). If he thought it was funny, where did he get that idea from? What does it say about people he is using as a reference (his friends, family or role models) that they think violating someone’s safety is amusing? What motivates people to avoid having empathy for others?
Or was he acting out of anger? Had he felt hurt or slighted by this young woman? In that case, there may have been an intent to cause distress. Most violence to women is done by men who feel disempowered. What made him think it was okay to hurt someone back?
Did he think this was a way to flirt? Is this an accepted norm in his peer group when exploring or trying to indicate sexual interest? If so, how did he and his peers end up so far off-track in their sense of what’s appropriate?
These are big and complicated issues that many adults don’t have good answers for. However, if your son is going to have a reliable moral compass to guide him through life and, especially, relationships with women, he needs to develop a deep understanding of these issues and the forces acting on him.
If you don’t feel equipped as a family to help him arrive at this level of understanding then get some professional help. In the first instance talk to the people at Netsafe who should be able to point you to relevant resources. If you feel you need more help than that, there are many psychologists who have been working for agencies that deal with sexual harm who are now in private practice. So, you can either go through an agency or seek someone privately who has relevant expertise.
• Verity & Nic are psychologists and family therapists who have specialised in relationship and sex therapy for more than 25 years. They have been working on their own relationship for more than 40 years and have two adult children.
