Beyond ‘just say no’: Safe Uncertainty and rethinking responses to image-based sexual abuse among young people

Introduction

Image-based sexual abuse (IBSA) is an increasingly pervasive and evolving form of harm in young people’s digital lives. Encompassing the non-consensual creation, distribution or manipulation of sexual or sexualised images, it includes a wide spectrum of practices, from unauthorised sharing of consensually produced images, covert capture (e.g., ‘upskirting’), coerced production and, increasingly, financially motivated sextortion and synthetic content generated via artificial intelligence (McGlynn et al., 2017; Notté, 2024; Powell and Henry, 2017; Ray and Henry, 2025). While IBSA affects individuals across the life course, adolescent young people face particular vulnerabilities due to the entanglement of digital intimacies in their peer relationships and the ways their practices and experiences intersect with institutional settings such as schools, families and online platforms (McGlynn et al., 2017; Mishna et al., 2023; Ringrose et al., 2021, 2024). We henceforth focus on adolescents, offering a conceptual reappraisal of institutional responses to their experiences of IBSA.

Specifically, we invite readers to consider the potential for a more coherent, compassionate and developmentally attuned response across policy and practice through a trauma-informed, rights-based ecological framework. To operationalise this framework, we offer the concept of ‘safe uncertainty’ as a practical and principled way to navigate complexity in safeguarding and education. Originally developed in systemic family therapy (Mason, 1993), we adapt safe uncertainty as an approach to digital harm that resists reductive solutions, supports ethical reflection, and affirms young people’s dignity, relational agency and right to care. While we write from the context of England – and thus consider how responses to IBSA are shaped by national education, safeguarding and legal systems – we acknowledge that the issues we discuss have broad international relevance. Our intention, therefore, is for the concept of safe uncertainty to serve as a framework for systemic, cultural and practice-level change across diverse settings.

Our invitation is informed by existing literature, alongside insights from a multi-agency stakeholder workshop held in 2025, which brought together 38 professionals from education, law enforcement, frontline services, academia, policy and the tech sector. Convened under Chatham House Rules, the workshop created space for cross-sector dialogue and critical reflection on the evolving landscape of IBSA, including the challenges and contradictions faced in practice, facilitated by the two authors. While not an empirical study, the workshop serves as a reflective anchor for the review that follows.

Finally, we note that terminology in this space remains contested; notably, as we explore, due to the socio-legal discourses and regimes that surround young people’s digital image sharing practices and cultures. For example, ‘child sexual abuse material’ (CSAM) is the dominant legal and law enforcement term for exploitative content involving minors and ‘youth-produced sexual imagery’ is often used to refer to CSAM created and shared among similarly aged peers. Yet these terms may not fully capture the specific interpersonal, developmental and relational dimensions of peer-related IBSA (Ringrose et al., 2021, 2024), thus we adopt the term IBSA in this review.

Conceptualising IBSA: Harm, shame and digital relationality

Understanding IBSA among young people requires attention to blurring of boundaries between consent and coercion, intimacy and harm, and normative and aggravated behaviours in digital contexts. Following Wolak and Finkelhor (2011), we distinguish ‘developmentally normative’ forms of peer image sharing – which may involve voluntary exchanges in the context of trust or romantic exploration – and aggravated forms of IBSA, including coercion, extortion and non-consensual redistribution. Rather than being exceptional or deviant, IBSA among young people is embedded in the everyday social dynamics of adolescence, with sharing, surveillance, humour, competition and peer validation acting as normalised and taken-for-granted digital cultural practices (Durán-Guerrero and Sánchez-Jiménez, 2025; Fernández et al., 2025).

While a minority of young people report actively having produced or shared sexual images themselves (Madigan et al., 2018), research suggests they understand it as part of flirting, social validation and intimacy in digitally mediated sexual, relational and peer culture (Cooper et al., 2016; Dobson and Ringrose, 2016; McGeeney and Hanson, 2017). They acknowledge risks relating to IBSA and organise their perceptions of harm around the concept of consent (Meehan, 2022). Studies find that IBSA is both a cultural and technological problem; it is enabled by gendered peer cultures that shape disproportionalities in enactments and experiences of abuse and recognition of and response to victims, as well as digital platform affordances that enable both connection and harm (Dahlqvist and Gillander Gådin, 2024; Martínez Román et al., 2025; Ringrose et al., 2013, 2021, 2024; Setty et al., 2022).

Shame is a central mechanism through which IBSA exerts harm. Across the literature and in our workshop, shame is highlighted as both an emotional aftermath and a structuring force in how victims are treated. As Fernández et al. (2025) and Durán-Guerrero and Sánchez-Jiménez (2025) show regarding unauthorised distribution of images, for example, victims are often disciplined through social exclusion, stigma or ridicule, while the violation of consent may be overlooked or minimised. Here, it is the victim’s act of having created or shared an image initially – rather than the violation of trust – that becomes the focal point of blame. In this way, IBSA is not simply a one-off act but a socially embedded harm that plays out through peer surveillance, gossip, inaction and moral judgment (Harder, 2021; Ringrose et al., 2021, 2025). The same image may, furthermore, be interpreted differently depending on the sender’s gender or pre-existing reputation, highlighting the moral and cultural judgments that inform how IBSA is understood and socially policed (Crofts et al., 2015). A single incident of image sharing may, therefore, carry different meanings and consequences depending on the relational context and wider cultural norms around gender, sexuality and shame (Mishna et al., 2023; Nygård et al., 2025).

These dynamics are intensified by the social affordances of digital platforms – such as screenshotting, anonymous sharing and permanent content trails – which can reproduce and entrench harm long after the initial incident (Setty et al., 2022). Platform design features, including as relate to algorithmic amplification, thus shape not only what harm occurs, but how it circulates and is responded to and the ability for users to seek redress (Gillepsie, 2018). As the digital landscape evolves, so too do the forms and dynamics of IBSA. Emerging threats highlighted in literature and by stakeholders in our workshop – including, for example, AI-generated ‘deepfakes’, financially motivated ‘sextortion’ and ‘honour-based’ IBSA – are further challenging conventional assumptions about consent, agency and risk. These newer forms of harm often bypass traditional understandings of image production and exchange; perpetrators may operate anonymously (e.g., in cases of sextortion), and, when involving deepfakes, harm may be inflicted without any original image or direct interaction, dramatically expanding the scope of abuse. This expansion is also reshaping the gender dynamics of IBSA, with, in the case of sextortion, for example, boys and young men seemingly at heightened risk of abuse (Notté, 2024; Ray and Henry, 2025).

Workshop participants provided examples of how digital manipulation tools have significantly altered the dynamics of IBSA in these ways. They described these as ranging from apps that ‘nudify’ social media photos to sophisticated deepfake pornography websites. The images – whether crude or realistic – can produce devastating psychological and social consequences, including shame, exclusion and reputational damage, regardless of their authenticity, reflecting the persistent social and cultural power of visual material. As Viola and Voto (2023) argue, even when deepfakes are recognised as fake, they still carry symbolic weight, performing humiliation, sexualisation and control. The harm lies not only in what is depicted, but in what is communicated: that a young person’s body, identity and consent are public property. For Murray (2020), the ‘deep’ in deepfakes requires interrogation of the power structures, motivations and interpretive frameworks that render such forms of IBSA intelligible and impactful in specific contexts.

The scope for and harms of IBSA are being further amplified by platform infrastructures that enable anonymity, mass-sharing and lack of accountability. In response to platforms like Pornhub tightening upload policies under pressure from payment processors concerned about exploitation, new websites have emerged to fill the gap. Telegram, Discord 4Chan and Reddit channels host caches of sexual images categorised by school or location. Some explicitly solicit ‘revenge porn’ or hacked content, operating with impunity behind encrypted systems and weak moderation (Uhl et al., 2018). Even ostensibly innocuous apps that generate ‘flirty’ AI videos contribute to a cultural climate that trivialises consent and authenticity. As one workshop participant observed, benign apps that let users generate AI videos (e.g., kissing a crush) may appear innocuous but normalise blurred boundaries between fantasy and reality and reflect a disregard for what is real or consensual. This participant argued that such features, though marketed as entertainment, normalise blurred boundaries between fantasy and reality and reinforce a cultural landscape in which consent and authenticity are easily undermined.

Some of our workshop participants highlighted how perpetrators often rely on societal reactions – shaming, blaming and ostracising victims – to amplify harm. For example, sextortion perpetrators leverage these dynamics to coerce victims to send money to avoid having their images distributed to their family, friends, school and/or employer. An evolving iteration of this landscape of shame was shared by a workshop participant in the form of ‘honour-based’ IBSA, particularly affecting girls and young women from minoritised or conservative backgrounds. In such contexts, victims are targeted with fabricated or distributed images showing them with unrelated men or without culturally mandated clothing such as headscarves. These harms are relational, reputational and often communal, and the cultural specificity of the abuse and its social consequences may not, the participant argued, be well captured within Western liberal norms of nudity, privacy and individual harm.

New forms of IBSA like deepfakes and sextortion are not necessarily replacing older ones but layering upon them and further digitally re-mediating the interpersonal, social and cultural dynamics of abuse and shame. The spectrum of harm now spans peer-driven violations in intimate relationships to larger-scale abuse operated by networked actors. A systemic understanding of IBSA requires moving beyond individualised accounts of victimisation or perpetration. Following Lloyd (2020) and Setty et al. (2024), we situate IBSA within broader socio-technical and institutional contexts, where harm is produced through interpersonal violations while being enabled and exacerbated by social dynamics, platform infrastructures and, as we discuss further below, policy gaps and institutional responses. The concept of the ‘post-digital’ is useful here in making sense of how online and offline dynamics and ecologies are deeply intertwined in young people’s experiences of intimacy and harm (Setty et al., 2024). Post-digital scholarship rejects the binary between digital and physical life, instead highlighting how emotions, identities and relationships are continuously (re)mediated across platforms, peer spaces and institutions (Nelson et al., 2020; Ringrose et al., 2024).

A post-digital lens invites attention to relationality. We use relationality to refer to the ways in which harm, care and responsibility are negotiated within peer and institutional relationships. This perspective foregrounds the emotional labour involved in navigating digital intimacy, the trust that is extended or violated, and the collective cultures that permit or resist abuse (Setty et al., 2022). Rather than framing young people as naïve or deviant – common, as we show below, in institutional discourses and responses – a relational approach recognises the complexity of their social worlds and the structural conditions that shape their choices and vulnerabilities (Ringrose et al., 2024, 2025) Recognising the embedded nature of IBSA allows us to move beyond victim-perpetrator binaries toward a systemic understanding of harm that foregrounds dignity, trust and relational accountability.

Institutional responses to young people’s experiences of IBSA

Institutional responses to young people’s digital sexual cultures – and, therein, their experiences of IBSA – have struggled to keep pace, constrained by narrow definitions of abuse, siloed mandates and risk-averse cultures. Legal, educational and safeguarding systems are not only ill-equipped to address harm but are also entangled in ecologies of harm in ways that reproduce fear, silence and procedural defensiveness rather than care. Legally, laws designed to address CSAM capture all forms of youth image-sharing, even when described or experienced as consensual by young people, under the proviso that minors lack legal capacity to consent. Young people are, therefore, excluded from legislative efforts – including within the Online Safety Act 2023 in England – to introduce redress mechanisms that rely on consent distinctions. At the same time, tools available to the police designed to divert young people from prosecution in cases of non-aggravated peer sharing, including Outcome 21 and Outcome 22, are applied inconsistently and often fail to deliver the educational or developmental outcomes they promise (Phippen and Bond, 2023). There is little clarity around how to support young people in learning from incidents – including when initially non-aggravated exchanges become coercive or exploitative – beyond reiterating that they should not share images again (Setty et al., 2025).

This ambiguous legal context creates significant barriers to help-seeking, contributing to underreporting, fear of criminalisation, and confusion among young people and professionals about how to interpret and respond to image-based practices (Phippen and Bond, 2023; Ringrose et al., 2021; Setty, Hunt & Ringrose, 2025). Stakeholders in our workshop described how the same incident of image-sharing among young people might be read by authorities as a consensual romantic exchange, a safeguarding concern or a criminal offence, depending on the moment at which the incident is identified or reported and the institutional lens applied. They described the thresholds for intervention as unevenly applied, particularly in so-called ‘grey area’ cases where image-sharing begins consensually but later becomes abusive. Synthetic images further complicate this terrain, as schools and services struggle to classify, investigate or respond to incidents that do not fit neatly within existing safeguarding categories. Educators and safeguarding professionals in the workshop highlighted how responses frequently prioritise the management of digital artefacts – such as seizing devices or securing evidence – over attending to the emotional, relational or reputational fallout for the young person affected. Some described schools are often more concerned with reputational risk than with student wellbeing, downplaying incidents or avoiding referrals to external agencies. Even where disclosures are taken seriously, referral pathways are often unclear, and multi-agency collaboration is inconsistent, leading to repeated retellings of traumatic events and fragmented care.

The legal framing thus not only fails to prevent harm but may exacerbate it, particularly when ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’ categories are ambiguous and unstable. They also unfold within gendered institutional contexts, whereby girls are typically framed as vulnerable victims of IBSA while boys are framed either as perpetrators or passive bystanders, which can shape responses to incidents (Setty et al., 2025). These gendered patterns are further inflected by racialised and classed assumptions about sexual innocence, deviance and risk, shaping who is believed, who is sanctioned, and whose experiences are taken seriously (Ringrose et al., 2024). Some young people – particularly LGBTQ+ youth and those from minoritised backgrounds – experience additional barriers to accessing support, including fear of exposure, cultural stigma and mistrust of institutions (Piljman et al., 2024; Turner et al., 2025). Institutional responses may, therefore, compound harm through differential treatment and moral surveillance, even when ostensibly aiming to protect.

Legal framings do not operate in isolation nor simply in response to incidents. They also directly shape how image-sharing is addressed in educational settings via preventative interventions. In England, the statutory requirement on schools to teach ‘the law’ on image-sharing (DfE, 2019) has contributed to a compliance-driven approach in which digital intimacy is presented as inherently risky or morally suspect. Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) in schools often positions image-sharing as deviant, shameful or illegal, reinforcing a deficit model in which young people are viewed as lacking in judgment and in need of prohibition to protect them from harm. While the updated RSE guidance released in 2025 includes a requirement to reassure young people that disclosing harm will not lead to punishment (DfE, 2025), this message is undermined by the broader legal environment in which schools operate and by the embedded cultures of surveillance, silence and blame within schools themselves (Setty and Hunt, 2025; Setty et al., 2025).

Our workshop discussions highlighted the limitations of educational campaigns advising young people to ‘just say no’ to image-sharing as a way of avoiding harm (see Internet Watch Foundation IWF, 2025), reminiscent, as one workshop participant reminded us, of failed anti-drug campaigns of the 1980s (Phippen and Street, 2021). Within this messaging, image-sharing is erased of its affective, relational and exploratory dimensions, while consent, trust and boundary negotiation in digital contexts are rarely addressed in nuanced terms, leaving little space for discussion of ethical digital intimacy or critical digital literacy (Albury, 2015; Dobson and Ringrose, 2016; Patchin and Hinduja, 2020; Ringrose et al., 2021; Scott et al., 2020; Setty and Dobson, 2023a). In turn, young people often describe interventions designed to address digital harms as out of touch with their lived experiences (Project DeShame, 2017; Ringrose et al., 2021) and are left within the emotional, social or ethical tools needed to navigate digital intimacy (Martínez Román et al., 2025; Ringrose et al., 2024, 2025).

Educators in our workshop described feeling constrained by dominant curricular framings and fearful of being perceived as condoning image-sharing if they attempt to differentiate consensual from non-consensual dynamics. Many felt unequipped to facilitate open, reflective or ethically complex discussions, and instead defaulted to legalistic scripts. Several stakeholders highlighted how evolving forms of IBSA demand a new approach. They were concerned, for example, about how boys targeted in sextortion scams can experience profound shame, isolation and suicidal ideation, exacerbated by the fear of criminalisation. They argued that responses that centre individual culpability and risk – even treating victims of manipulation and exploitation as offenders under child sexual abuse legislation – can reinforce silence and shame. Discussions also explored how technological shifts render prevention campaigns focused on discouraging image creation as a form of self-protection increasingly obsolete. Essentially, the logic of ‘just don’t send nudes’ fails when images can be fabricated and circulated within consent or awareness. Similar dynamics are at play in more long-standing forms of IBSA, including image-based sexual harassment such as unsolicited image-sharing – often ‘dick pics’ sent to girls and young women by boys and men – where the recipient, rather than the perpetrator, is called upon to manage the risk despite their inaction (Ringrose et al., 2021). In both cases, the burden remains with potential victims.

Workshop participants also expressed caution regarding efforts to respond to evolving digital infrastructures that enable abuse through the scope for anonymity and synthetic content creation. Some suggested that blunt attempts at reform risk compromising young people’s digital rights to privacy and expression, potentially undermining trust in services and disproportionately surveilling young people, while increasing the likelihood of young people moving to darker unregulated parts of the internet as they circumvent the barriers in place. It was also noted that young people demonstrate a preference for accessing support for issues like IBSA via, often times anonymous, online services, yet a discourse of digital risk remains entrenched, which may overlook the benefits of anonymised digital access to young people experiencing harm. There was, in turn, a call for regulation that balances accountability and safety with young people’s digital rights.

Taken together, these dynamics point to a systemic failure to meet the needs of young people affected by IBSA. Legal frameworks that conflate protection with prohibition shape educational environments that silence and shame, which, in turn, informs safeguarding responses that are reactive, fragmented and often out of step with the lived realities of digital harm. Rather than working in concert, these systems often reinforce one another’s limitations, producing a landscape in which help-seeking is risky, care is inconsistent, and harm is moralised. In the next section, we introduce a conceptual framework that seeks to address these challenges by integrating trauma-informed, rights-based and ecological principles into a coherent, youth-centred model of response.

Toward a trauma-informed, rights-based ecological response

The institutional challenges outlined above point to the need for a more coherent, compassionate and developmentally attuned response to IBSA. We bring together three intersecting conceptual frameworks – trauma-informed, rights-based and ecological – to propose an integrated model that supports ethical and effective interventions. These frameworks move beyond individualised, punitive or compliance-focused approaches, instead foregrounding young people’s dignity, relational agency and right to care.

A trauma-informed approach begins with the recognition that harm is not only psychological, but also social, symbolic and relational. Recent studies confirm the deep psychological and social effects of IBSA on young people, including anxiety, PTSD symptoms, suicidal ideation and social withdrawal (Colburn et al., 2025; Mitchell et al., 2025; Nygård et al., 2025). Gender and sexuality shape these experiences in distinct ways, as do cultural and familial dynamics, as seen in the case of ‘honour-based’ IBSA. IBSA can, furthermore, involve repeated violations over time, prolonging the emotional impact and reinforcing cycles of shame, fear and exclusion (Setty et al., 2022). These impacts are often intensified when institutional responses are perceived as disbelieving, dismissive, blaming or punitive. Harm may, therefore, be experienced not only through the initial violation but also through how others – peers, institutions, adults – respond to it.

Trauma-informed practice resists procedural or punitive responses that neglect these emotional realities of IBSA. It can support healing and reclaiming of agency, when the setting allows for safety and choice (Fava and Bay-Cheng, 2013). It calls for consistent, relational and developmentally sensitive support that goes beyond managing incidents to include safety planning, emotional containment and restoration of trust. It requires professionals to be trained to recognise trauma responses, avoid re-traumatisation and provide environments in which young people can disclose safely and receive sustained care (Carello and Butler, 2014). This requires attention not just to safeguarding procedures and protocols but also to wider preventative messaging and pedagogy with young people. Trauma-informed education scaffolds young people’s capacity to reflect and adapt, especially important when addressing emotionally charged topics (Lazarus et al., 2025).

While trauma-informed frameworks focus on care and recovery, rights-based approaches offer a complementary emphasis on young people’s entitlements to protection, expression and participation (Livingstone et al., 2018). A rights-based lens rejects binary categorisation of young people as reckless or vulnerable, instead affirming the developmental complexity of adolescence, including young people’s capacity to engage in ethical reasoning and decision-making, even in digital contexts (Albury and Crawford, 2012). Rather than foregrounding illegality or deviance, rights-based responses recognise that navigating intimacy and trust – including in digital spaces – can be a normative part of sexual development, albeit risky (Scott et al., 2020). Crucially, from this perspective, the exercise of agency does not nullify a young person’s right to protection when harm occurs (Gregory, 2015). As with Gillick competence in sexual healthcare, young people’s capacity for ethical deliberation and decision-making should not remove the responsibility of adults and institutions to offer care, guidance and redress.

Participation is central to a rights-based response (Setty and Dobson, 2023b). Rights are only meaningful when lived and enacted in practice, which, in this context, requires involving young people in shaping the educational, safeguarding and policy responses that affect their lives. This includes the co-production of resources, co-design of reporting pathways and co-evaluation of institutional cultures. Reflections shared by workshop participants underscored that when adults attempt to impose top-down solutions without listening to young people’s experiences and needs, interventions can be ineffective and may reinforce stigma or silence. In this way, rights-based education calls for a shift from fear-based or moralising messaging to reflective and dialogic engagement (Setty et al., 2025). Rather than teaching that all image-sharing is inherently harmful, education should support ethical reflection, moving beyond prohibition and toward the cultivation of digital responsibility and relational ethics.

In the context of IBSA, trauma-informed, rights-based practice is further strengthened by an ecological perspective, which emphasises that IBSA does not occur in a vacuum. Rather, it is shaped by wider ecologies of peer norms, institutional practices, cultural scripts and technological infrastructures (Phippen, 2025). In a ‘post-digital’ landscape, policy attempting to regulate the technology only represents a partial fix. As Woods (2024) argues, no technological response can resolve what is fundamentally a cultural and social problem. Platforms may, for example, build in safety features, but unless these are embedded in a broader framework of education, cultural accountability and systemic regulation, they will remain reactive rather than transformative.

An ecological framework demands that responsibility for prevention and response be shared across systems, including education, safeguarding, health, law enforcement and digital platforms (Phippen and Street, 2021). In aligns with literature on contextual safeguarding that emphasises the need to address social norms, institutional processes and digital contexts when responding to risk (Firmin et al., 2023; Lloyd, 2020). It emphasises joined-up working, consistent messaging and a shared ethical foundation across services. It requires reflective practice, inter-agency training and adequate resourcing both in response to incidents and to build the trust and relationships needed to support young people over time. At a cultural level, it involves critical engagement with the institutional and societal discourses that shape responses to IBSA, including shame, blame, denial and avoidance. Workshop participants discussed how public narratives around IBSA often devolve into blame: platforms blame parents; parents blame schools; schools blame young people. This cycle obscures the structural conditions that produce harm and diverts energy away from collective solutions. An ecological model instead asks: What roles do institutions play in reinforcing or challenging shame and silence? How do policy, platform design and peer culture interact to shape how IBSA is experienced and addressed? How can adults and young people work together to co-create safer, more just digital environments?

Workshop reflections emphasised the importance of clarifying the overarching purpose of institutional responses. Rather than setting a goal of eliminating all risk – a position that can lead to excessive surveillance or moral panic – a trauma-informed, rights-based ecological approach supports the development of young people’s critical awareness, ethical judgement and capacity for meaningful connection. The aim is not to control behaviour, but to create the conditions in which young people can explore intimacy, make mistakes, seek help and recover from harm with their dignity intact. In this way, the framework can, we suggest, provide the foundations for a more ethical, relational and contextually attuned response to IBSA among young people.

Operationalising a trauma-informed, rights-based ecological response through ‘safe uncertainty’

The trauma-informed, rights-based ecological framework outlined above calls for a new way of thinking about how institutions respond to IBSA among young people. Rather than focusing narrowly on individual risk, rule-breaking or moral failure, this framework recognises the structural and relational conditions in which harm occurs, and allows for practices that centre young people’s dignity, participation and emotional safety. We propose the concept of safe uncertainty as a practical and principled way of putting these ideas into action across education, safeguarding and youth policy more broadly.

Originally developed in systemic family therapy (Mason, 1993), safe uncertainty offers an approach to professional practice that resists the urge to impose certainty where complexity exists. It asks practitioners to stay reflective and responsive when facing ambiguity, rather than falling into reactive or overly rigid responses. This means resisting both paralysing uncertainty and premature closure, neither avoiding action for fear of getting it wrong, nor rushing to procedural solutions that fail to address the underlying relational, emotional or ethical dimensions of harm. In the context of IBSA, where cases often involve blurred boundaries, shifting motivations, peer dynamics and institutional tensions, this orientation is particularly important. Safe uncertainty reimagines pedagogy and safeguarding as relational, reflective and dialogic, creating space to talk openly about intimacy, pressure, consent, shame and boundary-setting, neither to condone nor prohibit, but to explore.

As outlined above, institutional responses to IBSA often rely on rule-based or compliance-oriented models that prioritise legal scripts, reputational protection or risk management over relational care. While such approaches offer a sense of clarity and control, they may also shut down opportunities for ethical dialogue, reflection and restorative support. They can leave professionals feeling disempowered and young people feeling blamed, surveilled or unheard (McKenny, 2021; Setty et al., 2025). Safe uncertainty offers an alternative orientation that recognises that young people’s image-sharing practices may involve curiosity, trust, validation or social connection, and that motivations and meanings can shift over time. Rather than scripting what should be said or done in every case, it supports practitioners to ask: What is happening in this particular context? What relational dynamics are at play? How can safety, trust and dignity be balanced in this response? This approach is particularly important in response to ambiguous or emerging issues, for example when coercion is subtle, cultural dynamics are at play, or when abuse involves AI-generated content or sextortion. In some cases, there may be no original image, no clear perpetrator or no explicit violation of the law, yet the harm is real, and the young person affected requires support. Safe uncertainty allows professionals to remain open and responsive in such cases, even when formal systems offer little guidance or precedent.

This orientation encourages professionals to recognise that each young person’s experience of IBSA is situated and shaped by social norms, emotional needs, institutional responses and peer relationships. It legitimises emotional complexity and relational ambiguity as central, rather than peripheral, to safeguarding and education. Yet is requires secure, responsive spaces for handling emotional risk and supporting disclosures without re-traumatising young people (McKenny, 2021). It involves ‘scaffolding’ uncertainty to avoid increasing vulnerability, especially among those facing trauma or marginalisation (Reyna and Farley, 2006). Safe uncertainty is, therefore, about going at the young person’s pace, with the adult providing containment and support.

For example, a case in which a young person consensually shares an image with a partner, and the image is later forwarded without consent following a breakup, clearly constitutes IBSA. Yet institutions may hesitate to intervene if the original sharing was consensual, if the individuals are still in a relationship, or if the incident is framed as ‘relational drama’ rather than abuse. Safe uncertainty encourages professionals to move beyond binary framings – victim/perpetrator, consensual/non-consensual – and consider the young person’s emotional state, relational context and longer-term needs, asking: What dynamics of trust, breach or harm are at play here? What support does this young person need to feel safe again and make sense of the experience? How are peer and institutional cultures shaping the harm? What needs to be addressed to prevent further harm?

These are not questions that can be answered by checklists alone. They require ongoing relational work, reflective practice and the willingness to sit with complexity. A safe uncertainty approach in RSE likewise supports critical discussion, scenario-based reflection and peer dialogue, exploring questions such as: What does it mean to share an image respectfully? Why might someone forward an image they were sent? What forms of trust, pressure or power are at play? These questions can help build cultures of digital responsibility and relational ethics, supporting young people not only to avoid harm but to navigate intimacy, trust and vulnerability in ways that affirm their agency (Gregory, 2015).

These shifts have wider implications for youth policy and institutional design. Schools and safeguarding systems often default to one of two positions: safe certainty (rigid rules, zero-tolerance policies, defensive responses), or unsafe uncertainty (avoidance, minimisation, lack of action). Safe uncertainty offers a third path that embraces clarity and accountability while also recognising that ethical practice requires reflection, dialogue and flexibility. It suggests that policies should not only define what to do, but create the conditions in which ethical, relational and context-sensitive responses can flourish. It requires guidance but also time, training and institutional support, especially when addressing potentially contentious or emotional charged topics. A culture of safe uncertainty supports professionals to acknowledge when they do not know, to consult and reflect, and to act with clarity and care even in the face of ambiguity. It involves building relational trust with students, embedding RSE as a site for ethical dialogue, prioritising trauma-informed supervision, creating time for inter-agency dialogue, and ensuring that thresholds for intervention are interpreted relationally, not just procedurally.

Finally, safe uncertainty invites wider cultural transformation. From this perspective, IBSA is not simply a behavioural problem; it is a site where cultural norms around gender, sexuality, consent and digital life are made visible (Ringrose et al., 2024). Institutional responses must engage with these deeper dynamics rather than attempting to neutralise them through procedural fixes. Safe uncertainty invites us to view complexity not as a threat to be managed, but as a feature of adolescent life to be navigated with care, humility and commitment. Grounded in trauma-informed, rights-based and ecological principles, safe uncertainty does not offer definitive answers. It supports professionals, institutions and young people to ask better questions and to stay in relationship with those questions, even when the answers remain uncertain.

Conclusion

Current institutional responses to IBSA among young people are often constrained by punitive, individualising and risk-averse logics that often fail to recognise the structural, relational and developmental dimensions of harm. Legal frameworks tend to criminalise or oversimplify adolescent sexual cultures; educational approaches often rely on fear or moralism; and safeguarding systems frequently prioritise procedural compliance over sustained, compassionate care. The evolving nature of IBSA demands that we rethink our assumptions about harm, risk and responsibility. In this review, we suggest it is possible to build a more coherent, compassionate and youth-centred response that supports young people not just to avoid danger, but to build relationships grounded in care, consent and mutual respect. We endorse a trauma-informed, rights-based ecological framework, operationalised through the lens of safe uncertainty. This model invites a shift from compliance to care, control to ethical reflection, and institutional fragmentation to shared, relational responsibility. It foregrounds the importance of trust, dignity and participation in supporting young people to navigate digital intimacy, harm and recovery, while resisting both premature certainty and fearful inaction.

Safe uncertainty is not a call for vagueness or decision. Rather, it is a principled stance for holding complexity, staying present with ambiguity and responding with ethical clarity. It enables young people to engage critically and reflectively with the realities of digital sexual cultures, while supporting institutions to create environments where help-seeking is met with empathy, not shame. Through safe uncertainty, we offer an alternative to systems built on fear, blame or silence. We invite educators, practitioners, policymakers and researchers to embrace uncertainty not as a weakness to be eliminated, but as a space in which relational, ethical and transformative responses to harm can emerge.