The turn to trust: adult women, hetero-sexting, and the use of trust as sexting risk mitigation

ABSTRACT This article explores how women use and understand trust as risk mitigation when sexting with men—also known as hetero-sexting. Drawing on interviews with 44 women aged 18–38 and based in Cambridgeshire, England, it takes as its starting point the fact that participants distinguished between trust as “implicit” and grounded in their current feelings for their sexting partner and as a more explicit, strategic means to gain control over the distribution of their private sexual images into the future. Focusing on the latter understanding of trust as control, the article explores what this understanding of trust can tell us about the changing nature of trust, and about the forces that inform how trust is performed and perceived in the context of hetero-sexting. It demonstrates how the logics of postfeminism or “gendered neoliberalism” informed participants’ understandings of trust as control, and how this understanding resulted in the generation and expectation of their engagement in “trust work” to protect themselves from having their private sexual images shared without their consent.


Introduction
Between June 2016 and February 2017, I conducted 44 interviews with adult women aged 18-38 and based in Cambridgeshire, England."Adult" is here defined in line with the UK legal definition, as anyone aged 18 or over (GOV.UK 2023).These interviews made part of an exploratory research project concerned with adult women's experiences of using digital media and technology in their romantic and sexual relations.The project was particularly focused on how women's experiences of this were articulated through their experiences of the digitally mediated creating, sending, and receiving of private sexual images-an activity that is also known as sexting (Emma Bond 2016). 1 The focus on adult women was informed by data showing that women aged 18 and over constitute one of the age and gender groups most subjected to further non-consensual sharing of private sexual images, and by my desire to learn how the risk of this did, or did not, inform their sexting and other digitally mediated romantic and sexual practices.
The sharing of private sexual images without the consent of a person depicted in the image is an act captured by the term "image-based sexual abuse" (IBSA), which describes "the taking, distributing, and/or making of threats to distribute, a nude or sexual image without a person's consent" (Anastasia Powell, Nicola Henry, Ashry Flynn, and Adrian J. Scott 2019, 392) (see also : Clare McGlynn and Erika Rackley 2017).IBSA covers a range of abuse related to private sexual images, like voyeurism and sextortion.Here, the focus is on one element of IBSA-the non-consensual sharing of private sexual images created for the purpose of sexting.In the UK, the Revenge Porn Helpline-a support service assisting people aged 18 and over dealing with threats or the actual sharing of their private sexual images without their consent-reported that between 2015 and 2020 (excluding 2017), the number of cases of private sexual images being shared non-consensually rose with nearly a third (Zara Ward 2021, 11).Whilst they noted 640 cases in 2018, there were over 1000 cases in 2000 and just under 1000 cases in 2021 (Ward 2021, 11;Revenge Porn Helpline 2022).A report grounded in an analysis of cases from the Revenge Porn Helpline and the Professionals Online Safety Helpline found that the non-consensual sharing of private sexual images is a gendered phenomenon, with those affected being "disproportionally female" (Sharratt 2019, 5).Another report by the Revenge Porn Helpline shows that women are "around five times more likely" than any other gender group to having their private sexual images shared non-consensually (Ward 2021, 12).
In this article, I explore how the participants in my study used trust to prevent the risk of IBSA from materialising.When discussing trust as sexting risk mitigation, these women explained trust in two different ways: trust was explained both as "implicit" and grounded in their current feelings for their sexting partner and as a more explicit, strategic means to gain control over the distribution of their private sexual images into the future.Whereas their understanding of implicit trust was similar to that of Denise M. Rousseau, Sim B. Sitkin, Ronald S. Burt, Colin Camerer (1998, 395), who define trust as "a psychological state comprising the intention to accept vulnerability," their second understanding of trust was different in that its emphasis on control signalled a rejection of vulnerability.This second understanding of trust hence contradicts the claim presented in much literature on trust as "a substitute for control," meaning that control is not necessary in situations of trust and vice versa (Rousseau et al. 1998, 399).Participants relied on this second understanding of trust to keep a sense of control over their private sexual images, even after they had sent them to their intended receiver and regardless of how their romantic or sexual relation developed.When understood as such, trust was cast as an emotive means of having control in an otherwise uncertain situation.
It is the second understanding of trust to control potential future image distribution that this article is concerned with.Engaging with participants' accounts of sexting in the context of female-to-male relations-henceforth referred to as hetero-sexting (Rikke Amundsen 2022) -it will explore how the logics of what Rosalind Gill (2007Gill ( , 2017) ) calls postfeminism or gendered neoliberalism informed participants' understandings of trust as control.The article will investigate how this influence of gendered neoliberalism led to a conceptualisation of trust as grounded in emotional and practical work and cast as an individual responsibility.It also aims to show how this reconceptualisation of trust as control works to entrench current gender inequalities within hetero-sexting and within the intimate, heterosexual domain.

Gender and trust in the sexting risk literature
This article is situated in relation to existing, and primarily qualitative, social science and humanities-based research on sexting, a body of research that tends to focus on the sexting practices of children, youth, or young adults (see, for example: Wendy G. Macdowall, David S. Reid, Ruth Lewis, Raquel Bosó Pérez, Kirstin R. Mitchell, Karen J. Maxwell, Clarissa Smith 2022, 1-2; Steven Roberts and Signe Ravn 2020, 260) -an Nicola empirical focus that is somewhat different from the research presented here.Like this article, however, the existing research on this topic primarily explores sexting in the Global North (Kath Albury, Amy Adele Hasinoff, and Theresa Senft 2017; Thomas Crofts et al. 2015;Amy Shields Dobson 2017;Döring 2014;Hasinoff 2015;Emily Setty 2020).The aim here is to contribute to two segments of this existing research, concerned with the role of gender in sexting-related risk and with the role of trust in practices and perceptions of sexting risk mitigation.
According to Dobson (2017, 79-80), "[d]iscourses of 'risk' and 'harm' in sexting are currently hegemonic," and much of the relevant research to date has sought to unpack how discourses of sexting risk and the ways that we make sense of them, are "socially and culturally determined."Certainly, a key issue addressed in the sexting risk research is about how we understand, and engage with, the worry brought on by knowing that our sexting material might be shared further without our consent (Morten Birk Hansen Mandau 2021; Marijke Naezer and Lotte van Oosterhout 2021; Laura Pavón-Benítez, Nuria Romo-Avilés, Pilar Tarancón Gómez 2021).A further core concern of the research preoccupied with discourses surrounding sexting risk is about gender, and about the gendered nature of sexting and sexting risk (Steven Roberts, Signe Ravn, Marcus Maloney, Brittany Ralph 2021, 23).For example, research from England and Australia with young people and/or men show how notions of masculinity inform consensual and/or nonconsensual sexting behaviours (Roberts et al. 2021;Antonio García-Gómez 2019;Jessica Ringrose, Katilyn Regehr, and Sophie Whitehead 2022).Research also shows how it is especially young women who are situated at the centre of the risk discourses surrounding sexting, something that renders them disproportionally responsibilised for the mitigation of this risk as well as for its materialisation (Amy Shields Dobson and Jessica Ringrose 2016; Lara Karaian 2014; Julia R. Lippman and Scott W. Campbell 2014;Morten Birk Hansen Mandau 2021;Signe Ravn, Julia Coffey, Steven Roberts 2021;Jessica Ringrose, Laura Harvey, Rosalind Gill, Sonia Livingstone 2013;Michael Salter 2016;Emily Setty 2018;2019).This research has also explored how those who are affected by it-especially young women-respond by engaging in risk mitigating practices to reduce the harm in case their private sexual image is later shared further without their consent.These risk mitigating activities can include the omitting of identifying characteristics and the use of image-sharing apps with a disappearing affordance (Melissa Burkett 2015;Christine Geeng, Jevan Hutson, Franziska Roesner 2020;Sidsel Kirstine Harder 2021;Harder et al. 2020;Renfrow and Rollo 2014;Macdowall et al. 2022, 5).Drawing on group and individual interviews with young people in England, Setty (2019) also shows how some young women choose sexting abstention, a form of risk mitigation that deprives them of the opportunity to engage in potentially pleasurable sexting experiences.
Of particular interest to this article, are findings from the relevant sexting risk literature regarding the significance of trust as sexting risk mitigation.Some research has shown how trust is seen as a prerequisite for safe sexting (Harder 2021;Clara Rübner Jørgensen et al. 2019, 30;Pavón-Benítez, Romo-Avilés, and Tarancón Gómez 2021, 5-6).Other research demonstrates how (committed) relationships tend to be understood as safer contexts for sexting, primarily because they are assumed to have a higher prevalence of trust within them (Burkett 2015, 853-54;Amy Adele Hasinoff, Tamara Shepherd 2014;2939-40;Setty 2018, 4540;Sara E. Thomas 2018, 198;Andrea Waling, Lucille Kerr, Adam Bourne, Jennifer Power, Michael Kehler 2020, 210-11).A survey on sexting amongst US-based adults also found that "[t]he most common mitigation strategy" for safe sexting among their participants was to ensure that one were "only sexting with someone the person knows and trusts" (Geeng, Hutson, and Roesner 2020, 136).Research has also demonstrated how the perceived risks in sexting provide an opportunity for those engaged with it to express trust and intimacy to their partners (Albury et al. 2013, 10;Amundsen 2019aAmundsen , 2022;;Hasinoff and Shepherd 2014;2939-41;Morgan Johnstonbaugh 2021, 679;Setty 2018, 4544, Setty 2019, 596;Macdowall et al. 2022, 5).Antonio García-Gómez (2022, 122) research with female teenagers, and with girls aged nine to twelve in England found that participants considered female sexting behaviour socially acceptable when "in love," with one participant equating sexting when in love with telling your partner that "you trust him." Ravn, Coffey, and Roberts (2021, 322) show how their focus group participants-young male adults studying at two universities in Melbourne, Australia-saw trust as a motivating factor not to share any sexting material further without the consent of the person depicted in the image (see also : Setty 2018, 4541).Another publication from the same study found that trust between men could be a motivating factor for them to show to each other sexting material that they had received from women, but only in "acceptable" situations, like when seeking advice from a friend (Roberts et al. 2021, 32-33).Thomas (2018, 202) analysis of written posts by primarily young women on a digital platform for teens, found that young men used "assurances of love or trustworthiness" to coerce young women into sharing private sexual images with them.
The existing research on sexting risk demonstrates how individualised and gendered discourses promoting choice and responsibility inform not just conceptions of risk and practices of risk mitigation, but also attendant experiences of trust (Amundsen 2019b;Mandau 2021, 441;Ringrose et al. 2013, 315;Setty 2018, 4541).This research demonstrates the role of gender in understandings of sexting risk and, more specifically, in the framing of who is responsible for mitigating them, whether that be through trust or otherwise.In this article, I build on these insights as I draw on Gill's (2007Gill's ( , 2017) ) understanding of gendered neoliberalism to scrutinise the elements of active calculation, assessment, and emotional and practical work involved as participants set out to protect themselves from the risk of IBSA through trust as control.Focusing on the role of gender in this reconceptualisation of trust as a form of future-oriented power, I bring new information to the existing literature about the forces that inform practices and perceptions of trust in hetero-sexting and in sexting risk mitigation.Power is here understood as "the ability to intervene in the course of events and to affect their outcome" (John B Thompson 1995, 13).

Methodology
The research was guided by an over-arching research question: What can women's accounts of sexting tell us about the impact of mediation on experiences of intimacy?All quotes by participants included in this article were about sexting practices deemed consensual.However, the concept of consent does not necessarily capture the ambivalence and complexity that can inform any decision to partake in sexual activity, or the fact that, sometimes, we might not know what we want (Katherine Angel 2022, 18).
The recruitment of interview participants commenced in May 2016 after I had received ethical approval from the Ethics Committee in the Department of Sociology, of the University of Cambridge.To find participants-which had to be self-defining women, aged 18 or over, and based in Cambridgeshire, England-I relied on purposive, network and snowball sampling. 2I recruited 44 participants, whom I interviewed between June 2016 and February 2017.The participants were aged 18-38.Recruitment commenced with a focus on women aged 18-30 but, after finding that several of the women showing interest in this research were aged 30 or over, I lifted the upper age limit.Doing so also enabled me to conduct interviews with women older than the younger participants in most sexting research so far.
Twenty-two of the participants identified as single, and 22 as in relationships.Six participants had one or more children, 38 had no children.One participant identified as Mixed British/Asian, two as Mixed British/African, two as East Asian, four as South Asian, and 35 participants identified as White British or White Other.The sample was highly educated: 42 of the participants had one or more degrees from higher education, or they were in the process of undertaking one.One participant identified as a "stay-at-home mother," with the remaining 43 being employed or in the process of undertaking a higher education degree.One participant identified as "queer," one as "lesbian," two as "not sure" about their sexual orientation, and 30 as "heterosexual."Even though 14 of the 44 participants were, had been, or desired to be involved in sexual and/or romantic relations with other women or people who identify as non-binary, our discussions of sexting primarily focused on it in female-male heterosexual relations.This focus came down to the participants' experience: sexting was something that they had mainly participated in or associated with female-male relations.In this article, I therefore focus on accounts about sexting in heterosexual contexts.I follow Janet Holland, Caroline Ramazanoglu, Sue Sharpe, Rachel Thomson (2004, 10-11, 22-23) in understanding heterosexuality as a term that captures more than certain sexual practices.Here, heterosexuality is perceived as a social construction and as a framework that feeds off and into how gender and sexual identities are understood, performed, experienced and felt (Holland et al. 2004, 22-23).
The interviews were conducted in places of the participants' choosing, including their homes, cafés, meeting rooms and, in two instances, via Skype.Most interviews lasted around 60 minutes, with the shortest taking 45 minutes and the longest two hours and ten minutes.Before each interview, participants read a participant information sheet and signed an informed consent form.To avoid deductive disclosure (Karen Kaiser 2009), participants have been assigned a pseudonym consisting of a randomly allocated standard British name, identifying characteristics have been removed, and I am not including other information about participants than pseudonym and age group.
Interviews were semi-structured and centred around four main questions about each woman's perceptions on and direct or indirect experiences of consensual and nonconsensual exchange of private sexual images.Two of these questions asked about their perceptions and experiences of consensual image sharing, and two asked about the same in relation to non-consensual image sharing.Following answers, I would probe further, ask follow-up questions, and request illustrative examples.Given the sensitive nature of the interview topic, I focused on establishing an interview context where the interviewee could feel free and comfortable to express themselves openly (Kathryn Roulston 2010, 23).
My active involvement in the interviews and desire to establish rapport with participants will have informed the data collected.What I asked and followed up on, the way that I asked these things, and how I came across to participants was inevitably informed by my feminist epistemology, interest in the intersections of gender and power, and in the ways that these inform intimate experiences.I addressed the issue of women's sexting and digitally mediated intimate experiences from this perspective because of my conviction that this could help generate data to shed light on the socio-technical forces that inform the construction of gender, sexuality, and intimacy.
All stages of my research, including the generation of data during interviews, will also have been informed by my positionality as a white, cisgender, heterosexual woman.My approach to interviewing is also driven by the belief that interviewer-interviewee rapport is essential for the generation of deep and meaningful data, and the conviction that interviews cannot be conducted in an objective way, as if uninformed by the interview context or the relation between interviewer and interviewee (Ann Oakley 1981).
An ethical concern raised by these interviews, is the fact that they might conjure difficult memories or new anxieties about sexting practices and experiences amongst participants.Each interview was therefore concluded by my handing out a sheet containing information about organisations helping persons with issues related to IBSA, like the Revenge Porn Helpline.
I transcribed the audio recording for each interview before conducting a reflexive thematic analysis (TA) (Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke 2006;Virginia Braun, Victoria Clarke 2019).The TA commenced as I was doing the interviews and started "generating (initial) themes" based on "patterns of shared meaning" that I saw as reoccurring in them (Braun and Clarke 2019, 592, 593).Transcript were coded using Atlas.ti1.0.48.The codes were developed and revised throughout the interviewing, transcription, and analytic process and clustered in relation to themes.Where I deemed initial themes no longer right, codes were used to inform my development of new themes or to aid my thinking as I revised old ones.Among the main themes generated during the TA was "trust as control."The goal with this article is not to generalise empirically but theoretically, as I explore what participants' accounts of trust as control can tell us about the influence of gendered neoliberalism on how trust is practiced and perceived in adult hetero-sexting and sexting risk mitigation.

Gendered neoliberalism
Following Yvonne Ehrstein, Rosalind Gill, Jo Littler (2020, 1), I understand neoliberalism as "a macro-political and economic rationality characterised by privatization, deregulation and a rolling back of the state from areas of social and political welfare provision, alongside the intensification of other means to surveill and control populations."Here, I focus on how the individualised and responsibilising market principles of neoliberalism inform everyday life, resulting in a situation wherein "neoliberal ideas become activated and sedimented into commonsense" (Gill and Orgad 2018, 478).Understood as such, neoliberalism is no longer a mere "economic discourse," but an overarching rationality informing ideas about ideal subjects as "rational, calculating, and self-motivating; subjects who will make sense of their lives through discourses of freedom, responsibility and choiceno matter how constrained they may be" (Ehrstein, Gill, and Littler 2020, 2).
Focusing on the everyday nature of neoliberalism (Ehrstein, Gill, and Littler 2020, 2), I am particularly concerned with "neoliberalism's gendered iteration" (Meg-John Barker, Rosalind Gill, Laura Harvey 2018, 3) as what Gill (2007Gill ( , 2017) ) refers to as a postfeminist sensibility or as a form of gendered neoliberalism.Whilst the concept of neoliberalism captures a market ideology or "political rationality" that promotes individual choice and the responsibilisation of every actor, the concept of postfeminism captures the gendered elements and consequences of this (Banet-Weiser, Gill, and Rottenberg 2019, 21).The logic of postfeminism appears targeted at especially (though not only) women (Gill 2007, 164), but its gendered logic does also intersect with structural inequalities along other lines, like race and class (Gill 2007, 149).Postfeminist discourse involves "the entanglement of feminist and anti-feminist ideas" and is articulated through a selection of themes, including the one that I shall focus on here, which is "individualism, choice and empowerment" (2007,149).In what follows, I situate participants' accounts of trust as control in relation to this theme to show how these women's understandings and use of trust as control were informed by a postfeminist rationality that promotes empowerment, and that channels a choice discourse that renders individual women responsible for addressing and mitigating the disproportional distribution of sexting risk along gendered lines within the heterosexual intimate domain.

Trust through knowledge
In many interviews, participants claimed that trust could be derived from their collecting various forms of proof or evidence of their potential sexting partner's character.As such, their accounts of trust often involved an emphasis on knowing, which was thought to enable them to distinguish who it is "sensible to trust" (Yasmin, mid-twenties) from those that were less so.This understanding of trust as grounded in knowledge about the trustee was seldom based on how close to or intimate, they were with that person (implicit trust).Therefore, this conceptualisation of trust was also different from those presented in literature like that by García-Gómez (2022, 122), where participants draw connections between being in love and trusting their partner.Rather, this understanding of trust was based on "a cool, rational consideration" (Brittany, late twenties) of the potential sexting partner and the possible repercussions of sexting him, a view that can be illustrated by the following exchange with Kirsty (late teens): Kirsty: It's [trust is] not even about how much I love that person or how intimate we are.It's just [. . .] from that person's personality, whether I trust that person enough.Like, such as, I have loved someone [. ..], but then, I wouldn't do it [send them private sexual images] just because that person's personality, there could be some point when they could share this photo [. . .].
Interviewer: So how do you know that you trust someone enough to share?Kirsty: Um, um, for example, that person would never like do any harm to anyone, I know that.And that person like, he's less like assertive.[. ..]Like also when that person is emotionally stable.Things like that, like if they are not very emotionally stable they'd be a good person, but they could still at the moment, they could like do it due to anger or whatever.
The way Kirsty uses trust here, she rejects the possibility of acting based on the current level of intimacy with her partner.Instead, Kirsty is striving to develop as full a picture of what these actions might be like through a careful consideration of his personality and perceived overall trustworthiness.In doing so, Kirsty is also effectively rejecting the idea of trust as linked to "the intention to accept vulnerability" (Rousseau et al. 1998, 395).Rather, she moves towards an understanding of trust as grounded in knowledge, overview, and a sense of control of how her partner is likely to act in the future, regardless of their level of intimacy.

Trust through networks
Another way that the participants worked to gain knowledge about their sexting partner -on which they would ground their future-oriented accounts of trust prior to sextingwas through embedding themselves and/or their partners within each other's friends and family groups.For instance, Holly (late teens) stressed how seeing her partner interact with her family could help her establish whether she could trust him with her private sexual images: Interviewer: So how do you eh know that you personally trust someone enough to feel like you're ready to send images?Holly: Um well I think, I don't know how I'd pinpoint it instantly because there is obviously stages.[. ..]But, being around him for a long time, feeling like [I] knew quite a few aspects of how their mind worked and the way they thought about me, the way they interacted with me, my family, how I interacted with them.I'm not saying these are like precursors [short laugh] for choosing to send them.But for me it certainly was like I feel like I have a connection with my partner and I feel like that trust was there [. . .].This understanding of trust as something that can be grounded in knowledge about a potential partner as gained through seeing him in social interaction with meaningful others, was reflected in several interviews.Whilst considering their own implicit trust insufficient means as risk mitigation, other networks and connections marked by such trust relations were still seen by participants as a useful resource for a thorough assessment of their general trustworthiness.This finding also indicates a lack of trust by the participants in their own ability to assess their sexting partner well when feelings were involved, something that calls for the need to incorporate others in their making of that trust assessment.Their higher evaluation of trust assessments that are seemingly more rational and calculating are also in line with the character traits of the supposed ideal neoliberal subject (Ehrstein, Gill, and Littler 2020, 2).
Holly's account above also demonstrates another insight about the importance of time for establishing trust as control.She stresses the significance of time together with her partner to get to know him, something that enables her to establish an understanding of and connection with him that she can draw on as she decides whether he is worthy of her trust.This finding thus shows how understandings of implicit trust can inform developments of trust that is more explicit.It also resonates with other sexting research (see, for example: Hasinoff andShepherd 2014, 2939-40), which has also found that (committed) relationships tend to be understood as safer contexts for sexting.

Trust as a tool for social power
Some of the participants also cast their own embeddedness within a partner's friends or family circles as means to prevent sexting partners from sharing their private sexual images without their consent.This is a view that can be illustrated by the following exchange with Emma (mid-twenties): Interviewer: So, you said that you prepare yourself for the eventuality that they [your private sexual images] might be shared.Could you explain a bit more how you prepare yourself for that?Emma: Sure, I guess I wouldn't do it with someone I didn't feel like I trusted.Like I would never do it with someone who I had just met or with someone who I hadn't established a trusting relationship with.I do try to meet their family and friends beforehand, just so, if anything does happen, I can kind of go and tell his mum.[Laughs].
Here, trust is cast as something that Emma considers herself better situated to assess with time (like Holly above) and conceptualised as a tool through which social power can be wielded in the form of the threat of or punishment through the generation of a friend or family member's or, more specifically, mother's fury.By embedding herself in her partner's close friend and family circle, Emma is thus also placing herself in a strategic position where she can prevent a potential breach of trust by encouraging others to conduct for her the emotional labour that goes into keeping him from sharing her private sexual images further without her consent.Whilst this account of trust as control shows the social resources available to women as means of risk management, Emma's emphasis on telling "his mum" also hints at the gendered nature of this kind of sexting risk management (see, for example: Salter 2016) as a form of emotional labour outsourced to the women in a potential perpetrator's life.During interviews, I also found that a relative lack of trust in the legal system and in technology providers adds to the relevance of family and friends as resources for mitigating sexting risk.

Mistrust in legal frameworks
Erin (late twenties) was one of the women interviewed as part of this study who discussed the anxiety and stress that knowing her ex-boyfriend had private sexual images of her caused her.I therefore asked Erin whether she had thought about what she would do if her private sexual images did end up being shared online by her ex-boyfriend without her consent.In responding to my question, Erin contemplated the possibility of contacting the police, before dismissing the idea, partly because her ex-boyfriend was based in another country with different laws: [. . .] it is hard to see how I would make any kind of legal case out of it.I think that the same people who would be very upset and angry with him in his life -I still have his parents' email address and phone number and I know that they're valid [. . .].So you know I could, in theory, be like 'Did you know that your son has released pornography of me, against my consent and I am really upset about it -can you talk to him?' Considering accounts such as this by Erin, the turn towards family and friends is also, then, perhaps a suggestion that when there is a sense that the legal system fails you (see also: Nicola Henry, Nicola Gavey, Clare McGlynn, Erika Rackley 2022, 9-12), you turn to social measures available to you for handling these issues yourself.
The participants in this study displayed varying degrees of trust in the legal system, with some-like Erin-dismissing it as a source of help.Another participant, Imogen (midtwenties), pointed out that she considered our ability to receive help from the legal system linked to race and relative privilege, meaning that for example white women are more likely to receive the support they need than are women of colour.

Mistrust in technology
Combined with their varying degrees of trust in the legal system, most participants did similarly display varying degrees of mistrust in the technology used for sexting purposes.Many expressed the view that the technology was untrustworthy and thus outside of the realm of their control something that again implies an understanding of trust as linked to control, rather than as a rejection of it through the intention to accept vulnerability (Rousseau et al. 1998, 395).Whilst several of the participants used the affordances provided by the technologies to mitigate sexting risks (a similar finding to, e.g., Geeng, Hutson, and Roesner 2020), they simultaneously expressed no or little trust in the technology providers that they could or would help them, should their images be shared further without their consent.This is a view that can be illustrated by Paige's (late twenties) response to the question of what she would do if her private sexual images ended up online without her consent: Paige: [. ..]Practically I wouldn't know where to go, because once something is shared now, again, then you can't really control it, I don't have the money for a super injunction [short laugh].[. ..]Yeah, no, eh that's, there are certain controls on Facebook and on websites where you can moderate things, but I don't trust that either.I don't think that's particularly well controlled.
Interviewer: Why do you not trust?Paige: [. ..]They [platforms like Facebook] don't care.You've willingly gone into that relationship with a business like Facebook, where you share your images willingly, you know, people know that once that's out there it's not theirs anymore, it belongs to Facebook, so.Nah I don't trust any of it, it's corrupt and it's there to make money [. ..].
I would like to suggest that this kind of lack of trust in the surrounding legal and technological systems and their ability to protect private sexual images from appearing non-consensually in public, also partly explains the participants' decision to take sexting risk mitigation and protection into their own hands through the establishment of a futurelooking conceptualisation of trust as control.In a context where women are disproportionally affected by the non-consensual further sharing of private sexual images, and where the consequences of an unsuccessful act of implicit trust are expected to be attributed to you directly, turning away from this kind of trust to a form of trust grounded in knowledge and networks might seem safer.The fall-out from such an act of IBSA can be grave (Richard Abayomi Aborisade 2022; Samantha Bates 2017; Henry et al. 2022), and not everyone can afford to rely on a form of implicit trust that provides no further assurances of their future protection.

Discussion: trust, gender, and power
This article has drawn on interview material about the role of trust in sexting risk mitigation to explore how a general emphasis among participants on female "individualism, choice and empowerment" (Gill 2007, 149) results in new conceptualizations of trust as a future-oriented form of control, grounded in various kinds of trust work.In examining the role of gendered neoliberalism in this reconceptualisation of trust as a form of power, and in highlighting the amount of work going into its establishment, the article has contributed to the existing research in this field (see, for example: Setty 2018, 4540) by unpacking, in more detail, how trust is understood and practiced in contexts of heterosexting and sexting risk mitigation.
I would also like to propose that the trust work engaged with by participants and outlined here feeds off and into "deep and persistent inequalities" (Barker, Gill, and Harvey 2018, 131) with regards to the distribution of power in the intimate heterosexual domain.Drawing on gendered neoliberal themes like empowerment, choice, and individual responsibility as they seek to establish forward-looking notions of trust as sexting risk mitigation, participants were also contributing to the social construction of women as trust workers responsible for their own risk management a finding that resonates with the other research on the responsibilisation of women in relation to sexting risk mitigation (see, for example: Mandau 2021).Simultaneously, men were socially constructed as irresponsible, unruly, and unsafe.With that, the idea of women as necessarily in charge of their own sexual and intimate safety (see, for example: Barker, Gill, and Harvey 2018, 161) is further entrenched.The onus is thus placed on women-those most affected by IBSA-to protect themselves from IBSA, rather than on their partners to not conduct IBSA in the first place.This discursive and practical construction of women as responsible for their safety in hetero-sexting happens, even as the language used to understand trust as control is marked by discourses of empowerment-something which again works to mark the empty promise inherent in claims for empowerment through individual choice and responsibility.Under the influence of gendered neoliberalism practices and perceptions of trust in sexting risk mitigation hence also occlude how the distribution of power in hetero-sexting-as exemplified by the unequal distribution of sexting risk-is both structural and social, and not necessarily individual and linked to one's ability to establish certain forms of trust.
To develop a fully informed understanding of the gendered dynamics in hetero-sexting, it is imperative that we also consider and include men's thoughts and reflections on the topic (like, for instance: Waling et al. 2020).A limitation of this study is thus that it does not consider the issues of risk and trust in hetero-sexting from the perspective of men.Moreover, the focus of this article has been on women participants' accounts as linked to notions of gender and sexuality.I nevertheless wish to stress my acknowledgement that gender is an intersectionally informed experience, shaped by context and by the various "axis of differentiation" that it happens in relation to, like race, age, sexuality, dis-/ability, and class (Avtar Brah and Ann Phoenix 2013, 76;Judith Butler 1990).Accounts like those by Imogen and Paige indicate that experiences of sexting risk, are also informed by such intersections: in stating that race (Imogen) or income (Paige) can inform our ability to receive legal help in the event of IBSA, they stressed that sexting risk is likely experienced differently depending on race or class.In future sexting research, I therefore aim to develop a research design that will help me better explore such issues of intersectionality.Finally, to challenge the unequal distribution of sexting risk and of the responsibility to mitigate it, it is also necessary to address the legal and technological systems that, as my participants pointed out, still often fail to protect them in relation to IBSA.This study does not focus specifically on these systems but, for the debate about trust in relation to sexting risk mitigation to further develop, it would be fascinating to see more such research.

Notes
1.The term sexting also captures the digitally mediated exchanging of sexual texts (Bond 2016).However, the focus here is entirely on the exchange of private sexual images (still or moving).Whilst commonly used in the literature, "sexting" is not necessarily used by research participants themselves (Tiidenberg and van der Nagel 2020, 36-37).Several of my participants used that term though, with others referring to it as 'nudes or "naughty selfies." 2. When recruiting, I asked for participants "based in" Cambridgeshire.I did not ask them to clarify where they live.Some participants might thus not have been permanent residents in Cambridgeshire, but they still spent enough time there-for example because of work or study-to consider themselves as based there.