RAPE can be a very misunderstood thing. The image of a strange man on a dark night grabbing an unsuspecting woman and assaulting her as she fights and scratches her attacker is a prevailing stereotype of this highly damaging act.

While that happens, it's not representative of the majority of cases, and despite the efforts of charities to change that perception in a bid to help those facing abuse in more common circumstances, it still dominates.

This causes a problem, and if more resource isn't invested into education we could have an even bigger problem on our hands in the coming years. When it comes to young people and technology use, the message is spectacularly failing to get through. I recently chaired an event about online safety, and hearing from professionals about how widespread nature of "sexting" culture – when people send explicit images or videos of themselves to another – among young people I was genuinely frightened.

Last week, former public schoolboy Alistair Wilson, now 20, received a suspended jail term and was ordered to pay compensation to two victims after being convicted of revenge porn offences. In one of the cases, he threatened to post explicit photos of a student on Facebook if she didn’t pay him £100.

But in the other case, horrifyingly, an 18-year-old victim was blackmailed into having sex with him, according to media reports.

This is where language becomes vitally important. The term "having sex" implies that a choice was made, and the question we must seriously ponder when it comes to modern sex crimes involving technology and the internet is whether this passes the test of consent. Is blackmailing a person with the terror of public humiliation with sexual images merely encouraging a person to have sex? Or is it time we started calling this something else? Forced sex. Rape.

This is crucial, because young people, with a less developed understanding of privacy and sexuality, are not grasping the gravity of their actions. As is often the case with teenagers, peer pressure is a big factor.

In the worst case scenarios, these images, having been sent to another with trust, are then shared with other people, sometimes groups, on social media or group-sharing apps. They are used to threaten, and pressure victims into sexual acts. They are even posted on sick websites set up specifically for the purpose of sharing these images. This has become a dark world, and, on the part of the aggressor, it is another layer of an enduring problem. This is a relatively new development, but the underlying motivations are not.

Male violence towards women is disproportionate in comparison to vice versa figures. It's symbolic of our historic societal structures when women were subordinate to men, when women didn't work and when women didn't vote. Women were mere possessions, and violence was the right of their masters.

Domestic abuse and sexual violence are remnants of that culture. Neither technology, the internet nor social media is intrinsically to blame for the culture emerging in the young of using "leverage", as Wilson called it in one of the messages to his victims, to get what they believe they're entitled to take. It is simply the latest wave of an age-old problem, and it hands even greater power to those who refuse to respect a woman's choice. That is, if we allow it.

Several things need to happen. Young people need stern education on the dangers of sexting. Girls, in particular, need to be encouraged to assert their rights in order to negate the power of pressure.

Importantly, the law must have a strong response for those who use sexual images and videos as a form of sexual coercion. It is not normal behaviour to use any method, violent or otherwise, to force a woman into sex. It is a dangerous, abusive act, and if we as a society are seen to be lenient it will undo decades of work aimed at protecting women.

The Scottish Government is to be commended for seeking to make coercive control an offence in its upcoming Domestic Abuse Bill, and I sincerely hope officials listen to charities like Women's Aid and Rape Crisis to get this right.

But we need to better understand the problem, and acknowledge that it has deeper roots. In some of these cases between teenagers, a poor understanding of the consequences of behaviour may be at the heart of it, and education should tackle it.

But in the most serious cases, we must make the connections between new and old forms of abuse. Tutting about social media as though it’s installed a previously unknown evil in our children is a dereliction of our duty as adults who have a responsibility to create a society where women and girls don’t live in fear.