Nicola Henry

Beyond the 'sext': technology-facilitated sexual violence and harassment against adult women

Young peoples use of technology as a tool for the negotiation of their sexual identities and encounters has increasingly become a focal point in popular and scholarly discussion. Much of this debate centres on the sending of explicit sexual images and/or video (‘selfies’ or ‘sexting’) by mobile phone, email or social media. In Australia and elsewhere, legislative frameworks have arguably over-regulated or criminalised young peoples consensual, digital, sexual communications. Equally, the law has failed to respond to the harm that is experienced by victims of non-consensual making and/or distribution of such sexual images. In this paper, we examine the non-consensual creation and distribution of sexual images in the context of harassment, stalking and family or intimate violence. We argue that harmful digital communications are often framed as a problem of user naiveté rather than gender-based violence. Moreover, we argue that current legal and policy approaches fail to adequately capture the social and psychological harm that results from the use of sexual imagery to harass, coerce or blackmail women. We draw on preliminary data from a larger project investigating adult womens experiences of technology-mediated sexual violence and harassment.

The Impossibility of Bearing Witness: Wartime Rape and the Promise of Justice

Testimonies of wartime sexual violence contribute to the recognition of rape as a serious human rights violation. Although acknowledgement and justice are imperative to ending silence and impunity, this article critiques some commonly held therapeutic assumptions about disclosure through examining the way so-called “unspeakable” events are communicated through legal discourse. In this article, the author explores the inherent limitations of language for bearing witness to wartime rape, specifically focusing on international war crimes tribunals. The author argues that trials contribute to the impossibility of bearing witness through both the appropriation of trauma and the failure of law to accommodate traumatic experiences.

Embodied Harms Gender, Shame, and Technology-Facilitated Sexual Violence

Criminality in cyberspace has been the subject of much debate since the 1990s, yet comparatively little attention has been paid to technology-facilitated sexual violence and harassment (TFSV). The aim of this article is to explore the ways in which retraditionalized gender hierarchies and inequalities are manifested in online contexts, and to conceptualize the cause and effects of TFSV as “embodied harms.” We argue that problematic mind/body and online/off-line dualisms result in a failure to grasp the unique nature of embodied harms, precluding an adequate understanding and theorization of TFSV.

Sexual Violence in the Digital Age: The Scope and Limits of Criminal Law

Considerable scholarly attention has been paid to a range of criminal behaviours that are perpetrated with the aid of digital technologies. Much of this focus, however, has been on high-tech computer crimes, such as hacking, online fraud and identity theft, or child exploitation material and cyberbullying. Less attention has been paid to ‘technology-facilitated sexual violence’, where new technologies are used as tools to perpetrate or extend the harm of a sexual assault, extend control and abuse in a domestic violence situation, or distribute sexual or intimate images of another without their consent. In this article, we focus on the scope and limitations of criminal legislation for responding to these varied but interconnected gendered harms. We argue that although there have been some developments in a range of international jurisdictions, particularly relating to the phenomenon of ‘revenge pornography’, much more needs to be done both within and beyond the law. Whilst we support the intervention of the criminal law, we argue that equal attention must be given to policies and practices of educators, law enforcement agencies, service providers, online communities and social media networks to fulfil the promise of equal and ethical digital citizenship.

The Fixation on Wartime Rape Feminist Critique and International Criminal Law

Since the early 1990s, wartime rape has been successfully prosecuted as a war crime, a crime against humanity and a crime of genocide. Feminist scholars, however, warn that the unprecedented attention to wartime sexual violence within international criminal law has had wide-ranging and unintended consequences. The aim of this article is to examine the heightened consciousness around wartime sexual violence and its ascendancy as a crime against ‘humanity’. The article draws attention to two discourses. The first is the feminist political project, which sought to delineate wartime rape as a crime of grave magnitude that warranted explicit treatment under international criminal law; the second is the postmodernist feminist discourse, which questions the desirability of fixating on sexual violence against women in conflict. The point of this article is not to situate myself in either camp but rather to examine the power of international criminal law to pronounce meaning, demarcate the gravity of crimes and silence alternative stories. I will argue that due to the impassioned political controversy over rape within populist, scholarly and legal realms, not only are the substantive problems associated with rape prosecutions often left obscured but problematic rape hierarchies are reified and victim experiences further marginalised.

Policing technology-facilitated sexual violence against adult victims: police and service sector perspectives

ABSTRACT To date, the majority of attention to technology-facilitated sexual violence (TFSV) in both policy and practice has been on child sexual exploitation and abuse. Far less attention has been paid to digital sexualised violence against adult members of the population. The aim of this paper is to examine police responses to these serious and emerging harms, which we identify as including the following: (1) online sexual harassment; (2) gender and sexuality-based harassment; (3) cyberstalking; (4) image-based sexual exploitation (including ‘revenge pornography’); and (5) the use of communications technologies to coerce a victim into an unwanted sexual act. While these are variously criminal offences, unlawful civil behaviours or not subject to criminal or civil sanctions or remedies, we claim in this paper that they exist on a continuum of violence and yet the ‘real’ harms of TFSV are frequently minimised in practice. Drawing on 30 stakeholder interviews with police, legal services and domestic and sexual violence service sector providers, we explore the issues, challenges and promises of law enforcement in this area. We argue that greater attention must be paid to recognising the serious harms of digital abuse and harassment; the role of criminal law in responding to these behaviours; and the importance of investing in police resources to adequately tackle these growing behaviours in a constantly shifting and amorphous digital era.

Technology-Facilitated Sexual Violence A Literature Review of Empirical Research

Technology-facilitated sexual violence (TFSV) refers to a range of behaviors where digital technologies are used to facilitate both virtual and face-to-face sexually based harms. Such behaviors include online sexual harassment, gender- and sexuality-based harassment, cyberstalking, image-based sexual exploitation, and the use of a carriage service to coerce a victim into an unwanted sexual act. This article reviews the current state of knowledge on these different dimensions, drawing on existing empirical studies. While there is a growing body of research into technology-facilitated harms perpetrated against children and adolescents, there is a dearth of qualitative and quantitative research on TFSV against adults. Moreover, few of the existing studies provide reliable data on the nature, scope, and impacts of TFSV. Preliminary studies, however, indicate that some harms, much like sexual violence more broadly, may be predominantly gender-, sexuality-, and age-based, with young women being overrepresented as victims in some categories. This review collects the empirical evidence to date regarding the prevalence and gender-based nature of TFSV against adults and discusses the implications for policy and programs, as well as suggestions for future research.

Technology-Facilitated Sexual Violence Victimization: Results From an Online Survey of Australian Adults

Online forms of sexual harassment and abuse as experienced by adults represent an emerging yet under-researched set of behaviors, such that very few studies have sought to estimate the extent of the problem. This article presents the results of an online survey of 2,956 Australian adult (aged 18 to 54 years) experiences of technology-facilitated sexual violence (TFSV) victimization. The prevalence of TFSV was analyzed in relation to a 21-item scale developed in accordance with prior conceptual research identifying multiple dimensions of TFSV including digital sexual harassment, image-based sexual abuse, sexual aggression and/or coercion, and, gender and/or sexuality-based harassment (including virtual sexual violence). Results revealed significant differences in lifetime TFSV victimization for younger (18-24) and non-heterosexual identifying adults. Lifetime TFSV victimization for men and women was not significantly different, though women were more likely to report sexual harassment victimization and men were more likely to report victimization through the distribution of non-consensual images, as well as gender and/or sexuality-based harassment. The authors conclude that although women and men report experiencing similar overall prevalence of TFSV victimization, the nature and impacts of those experiences differ in particular gendered ways that reflect broader patterns in both gender relations and “offline” sexual harassment.

Theorizing Wartime Rape: Deconstructing Gender, Sexuality, and Violence

Throughout the history of warfare, rape and other forms of sexual violence against children, women, and men have been extremely widespread and prolific.1 Despite long-standing legal and political silences, rape in war has endured as a “lasting legacy” of violent conflict in artistic, documentary, and cinematic representations throughout history, albeit almost exclusively when perpetrated against women. The last two centuries, for instance, have witnessed the rapes of women in Belgium during the First World War; the rapes and murders of Chinese women during the 1937 invasion of the city of Nanjing; the mass rapes of Filipino women in the town of Mapanique in 1944; the sexual enslavement of up to 200,000 women throughout Asia during the Asia-Pacific War; the mass rapes of German women at the end of the Second World War; as well as the mass rapes of women in modern-day armed conflicts such as Vietnam, Bangladesh, Uganda, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Timor-Leste, Peru, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Darfur, Libya, Iraq, and Syria. The list of geographical locations where rape has proliferated in conflict is too extensive to comprehensively catalog here, yet the common thread between all wars is that rape is a product of warped (yet normalized) militarized hegemonic masculinity, which arguably is structurally embedded in pre-conflict gender inequality and unequal power relations. Although rape and other forms of sexual violence, including sexual enslavement, sterilization, and forced marriage, are now treated as among the most serious of violations against international humanitarian

The Dark Side of the Virtual World

Information and communication technologies (ICTs)1 have unequivocally transformed contemporary life with profound and monumental effects. These sophisticated technologies provide a tantalising array of opportunities, a reservoir of information and an ever-expanding ‘imagined community’ with unparalleled freedoms beyond a conventional state-centric configuration. Accessible to literally millions of users across the globe, ICTs have traversed and fused public and private life in radically new ways. In particular, social networking sites (such as Facebook and Twitter) and mobile phones have enabled dramatically fresh, modern and constantly changing identities, encounters and communications among diverse individuals, producing a ‘postmodernisation of intimacy’ (Plummer, 2001, p.98). And yet there is a dark side to the virtual world — a world which has also become a ‘breeding ground’ for both offensive and criminal conduct (Levmore & Nussbaum, 2010). This chapter focuses on one such example: technology-facilitated sexual violence (TFSV) against adult women. Behaviours include the sending of sexually explicit material via a mobile phone, email or the Internet without the consent of the subject; the use of Facebook groups to promote rape-supportive attitudes; the doctoring of photographs to create sexually explicit images; threats of sexual violence, including publicly posting the names and addresses of women who ‘deserve to be raped’ the posting of degrading, sexually based comments about female students and teachers; the threat, or actual distribution, of sexually explicit material to family members, friends and colleagues in intimate partner violence situations; and the use of online dating sites to procure a sexual assault.