The Dark Side of the Virtual World

Abstract

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.