If you’re around my age or have kids around my age (23, to be exact), then you probably know all about internet safety. I mean, we spent days in the library in elementary school watching cartoons and playing online simulators that attempted to teach us all about the old, grimey, middle-aged white man behind the computer screen pretending to be someone our age. Someone who looks strangely like the creeper in 13 Cameras, if I’m being honest. We’ve all seen the Lifetime movies, the blockbuster hits about kids who are stolen from their families simply by believing their meeting an online ‘friend’ at the mall.
But, what we forget is that online safety isn’t just about middle schoolers.
You see, we forget that adults can be prey to internet predators, too. In fact, you’ve probably experienced it more than you think.
Unsolicited dick pics.
Unsolicited pornographic images and videos.
Messages from people on dating apps that you’ve terminated contact with detailing harmful sexual situations with you.
People you barely know from online showing up to your work ‘coincidentally.’
Horrific messages sent through Discord and other online gaming streaming services.
Ex-partners sharing confidential nude photos of you without your consent to their friends (or your friends) to get back at you for breaking up with them.
Current partners sharing confidential nude photos of you without your consent to their friends to ‘show you off.’
Sound familiar?
It should. That’s because online safety isn’t just about elementary and middle school aged kids on Kik or WhatsApp. It isn’t just about the middle-aged white guy hiding behind the computer screen, on a mission to corrupt young girls. It isn’t just about the pedophile messaging rings online to share, manufacture and distribute child pornography.
We’ve all been victims of online sexual harassment - and survivors have experienced additional trauma from an online presence.
There’s more happening than we think.
As we engage with the internet landscape, it’s important that we consider our actions online, as well as the actions others might take towards us. There’s more to online sexual violence than adult men engaging with middle-school girls. Online sexual violence can happen in a variety of forms, and the trauma that comes with it doesn’t look the same as physical, in-person sexual violence.
This isn’t to discredit survivors of in-person sexual violence - these two pheonomenon are just different, and how we approach prevention for them should be tailored to their specific needs.
Prevention Means Speaking Up
Online sexual violence occurs both publicly and privately. Whether it’s two individual users, a group against one or groups against each other, there are plenty of ways in which the digital landscape will interact to create a cesspool of potential for online sexual violence. Across media platforms, messaging and e-mail communications and even chatboxes during online Zoom meetings, there are a variety of ways that offenders can commit their crimes.
At the end of the day, sexual violence stems from power and control. Just as with intimate partner violence, the person committing the violence has a desire to control another person and exercise power over them. In the online landscape, we see this a lot when one ex-partner doxxes another - they reveal what is typically private personal information on a public platform, intending to humiliate or embarrass them. This is most common in the fight against white supremacy, but sexual predators have done this for years by sharing the nudes their partner sent them (or threatening to). Still unsure what I’m talking about? Just think about when Regina George copies pages from the Burn Book and distributes them around the high school. Intimate, confidential and personal information about each of the high schoolers (and their teachers!) was suddenly made public to everyone - even if it was false. While doxxing might be a powerful tool for outing people who are bigoted, racist, sexist or even just overall ‘bad’ people, offenders use it as a technique to keep their victims under their control.
One of the best ways we can prevent online sexual violence is by speaking up. When we see sexually violent behavior online, we should be speaking against it. You can share violent messages without doxxing someone - just remove their name from the image. You can post a comment on a video that calls out someone’s behavior. You can report users, posts or messages to the social media platform for violating user agreements. All of these are ways that we can lead to better prevention of sexual assault online.
Prevention Means Checking Ourselves
One of the other biggest ways we can prevent online sexual violence is by checking ourselves. You see, we’ve all taken a screenshot of a conversation we’re having with someone and sent it to someone else to have them weigh in on the conversation. Typically, we do it for support and validation about what we’re saying; whether it’s an argument or something humorous, we’ve all done it.
But it’s a violation of a boundary.
You see, when we took that screenshot and sent that message, we violated someone’s privacy. The conversation you were having with them was private; and if they didn’t consent to you sending their messages to someone else, then you shouldn’t be sharing them. Consent is a huge part of sexual violence prevention. If we aren’t practicing consent and healthy boundaries in our non-sexual online communication, how can we be sure that we’ll follow it during sexual conversations?
Online sexual violence prevention is so much more than automatic restrictions on images and words. It’s about users paying attention to the words that are used and controlling their own messages. By doing this, we can ensure to better protect survivors and support them.