2

Sexual Violence: A Feminist

Criminological Analysis

Introduction
Sexual violence in the digital age is not something fundamentally new.
Rather than representing a break with the practices of the past, we argue
that technology-facilitated sexual violence is better understood simulta-
neously as a continuation, an elaboration and an immersion of diverse
forms of sexual violence in women’s everyday lives. Technology-­facilitated
sexual violences present in both familiar and unfamiliar ways and may
differ in form, such as the nature and extent to which harms are embod-
ied and disembodied (see Chap. 3) while serving the same function: both
an expression and re-institution of gendered power relations and women’s
differential positioning as ‘sexed’ subjects. As such, the starting point for
our discussion of technology-facilitated sexual violence cannot lie with
the changes and role of the technologies involved in these harms. It must
instead begin with an understanding of the power relations of sex and gen-
der that underlie sexual violence more generally and with an analysis of
the ways in which sex, gender and power both shape and are shaped by
technologies.

© The Author(s) 2017 23

A. Powell, N. Henry, Sexual Violence in a Digital Age,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58047-4_2
24  Sexual Violence in a Digital Age

The framework presented in this chapter is informed by a crimino-

logical engagement with ‘technofeminism’, which refers to the idea of
the mutual shaping of gender and technology, ‘in which technology is
both a source and a consequence of gender relations’ (Wajcman, 2004,
p.7). The chapter explores intersecting theories of sex, gender and power;
technofeminism; as well as feminist and cyber criminologies that under-
pin this book and are woven throughout its many case studies and analy-
ses. In the first section we discuss feminist criminological scholarship,
which positions sexual violence generally within a broader understand-
ing of sex, gender and power relations in society. Here we consider the
individual and subjective experience of sexual violence, including rape,
harassment and ‘everyday’ intrusions in women’s lives; the socio-cultural
construction of sex and gender relationships that provide the ‘cultural
scaffolding’ for sexual violence (Gavey, 2005); and the hierarchical gen-
der power relations (Connell, 1987) that likewise structure institutional
and organisational responses to sexual violence. In the second section,
we focus on technofeminism and explore various scholarly debates in
relation to the disruptive potential of technologies in gendered power
relations, which have been simultaneously cast in both utopian and dys-
topian visions of women’s liberation or inequality. Yet our analysis neither
dismisses technologies as inherently oppressive to women nor takes it for
granted that technology is automatically liberatory for women. Rather,
we position sexual violence in a digital age as increasingly technosocial:
that is, it constitutes a set of sexually that replicate sex, gender and power
relations that pre-exist digital technologies, while also reproducing sexual
violences in both familiar and unfamiliar ways.

Sex, Gender and Power

Sexual violence (and gendered violence more broadly) is simultaneously
a private and public harm. On the one hand, an individual victim may
experience the violence as a highly personal and private violation, par-
ticularly since rape is most often perpetrated by a known man in a pri-
vate, residential location. Moreover, the shame and taboo that continue
to overshadow sexual violence victimisation in many societies means that
 2  Sexual Violence: A Feminist Criminological Analysis 
   25

relatively few victim-survivors report their experience either formally to

police or informally to family, friends or support networks. This private
nature of rape has historically enabled both an explicit license for men’s
use of sexual violence (such as in husbands’ legal impunity for rape in
many countries at various times) and an implicit silencing of the extent
and nature of the problem.
Yet, on the other hand, as a social group women also experience ‘every-
day’ intrusions, routine sexual harassment and sexual assaults in public
spaces. Women collectively experience greater fear than men of interper-
sonal violence in public space (despite overall rates of physical victimi-
sation of women being lower in public space comparative to men) and
engage in more ‘safety management’ behaviours as they go about their
day. Thus women’s private and individual experiences of sexual violence
also shape women’s public and collective experiences of moving through
a society in which their safety, and particularly their sexual autonomy, is
uncertain. At the same time, a wide variety of meanings about sexual vio-
lence are represented and reproduced in public spaces, including through
law, media, organisations and institutional responses, as well as societal
discourses more broadly. As such there is a particular kind of ‘public
knowledge’ about sexual violence often including—problematically—
attitudes and practices that minimise sexual violence, excuse perpetrators
and blame victims (often referred to as ‘rape culture’, as discussed further
in Chap. 4).
There is, however, a further way in which women’s experiences of
­sexual violence have become increasingly ‘public’ in the digital age. As
we go on to discuss throughout this book, digital technologies such as
camera-enabled smartphones, along with online social networking, and
user-content generation, have made it increasingly possible to visually
document and share aspects of one’s life, which has become embedded
within a socio-cultural imperative to do so. This broader technosocial
practice has specific implications for sexual violence perpetration and
victimisation as offenders are increasingly recording and sharing images
of their exploits, furthering the harm and humiliation to their victims
(see Chap. 4). At the same time, victims themselves are variously record-
ing their own audio and video evidence to support justice processes,
sharing accounts of sexual violence in online forums and communities,
26  Sexual Violence in a Digital Age

­ articipating in hashtag activism that identifies the extent and nature

p
of sexual violations against women, and proactively and publicly recon-
structing their identities as ‘survivors’ (see Chap. 9). Never before has our
society had so many publicly available, first-hand accounts of women’s
experiences of diverse forms and ‘everyday’ infractions of sexual violence.

Sexed Subjects: The ‘Everydayness’ of Sexual Violence

Since Laura Bates launched the #EverydaySexism Project on Twitter and

through her online site in April 2012, women and men have been shar-
ing their experiences and observations of gender inequality, misogyny,
harassment and sexual assault with an online public in an effort to expose
the ‘serious or minor’, ‘offensive’, ‘niggling’ or ‘normalised’ nature of
these ‘everyday’ infractions. Bates (2014) originally established the proj-
ect to highlight the nature and frequency of the ‘pinpricks’ of sexism
that women routinely endure yet which, individually, might be consid-
ered too minor to report. The project has also received many disclosures
of rape and sexual assault and, by April 2016, had received more than
100,000 stories from women (and male supporters) from countries across
the world. In April 2016, the project started the hashtag #wheniwas to
specifically ‘raise awareness of early experiences of sexism, harassment &
assault’. According to the Twitter account, in its first day, the hashtag had
prompted 12,000 people to share their stories of childhood and teenage
sexual harassment, assault and abuse. These campaigns, and many others
(see e.g., #rapedneverreported, #thisisrapeculture, #whyistayed, #noto-
kay), reveal the banality of sexism, sexual harassment and sexual viola-
tions in women’s lives. As Bates (2014, pp.15–16) observed, while this
everyday sexism is, for many women, so common as to be considered nor-
mal and part of being a woman, women who confront men about these
behaviours are routinely told that they are ‘overreacting’, ‘over-sensitive’,
‘frigid’ or even ‘looking for problems where there weren’t any’. Yet Bates,
like many feminists before her, could not help but identify connections
between the ‘minor’ incidents and broader patterns of sexual assault, rape
and intimate partner violence, and the everyday nature, rather than rar-
ity, of these experiences (see also Quadara, 2014).
 2  Sexual Violence: A Feminist Criminological Analysis 
   27

Within criminology there is a long history in feminist scholarship

that has sought to uncover men’s violence against women and to mount
critiques of the ways in which a patriarchal society (and a patriarchal
or ‘malestream’ criminology, discussed further below) has routinely
neglected, minimised and/or ignored this violence. For example, Stevi
Jackson (1978, p.27) described rape as ‘less of an aberration and more
an extension or exaggeration of conventional sexual relations’. Elizabeth
Stanko (1985, 1990) famously described the ‘everyday violence’ and ‘lit-
tle rapes’ that women experience as problematically defined from a male
point of view which constructed such ‘intimate intrusions’ into women’s
sexual autonomy as ‘normal’ features of heterosexual interactions (see also
Greer’s (1971) discussion of ‘petty rapes’). Perhaps most influential is Liz
Kelly’s (1987) concept of a ‘continuum of sexual violence’, which iden-
tifies that the basic, common character underlying women’s many and
varied experiences of sexual violence is that ‘men use a variety of forms of
abuse, coercion and force in order to control women’ (Kelly, 1987, p.48).
Sexual violence then, whether a minor intrusion or a serious physical
violation, is understood as both a manifestation and tool of gendered
power relations. Each incursion has the effect of reinforcing women’s dif-
ferential position in society as the sexed subjects of male domination. As
Kelly (2010, p.121) further elaborated, ‘Sexual violence is a continuum,
some is out of the ordinary and unbearably brutal; much is banal, and
unbearably mundane; we need all of it in our sights’.
The point, made so persuasively by both Stanko (1985, 1990) and
Kelly (1987, 2010), is that rather than being dismissed as private, indi-
vidual and minor (or nonexistent) incursions, women’s experiences of
harms across a continuum of sexual violence have both cumulative and
collective effects. This does not necessarily mean that we must turn to
the criminal law, or even always a legal solution, to address all harms of
sexual violence (see Chaps. 7 and 8). Rather, acknowledging the broader
context of women’s experiences of sexual violence enables recognition of
the individual impacts, cumulative effects and collective implications of
diverse forms of sexual violence in women’s lives. For Stanko (1985) these
violations result in women collectively being ‘continually on guard’ in
relation to the possibility of male violence. Yet this ‘safety management’
work of women is difficult, tiresome, burdensome and largely invisible—
28  Sexual Violence in a Digital Age

until of course something goes wrong, by which time there will be no

shortage of commentators critiquing the various ways in which an indi-
vidual woman failed to prevent her victimisation. Perhaps she overlooked
the signs, dismissing them as the everyday microaggressions which, while
burdensome, do not normally result in a sexual attack. Indeed, ‘try as they
might, women are unable to predict when a threatening or intimidating
form of male behaviour will escalate to violence’ (Stanko, 1985, p.12).
Fast-forward over 30 years and we suggest that in the digital age it can
likewise be difficult to predict when men’s threatening or intimidating
online behaviours might escalate, become amplified via the participation
of others and/or form part of a constellation of abuse that extends to ‘con-
tact’ harms—each of which have very real effects on victims. According
to legal analyst Dahlia Lithwick (cited in Bartow, 2009, p.118):

Women have accumulated at least some skills in figuring out when face-to-­
face sexual innuendo or threats are serious, joking, or pathological. True,
we are sometimes tragically wrong. But for the most part, we can tell
whether Jeff from accounting needs a restraining order or just a stern ‘no.’
An anonymous sexual threat on a blog could come from anywhere, and it’s
virtually impossible to determine whether or not the poster is serious.

Like many feminist criminologists, we also find it problematic and an

unfair burden on women’s autonomy, rights and parity of participation
(Fraser, 2009) that in order to avoid everyday sexual violence the respon-
sibility is disproportionately placed on women to guard against male
intrusions, whether by avoiding walking the streets alone at night, by
adopting a male avatar in an online gaming world or by restricting one’s
participation in online interactions at all. As we go on to discuss in subse-
quent chapters of this book, digital technologies are used by perpetrators
both to facilitate and to extend the harms of contact sexual and physical
violence against women, at the same time as exponentially expanding
men’s practices of everyday sexual violence and harassment. History, it
would seem, repeats itself. Just as date rape and sexual harassment have
been and continue to be contested, rather than acknowledged as forms
of violence against women, so too are digital forms of sexual violence and
harassment regularly dismissed, minimised or excused as ‘normal’ online
behaviour (Penny, 2013).
 2  Sexual Violence: A Feminist Criminological Analysis 
   29

In our view, sexual violence against women, whether banal or brutal,

should not be considered normal, ‘to be expected’ and therefore tolerable
behaviour. To suggest that technology-facilitated sexual violence is nor-
mal behaviour is to conveniently trivialise or deny its harms. Furthermore,
such denial or trivialisation can obscure the place of these behaviours in
their broader socio-cultural and structural contexts. A key feature of fem-
inist criminological analyses is thus to understand sexual violence as one
manifestation of persistent socio-cultural and structural forms of gender
inequality. It is to this body of scholarship that we now turn.

 ultures and Structures of Gendered Power Relations:

C
The ‘Cultural Scaffolding of Rape’ and the ‘Gender
Order’

The recognition that sexual violence against women exists in a broader

socio-cultural and structural context of gender inequality is central to
a feminist criminological analysis. In the 1970s many feminist scholars
famously sought to relocate sexual violence away from the rare and path-
ological behaviours of individual men into a shared cultural construction
of gender relations and heterosex itself that positioned men’s active, desir-
ing and ‘unstoppable’ sexuality against women’s passive, romantically
oriented and undesiring compliance (Brownmiller, 1975; Greer, 1971;
Jackson, 1978; Millett, 1970). As Kate Millett described in her classic
text Sexual Politics:

Coitus can scarcely be said to take place in a vacuum; although of itself it

appears a biological and physical activity, it is set so deeply within the larger
context of human affairs that it serves as a charged microcosm of the variety
of attitudes and values to which culture subscribes. (1970, p.23)

An analysis of heterosex and gender relations as socially and cultur-

ally constructed thus explicitly positions gendered ways of being, and
gendered sexual practices, not as the products of women’s and men’s
­predetermined and ‘biological’ nature but as the products of society
itself. Where society is characterised by unequal power relations between
men and women, these inequalities are themselves embedded in men’s
30  Sexual Violence in a Digital Age

and women’s everyday practices, including their experiences and negotia-

tions of sexual intimacies. Such an analysis helps to explain how women’s
experiences of men’s sexual violence are so often dismissed, tolerated or
excused as normal male sexuality and ‘just sex’ (Gavey, 2005).
Contemporary feminist scholarship has continued to critically exam-
ine the various ways in which ‘culture’ (predominantly from the posi-
tion of Western countries) has obscured the difference between rape
and consensual sex by embedding male dominance and even aggression
into our understanding of heterosex itself (Burkett & Hamilton, 2012;
Gavey, 2005; Holland et al., 2004; Larcombe, 2005; Powell, 2010).
For instance, in her influential book Just Sex? The Cultural Scaffolding
of Rape, Nicola Gavey (2005, p.19) unpacks the ‘discourses of sex and
gender that produce forms of heterosex that set up the preconditions
for rape—women’s passive, acquiescing (a)sexuality and men’s forth-
right, urgent pursuit of sexual “release”’. These culturally shared mean-
ings, or discourses in Michel Foucault’s (1972) conceptualisation of
the term, shape individual subjectivities and sexual practices. Yet in a
culture where sexual violence is minimised, and men’s sexual aggres-
sions and violations are frequently recast as ‘seductions’, much of what
women experience as harmful is likewise dismissed as part and parcel of
the messiness of ‘normal’ sex.
We find it useful to situate the everyday nature of sexual violence in
women’s lives within broader cultural discourses of sexuality that are, at
least to an extent, shared within contemporary Western societies such that
they guide women’s and men’s sexual selves, experiences and actions. We
do not view these socio-cultural constructions as floating freely through-
out societies, to be taken up or resisted at the will of individual agents
as they actively and reflexively construct their subjectivity (see Adkins,
2003, for a critique of this position). Rather, we acknowledge that cul-
tural discourses become persistent through their production and repro-
duction in societal structures and institutions, as well as in individual
embodied practices. Raewyn Connell’s (1987) extensive work on gender
and power is particularly instructive for making this connection between
cultures and structures of gender inequality, in which she resists concep-
tualising gender as a predetermined or natural fact, while still critiquing
 2  Sexual Violence: A Feminist Criminological Analysis 
   31

the ways in which gender inequalities come to be reproduced in remark-

ably persistent and durable, albeit variable, ways throughout societies.
Gender relations, according to Connell (1987), are always being made
and remade in the interactions, relationships and practices of everyday
life. At the same time, social institutions such as the family, education,
workplaces, media, the economy and the state, even ‘the streets’ them-
selves, are each characterised by particular patterns of gender relations,
which Connell (1987) referred to as the gender regimes of organisations
and institutions. Gender regimes vary across the contexts and milieu of
different organisations; the gender relations in one school or workplace,
for instance, may not exactly mirror those of another. Indeed, some
organisations might reflect quite a distinct pattern of gender relations—
the ‘gender equitable’ workplace as opposed to a more hierarchical set
of gendered practices which differentiate the positions and roles of men
over women. Yet Connell (1987, 2002) noted that while variation cer-
tainly exists, the common and durable patterns of gender regimes within
individual organisations and across institutions can be understood as rep-
resenting the wider gender order of a society. The common and durable
patterns of almost every part of our contemporary world together con-
stitute a gender order based on inequality. Globally, though to different
degrees and with particularities in gender regimes in different places at
different times, women remain unequal to men across key economic,
health and educational indicators, as well as in regard to high levels of
violent victimisation at the hands of (primarily) known men.
Connell’s (1987) concepts of gender regimes and the gender order are
not, however, exclusively focused on women, nor are they blind to inter-
secting inequalities. In particular, Connell noted that another key and
durable pattern of the gender order is men’s own violence and domina-
tion over other men, such that particular arrangements or ways of doing
masculinity are normalised (e.g. ‘hegemonic masculinity’, further dis-
cussed in Chap. 6), while others are marginalised, even criminalised (e.g.
male homosexuality). Furthermore, while gender regimes are, according
to Connell, always present in organisational and institutional contexts,
they may not always be the dominant pattern, with class-, racial- and
sexuality-based inequalities likewise structuring social relations.
32  Sexual Violence in a Digital Age

How might an understanding of the gender regimes of organisations

and institutions of society, as well as the wider ‘macro-politics’ of the gen-
der order, help to situate the ‘micro-politics’ of the continuum of sexual
violence in a digital age? To borrow once again from Connell (1987,
n.p.): ‘The dovetailing is neat, and it is anything but accidental’. As we
discuss further below, gender inequalities characterise the development,
access and uses of technologies themselves. At the same time, the socio-­
cultural minimisation of men’s sexual violence (whether everyday sexism,
street and sexual harassment, ‘little rapes’ or the most violent of physical
intrusions) is reinforced by institutional decisions, such as by police or
courts, not to pursue the vast majority of incidents of victimisation, as
well as by actions of the state in legislating and regulating (or not) to
protect women’s sexual autonomy.
By way of summarising the framework presented in this section, while
much research separately considers stalking, sexual violence and sexual
harassment, we find it useful to examine such harms as interrelated forms
of sexualised violence. Following the work of Stanko (1985) and Kelly
(1987), we recognise the commonalities between different forms of vio-
lence, and the threads of cultural and structural gender hierarchisation
and inequality that link them all together. Technology-facilitated sexual
violence then, as we understand it throughout the examples discussed in
this book, is not exclusively violence of a sexual nature, directed specifi-
cally at women’s sexuality or motivated by perpetrator sexual gratification.
It is much broader, encompassing gendered violence against deliberately
constructed sexed subjects, including the ‘myriad forms of sexism women
encounter everyday through to the all too frequent murder of women
and girls by men’ (Kelly, 1987, p.97). We also explicitly draw on an
understanding of sexual violence against women as simultaneously socio-­
culturally produced and reproduced in discourses of heterosex and sexual
practices (Gavey, 2005), as well as made durable and persistent in institu-
tional and structural gender inequalities (Connell, 1987). Together, these
theories present a complex understanding of the mechanisms through
which gender, power and inequality affect women’s (and men’s) everyday
lives.
This understanding of sexual violence as gendered violence that is both
socio-structurally and socio-culturally reproduced in a society of unequal
 2  Sexual Violence: A Feminist Criminological Analysis 
   33

gender relations lies at the heart of our conceptualisation of technology-­

facilitated sexual violence. Yet in order to gain a more complete apprecia-
tion of how developments in digital technologies might influence, and be
influenced by, women’s position as sexed subjects in broader gender rela-
tions, we find it useful to also engage with theories exploring the intersec-
tions of gender, inequality and technology.

 echnofeminism: Gender, Inequality

T
and Technology
The Internet itself has long-reaching origins, but the modern ‘World
Wide Web’ went live to a global public on 6 August 1991 (Leiner et al.,
2009). As summarised by Powell, Cameron and Stratton (2017), techno-
logical developments can be charted across three broad periods. The first
is the ‘pre-web’ era of the 1980s to early 1990s, characterised by the rapid
uptake of personal computing workstations in government institutions
and workplaces, connected by closed or ‘private’ networks. The second
period is the ‘global web’ era of the 1990s to early 2000s, characterised
by the launch of the World Wide Web and an associated opening-up
of transmission and access to information. The third is the ‘social web’
era from the mid-2000s to today, characterised by content generated by
users, and by social and mobile networking. Between 2002 and 2010
there was an explosion of social networks and image-sharing platforms,
including: Friendster (in 2002), MySpace (in 2003), Facebook (in 2004),
YouTube (in 2005), Twitter (in 2006), Tumblr (in 2007) and Instagram
(in 2010). Even now, Internet scholars, computer engineers and social
theorists are contemplating the implications of the next technologi-
cal wave, the ‘Internet of things’ and the ‘semantic web’, where more
‘smart’ devices will connect and share information online and where
this connected yet disorganised human information will be increas-
ingly understood and automatically processed for human consumption
and interaction by learning machines (Berners-Lee, Hendler, & Lassila,
2001; O’Neill, 2014). Critiques are also beginning to emerge as to the
nature and impacts of such automated data processing, which obscure
the human programming and thus decision-making that is embedded in
34  Sexual Violence in a Digital Age

algorithms and software design (Chan & Moses, 2016; Wajcman, 2014).
In other words, as technologies become further embedded and integrated
into daily life, there is arguably a greater need to pause and consider the
impact of human agency and social relations on the development, imple-
mentation and use of technologies, and vice versa.
Feminist-informed studies of technology and society (STS) have long
sought to understand the relationship between technology and gender
relations. Since the 1980s, these scholars have examined the gendered
nature of technology as both a physical artefact and a social process, vari-
ously focusing on equity of access and the ‘gender gap’ in technology, or
the emancipatory potentials of technology (Bimber, 2000; Cockburn,
1985, 1992; Harding, 1986; Plant, 1997; Spender, 1995; Turkle, 1995;
Wajcman, 1991, 2004; Youngs, 2005). Sherry Turkle (1995, p.12) pre-
sented an optimistic view that the ‘Age of the Internet’ would open up
possibilities for reflecting on the social construction of gender, allow-
ing people ‘to express multiple and often unexplored aspects of the self,
to play with their identity and to try out new ones’. Likewise, Donna
Haraway (1987, p.65) famously described the positive potential of tech-
nologies to fundamentally change experiences and expressions of self and
gender, suggesting that the concept of a ‘cyborg’—a human/machine
hybrid—enables us to ‘imagine a world without gender’. Such theori-
sations represent an extension of postmodern approaches to gender, in
which gendered selves are not merely ‘performed’ (Butler, 1990), or made
in the ‘doing’ of gender (West & Zimmerman, 1987), but in which bod-
ies and the gendered meanings inscribed upon them may be dispensed
with completely (see Chap. 3).
Yet feminism has also ‘long been conflicted … about the impact of
technology on women, torn between utopian and dystopian visions of
what the future may hold’ (Wajcman, 2004, p.8). Some feminist schol-
ars have argued that technology itself is inherently ‘masculine’ or ‘gen-
dered’. For instance, Wendy Faulkner (2001) argued that there are at
least seven ways in which technology is gendered: (1) designers of tech-
nology are predominantly men, (2) the workplace reflects and reinforces
the i­nterconnection between masculinity and technical skill, (3) techno-
logical artefacts are often materially and symbolically ‘male’ or female’,
(4) popular and cultural images of technology are strongly associated
 2  Sexual Violence: A Feminist Criminological Analysis 
   35

with ‘hegemonic masculinity’, (5) technical knowledge is often gendered,

(6) technical practice is often gendered, and (7) gender identity is fre-
quently premised on technology. Technologies, then, rather than repre-
senting a new space of freedom from old social relations and gender roles
(Wajcman, 2004), have been alternately understood as sites foremost for
the reproduction of hierarchical gender relations in which men’s per-
spectives, positions of power and interests both implicitly and explicitly
form the basis of, and are written into, the design, production and use of
technologies.
While it would be an oversimplification to represent all feminist STS
as inherently dichotomous, Judy Wajcman (2004) presented an influen-
tial framework in her conceptualisation of ‘technofeminism’, which is
particularly useful here. Technofeminisms, she asserted, ‘conceive of a
two-way mutually shaping relationship between gender and technology in
which technology is both a source and consequence of gender relations and
vice versa’ (Wajcman, 2002, p.356, emphasis added; see also Wajcman,
1991, 2004). She argued that analyses of technology must include a tech-
nofeminist awareness of the differential positioning of women and men as
designers, manufacturers, salespersons, purchasers, profiteers and embod-
ied users of technologies (Wajcman, 2004). According to Wajcman:

Empirical research on everything from the microwave oven, the telephone

and the contraceptive pill to robotics and software agents has clearly dem-
onstrated that the marginalisation of women from the technological com-
munity has a profound influence on the design, technical content and use
of artefacts. (2010, p.149, references omitted)

In reflecting on the initial design and marketing of the microwave

and other domestic technologies, Cynthia Cockburn and Susan Ormrod
(1993) pointed to a gender divide whereby ‘brown goods’ such as televi-
sions, video and hi-fi were seen as high-tech and male-oriented by the
company engineers, marketers and retailers, while ‘white goods’ such
as refrigerators, ­dishwashers and clothes washing machines were seen as
low-tech and female oriented (see also Cockburn, 1997). Cockburn and
Ormrod describe how early designs imagined the microwave as a ‘brown
good’, a high-tech device that would appeal to single men who were
36  Sexual Violence in a Digital Age

without wives to cook for them at home and did not themselves possess
the natural inclination or time to spend in the kitchen. It did not initially
occur to the engineers and marketers that women might be a primary
market for the device that could also be time-saving in family kitchens.
Yet it was women, and not men, who took to the microwave more readily,
resulting in its reframing by marketers as a ‘white good’ with an associ-
ated cookbook directed at women users to supplement the more techni-
cal detail in the manual (Cockburn, 1997; Cockburn & Ormrod, 1993).
A related analysis can be found in Michèle Martin’s (1991) account
of the history and changes in use of the telephone. In ‘Hello, Central?’
Gender, Technology and Culture in the Formation of Telephone Systems,
Martin described the intended purposes of this new communications tool
according to the telephone companies (see also Wajcman, 2010). In the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she writes, the telephone
was considered a ‘high speed tool of civilisation’ that would improve effi-
ciency in the (male) public sphere of business and economy. By contrast,
women users brought a new and unexpected purpose to the attention of
companies through their uptake of the telephone as a tool for sociability,
which in turn played a significant role in the shaping of modern cultural
communications practices (Martin, 1991). The mutual shaping approach
underlying technofeminist analyses is thus suggestive of not only the per-
sistence of male power, privilege and interests in the ‘entire life trajectory
of an [technological] artefact’ but, crucially, a recognition that the gen-
dering of technologies can also be ‘reconfigured at the multiple points of
consumption and use’ (Wajcman, 2010, p.149). Yet, as many feminist
scholars have observed, women’s influence and agency in directing the
development or uptake of technologies are often downplayed in male-­
dominated fields of technology and its study in society.
Further underlying the theoretical project of technofeminism is the
core concept of ‘technosociality’. Technosociality refers to the integra-
tion of technology, social practice and place resulting in technologically
mediated social orders (Ito & Okabe, 2005). It is a concept, developed in
social and cultural studies of technology, that views the technical and the
social as ‘inseparable outcomes of ongoing and historically contextual-
ized practice’ (Ito & Okabe, 2005, pp.259–60). Thus technologies are
not understood as neutral (a mere addition to a pre-given social system),
 2  Sexual Violence: A Feminist Criminological Analysis 
   37

or determinative (directly causal of changes in a social system) but as an

embedded and co-constituting feature of society and its structures, cul-
tures and practices. Again, we find Wajcman’s work instructive:

… both technology and gender are products of a moving relational process,

emerging from collective and individual acts of interpretation. It follows
from this that gendered conceptions of users are fluid, and that the same
artefact is subject to a variety of interpretations and meanings. The result is
more nuanced feminist research that captures the increasingly complex
intertwining of gender and technoscience as an ongoing process of mutual
shaping over time and across multiple sites. (Wajcman, 2010, p.150,
emphasis added)

In conceptualising the mutual shaping of gender and technology,

and a technosocial understanding of gendered structures, cultures and
practices in a digital age, technofeminism represents a timely and sig-
nificant focus for feminist criminological theorisation and research. Yet
to date, there has been very little scholarship within criminology that
has explicitly engaged with concepts of either technofeminism or tech-
nosociality more broadly, in seeking to understand crime, violence and
justice.

 eyond ‘Cyber’ Crime: A Technofeminist

B
Perspective on Sexual Violence
Unfortunately, just as technology development remains largely male-­
dominated and blind to the ways in which gender and other privilege
shapes the industry (Wajcman, 1991), so too has a ‘malestream’ discipline
of cybercriminology largely ignored technology-facilitated crimes against
women or the persistence of social inequalities in cyber-victimisation
more generally. Instead, the dominant focuses of cybercriminologies have
tended to reflect a preoccupation with ‘core’ topics, such as cybertheft,
identity fraud and child sexual exploitation, as well as a primary focus on
policing and forensic investigation of these crimes across global networks
(see Powell, Cameron, & Stratton, 2017, for a discussion). Furthermore,
38  Sexual Violence in a Digital Age

much of the theoretical work in the cybercrime field to date has explored
the suitability of conventional criminological theories to the ‘new’ con-
text of cyberspace. In practice, this theoretical exploration has, however,
been itself somewhat limited to a handful of influential theories by the
‘fathers’ of modern criminology, such as routine activity theory (Cohen
& Felson, 1979), differential association (Sutherland & Cressey, 1984),
and techniques of neutralisation (Sykes & Matza, 1957), in which gen-
der as an explanatory factor is near-absent. There are several side effects,
we suggest, of these conceptual framings, including an overemphasis on
technology as ‘neutral’—a mere tool in the hand of the cybercriminal;
a preoccupation with the ways these tools enable an extension of reach
for cybercriminals, comparable to ‘physical’ crimes (e.g. representing ‘old
wine in new bottles’, Grabosky 2001); an associated technological deter-
minism, focusing foremost on the effects of technology in creating oppor-
tunities for crime, as opposed to analyses of socio-cultural and structural
factors; and a gender blindness which precludes utility for a feminist
analysis of crimes that are inherently gendered.
Interestingly, feminist criminologies too have been somewhat limited
in their engagement with questions of technology and sexual violence,
or indeed gendered violence more broadly. This is in stark contrast to
the rich literature developed in disciplines from feminist media studies
to cultural and Internet studies and politics (particularly in relation
to activism and social movements). These scholars have been examin-
ing both the limiting and enabling influences of communications and
content-­ generation technologies. Again there are some exceptions,
including notably the broad body of work on cyberstalking, cybersexual
harassment and cyber-aggression (Barak, 2005; Citron, 2014; Finn &
Banach, 2000; Halder & Jaishankar, 2011; Halder & Karuppannan,
2009; Miceli, Santana, & Fisher, 2001; Reyns et al., 2013), as well as a
handful of criminological studies of gender, violence and social media
(Dragiewicz & Burgess, 2016; Larkin, 2015; Larkin & Dwyer, 2015;
Milivojevic & McGovern, 2014; Powell, 2015a, 2015b). The restricted
scope of both cyber and feminist criminologies to date may itself be
reflective of a broader issue of academic ‘siloing’ within criminology
(Garland, 2011). Nonetheless, in drawing on our preceding discus-
sion of both feminist and technofeminist analyses of gender, power
 2  Sexual Violence: A Feminist Criminological Analysis 
   39

and technology to understand technology-facilitated sexual violence,

we hope to simultaneously contribute to an expansion of the fields of
technofeminist and criminological scholarship.
Influenced by both technofeminism and feminist criminological
accounts of men’s everyday sexual violence against women, we thus
suggest that an analysis of the technosocial practices of sexual violence
is necessary to account for the changes manifest in the digital age. We
advocate moving beyond an understanding of technologies as either driv-
ing changes in crime or mere ‘tools’ used by individual motivated offend-
ers, and towards a more complete account of the ways in which both
technology and gender relations are mutually shaping men’s perpetra-
tion and women’s experiences of sexual violence and harassment. In other
words, just as technologies can be understood as both reflecting/embed-
ding and reproducing/producing the gender relations of our societies
more broadly, so too can technologies be understood as simultaneously
reflecting/embedding and reproducing/producing cultures and practices
of sexual violence against women. A number of examples serve to further
illustrate the importance and implications of such an analysis. Consider,
for example, the problem of ‘cyber-flashing’ as a contemporary form of
sexual harassment directed at women. In 2015 the UK media reported
that:

Lorraine Crighton-Smith was riding the train to work in London when

images of a penis popped up on her phone via the AirDrop function. She
had left the AirDrop on after exchanging files with a friend, and quickly
realized that the person who sent the photos had to be on the train as well.
Her AirDrop registers as ‘Lorraine’s iPhone,’ so the sender would have
known it was a woman’s phone. (Currey, 2015)

There are numerous reports of women receiving unsolicited images

direct to their mobile phones via open bluetooth connections or file-shar-
ing services. What makes these forms of harassment particularly unset-
tling for women is that, like other forms of public street harassment, the
aggressor is in close proximity—close enough to be within the Bluetooth
or wireless file exchange of the victim’s device—yet the identity of the
aggressor may not be immediately apparent. Which of the men on the
40  Sexual Violence in a Digital Age

crowded train sent the image? What is their intention? A ‘joke’? To harass
and intimidate? Or will their actions escalate to a physical act? To para-
phrase Stanko’s (1985) analysis from earlier in this chapter, women in
receipt of such harassment remain ‘on guard’, wary of the ‘right’ response
required to contain the behaviour and unsure whether the harassment
will escalate. Physically exposing one’s genitals in public is in most places
a criminal offence, yet ‘cyber-flashing’ occupies a grey legal space (see
Chap. 7). And of course, while women can protect themselves to some
extent by ensuring they close off their Bluetooth or Airdrop as much as
possible when moving through public spaces, the unsolicited sending of
‘dick pics’ remains a feature of sexual harassment in a range of other com-
munication contexts in which the only sure ‘self-protection’ would be
non-participation in these spaces (see Chap. 6).
Though cyber-flashing involves the re-purposing of image and file-­
sharing  technologies that were not originally designed with gender
harassment in mind, the development of other technologies is far from
gender-neutral. In some instances, the reproduction of gender relations
supportive of violence against women is particularly overt. Consider the
proliferation of ‘stalking apps’. While ‘SpyWare’ is available for a whole
range of illicit purposes, some apps are specifically marketed to men for
the purpose of ‘monitoring’ (in other words cyberstalking) their wives, girl-
friends and exes. Similarly, ‘spy cams’ and camera apps designed to maximise
the voyeuristic taking of ‘upskirt’ and ‘downblouse’ images are marketed in
both ostensibly neutral yet implicitly gendered ways. For instance, much
controversy surrounded the marketing of the Peek-I Spy Cam, which read:

Want a picture of your secret crush? You can make that happen and your
crush won’t even think you are stalking him or her, because you will be
looking in a different direction. (Cited in Starr, 2014)

Yet the ‘gender-neutral’ text was accompanied by two strongly gendered

and heterosexist images: one of a man taking a photo under the table and
under the skirt of a woman sitting opposite him, and the other a group of
men ­surreptitiously photographing down a waitress’s blouse as she served
them drinks. Other spyware, designed to be installed on a smartphone
without the owner’s knowledge, monitors location and all communica-
 2  Sexual Violence: A Feminist Criminological Analysis 
   41

tions, sending them back to the stalker. Technology-facilitated stalking

and voyeurism are thus becoming increasingly common. As women’s ref-
uges and domestic violence support workers report, many women do not
know that their devices have been compromised, leading to abusive men
discovering the locations of refuges or simply ‘turning up’ as women go
about their day (Powell & Henry, 2016; Woodlock, 2016). Moreover,
and as we discuss further in Chaps. 4, 5 and 6, there is also a market for
‘creep shots’, as well as voyeuristic and ‘revenge pornography’ images.
Most often the images are of women, and they are frequently associated
with gender-­based harassment and/or abuse by individual men or groups
of men.
Beyond technology-facilitated forms of violence and harassment, how-
ever, gender and technology are mutually shaping in other overt ways.
Consider, for instance, the development and marketing of technical solu-
tions to the social problem of sexual violence. There is everything from
‘rape whistles’ and personal alarms, to ‘rape-proof ’ underwear, to ‘date
rape drug-detecting’ nail polish (Berry, 2013). In pitching the case for
‘rape-proof ’ underwear, the designers state:

We developed this product so that women and girls could have more power
to control the outcome of a sexual assault. We wanted to offer some peace
of mind in situations that cause feelings of apprehension, such as going out
on a blind date, taking an evening run, ‘clubbing’, travelling in unfamiliar
countries, and any other activity that might make one anxious about the
possibility of an assault. (Berry, 2013)

Whether designed in an attempt to make women feel safe (or, cynically,

to make women feel less safe by being more ‘on guard’), the implications
of such ‘rape prevention’ technologies are clear: rape can be prevented
when women take personal responsibility for their safety. (Never mind
that women are more likely to be sexually assaulted by known men.) The
design and marketing of such technical solutions implicitly offer a very
narrow analysis of sexual violence and its prevention, whereby women
are simultaneously offered ‘empowerment’ for their own protection, at
the same time as men’s role in rape perpetration (and therefore its pre-
vention) is ignored. While rape myths, such as ‘most perpetrators are
42  Sexual Violence in a Digital Age

strangers’, and ‘most rapes occur in public spaces or “risky” situations’,

pre-existed these particular technologies, there can be little doubt that the
design, development and marketing of anti-rape technologies to women
contributes substantially to re-embedding these myths in our shared
socio-cultural understandings of rape.
While the examples of the mutual shaping of gender and technology
thus far described may be particularly overt, others are less obvious. For
example, Wajcman (2004, 2010) pointed out the ways in which social
biases may be reproduced as they are implicitly written into automated
algorithmic processes, such as Internet search engine results that depict
stereotypical images on the basis of gender, race and class. Rather than
providing a mere mirror of the implicit biases that already exist in societ-
ies more broadly, research has demonstrated that Internet image-based
searches tend to exaggerate gender and racial stereotypes (Kay, Matuszek,
& Munson, 2015).

Conclusion
These examples, and many others, demonstrate the mutual shaping of
gender relations and technologies. Furthermore, the examples discussed
here serve to illustrate the importance of a technofeminist analysis that
is concerned with the shaping of gender relations, and inequalities in
particular, through technosocial cultures and practices. This is not to
suggest that gender relations and technology are embedded solely in
ways that are oppressive for women or that reproduce gender inequality
nor to deny that technologies are simultaneously implicated in diverse
strategies of activism and resistance. Indeed, a remarkable feature of
feminist activism in a digital age is the extent to which women’s partici-
pation and resistance to sexual violence has reached a broader audience
in new ways. Such activism represents a noteworthy set of technoso-
cial practices in its own right and is something we discuss at length
in Chap. 9. Nonetheless, as technofeminist criminologists, our core
concern and the primary focus of this book remains firmly fixed on
understanding the nature, impacts, practices of, and justice responses
to, sexual violence in a digital age.
 2  Sexual Violence: A Feminist Criminological Analysis 
   43

In the next chapter we further explore and apply the conceptual frame-
work presented here, to consider in more depth the nature and impacts
of sexual violence in the digital age. In particular, we elaborate on a key
implication of technofeminist and technosocial analyses: that the harms
of technology-facilitated sexual violence are better understood as embod-
ied experiences rather than through a binary of virtual versus material
harms.

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