Conceptualising Technosocial Sexual Harms

Abstract

The law alone will not provide an answer to technology-facilitated sexual violence, nor will it fulfil the justice needs of many victims. Partly this is due to the significant challenges of responding to crime in a global, digital context in which victims, perpetrators and the technologies used to facilitate harm may often reside in different nation states and the cross-jurisdictional will and/or the capacity to investigate all forms of technology-facilitated sexual violence may simply not be present or practically feasible given the scope of the problem. The law then cannot be the sole focus of efforts to address technology-facilitated sexual violence. This is a complex social problem that requires a combination of legal, technical and social solutions to tackle it at its core. In this chapter, we focus our attention on the prevention of technology-facilitated sexual violence. In particular, we consider the possibilities for translating existing prevention approaches, and developing new ones, for preventing digital violence, abuse and harassment.