Abstract
When rape goes viral: Youth and sexual assault in the digital age is a disquieting book to read. As someone who is not a digital native, I cannot help feeling panicked and a little helpless about the cascading harmful scenarios described. However, the author, Anna Gjika, does an excellent job of describing the violent digital landscape in a dispassionate way and making a strong call to action through the dialectical approach apparent in the book.
The three cases of technology-facilitated sexual violence, which took place physically in the USA before being distributed online, form the crux of this research. The book is structured in a logical way, lucidly illustrating the intersectionality of three disparate domains. These domains are the performances of youth gendered identities; the digital enabling of sexual assault through recordings and their dissemination on social media; and pertinent justice-seeking practices. Despite the complexity of unpacking seemingly separate topics, the book succeeds very well in creating a systematic account of how these domains are connected in a network which sustains and reinforces gender inequality and violence in adolescent contexts.
The first two chapters focus on youth identities. This introductory section describes the cultural shift we are witnessing as young people harness the power of technology to construct gendered and sexual identities on social media. Gjika presents clear evidence for how seemingly intractable gender inequality (already firmly established within heterosexual relationships) is mirrored and amplified in the recording and distribution of sexual assault on social media. The “missing cultures of consent” (p.36) are identified as a chain of continuity between the physical and online spaces. Just as a culture of non-consensual interactions enable violence within heterosexual relationships, the violation of privacy and consent is reinforced in the recording and distribution of sexual assault imagery within the digital realm.
The middle section of the book illustrates how the intersection of sexual and gendered youth identities performed on digital platforms not only shapes but also amplifies youth sexual assault. This nexus of identities has implications, for example, in the utilization of evidence to ensure justice. Owing to a lack of knowledge and sufficient expertise, digital evidence has contradictory status as simultaneously being deemed ephemeral and enduring within the law-and-order realm.
In the final third of the book, opportunities for thinking about alternative pathways to justice and how to prevent and reduce harms and violations are offered. Throughout, Gjika provides a nuanced analysis of how technology-facilitated sexual assault raises important questions about anonymity, privacy, consent, power, privilege, and oppression. The evidence provided in this book leaves the reader in no doubt that the growing culture of digital abuse and humiliation works to extend male entitlement into the digital world. The book prompts readers to question whether despite the normalisation of a culture of abuse and humiliation on social media, technology could also offer unique opportunities for disruption of the same.
The methodology utilized in this qualitative research project is impressively coherent. The author provides a thick description of appropriate feminist theory and how it is applied to methods of qualitative data collection and analysis. The range of data utilised is commendable. These include documentary analysis of media coverage of three high-profile cases in the USA; focus groups with young people; and interviews with journalists who produced stories about these cases and prosecuting, defense and civil attorneys. However, my being impressed by this research did little to mediate my sense of vertiginous recognition of something that was at once so familiar but also strangely unfamiliar to me. The lived experiences and trauma experienced by young women who are sexually assaulted is by now well documented. However, understanding the ways in which the use of digital technology works to reinforce hegemonic gender norms and amplify unequal gendered dynamics is less well understood. This book makes a significant contribution to helping us to recognize the intersections as well as showing us what is at stake. Certainly, the consequences are very dire for those of us living in more precarious contexts where social support systems are overburdened and under-resourced and where there are woefully few legislative or policy supports for victims of technology-facilitated sexual violence.
Despite the shocking narratives which are reported in this book, the author has used a measured approach. I especially appreciate their resistance to the usual alarmist and binary thinking which is too often applied to research about young people or social media use. This is no easy task considering the personal cost they must have paid in keeping the focus on this brutality. As researchers we are inclined to apply an ethics of care to victims of injustice, without paying attention to those amongst us who willingly do much needed and difficult intellectual and emotional labor. Anna Gjika has modelled an ethics of care by honoring victim-survivor experiences with immense compassion while simultaneously grounding these experiences within the unjust social, cultural, gendered, and technological contexts in which they occur. It is my hope that all who read this book will respond with commensurate grace to Gjika's urgent call to action.
