Digital sexual cultures feminist research and engagement consortium

Key findings

Normalized Violence

• Surveys, focus groups and interviews with 647 young people overwhelmingly show a desire for more comprehensive Relationship and Sex Education (RSE) covering topics including consent, healthy relationships, respect, dignity, and digital technologies.
• The risks of technology facilitated sexual and gender-based violence is unevenly spread, and is experienced more by girls, trans, and gender-nonconforming youth, and increases for all genders with age. Girls, trans, and non-binary people face more sexually explicit risks and harms than boys.
• The experiences, risks, and harms of technology facilitated gender and sexual violence are routinely normalized, trivialized, and dismissed by peers, teachers, and schools. Many of these practices are not taken seriously, and victims, rather than perpetrators are often punished.

Struggling Schools

• Schools are struggling to address issues of (technology facilitated) sexual and gender-based violence. Recent reports (Ofsted 2021; Ringrose et al. 2021), and the Everyone’s Invited campaign highlight sexual and gender-based violence as an urgent concern, while schools are given few resources or training.
• Schools’ inability to address these issues was compounded by different factors including: teachers who do not recognize the scale or scope of the problem; teachers who are keen to address it, but have so little time dedicated to RSE or PHSE; school leaders who perpetuate rape culture and victim blaming attitudes; outdated policies and those that ignore the highly gendered and sexualized dynamic at play in peer on peer abuse.
• The materials produced by the Department for Education and Ofsted do not address the realities of young people’s experiences. Policies do not appear to have been created in consultation with young people to address the complex risks and harms that they experience, or how these are rapidly changing amidst algorithmic and technological developments, new social media platforms of choice etc. 

Parental Awareness

• Most parents have minimal understanding of how the social media platforms their children use work, and therefore, what specific risks and harms they experience there. Many parents also displayed fear towards the technology.
• Many parents attempt to address online risks and harms through using filters and controls over their children’s devices, rather than say through conversations. This strategy is inadequate as our survey with youth showed that over 50% knew how to bypass these parental controls.
• Some parents expressed that they didn’t know how to start conversations with their children about these issues and need support on what to say. Many parents engage in these conversations long after their child has started experiencing them – we argue conversations about respect, consent, and online behaviour needs to start happening much sooner. 

Accountability

• Snapchat and Instagram and the platforms where most girls experience online harms and risks, where gaming platforms pose the most risk for boys.
• Social media companies must be held accountable for online harms that young people experience. There are serious concerns with automatic privacy settings disabled for young people, exposing them to various harms and risks (e.g. grooming and cyberflashing by unknown adults). Reporting features rarely lead to satisfactory resolutions, with some social media companies not responding to reports (e.g. Snapchat), and others saying what is reported can’t be addressed (e.g. it doesn’t break ‘community standards’)

Developing Digital Defense & Activism Lessons (AH/T008938/1) Follow-on-Funding for Impact and Engagement. (July 2020-July 2022) £98,424.91.

Professor Jessica Ringrose (University College London), Dr. Tanya Horeck (Anglia Ruskin University), Professor Kaitlynn Mendes (University of Leicester), Dr Karen Desborough (University of Leicester)

Context

In 2015, a group of girls set up a Twitter account as part of their secondary school feminist society. Less than an hour after posting their first tweet, they received a barrage of angry, sexualized responses. Over the coming weeks, they were attacked, threatened, and belittled. The girls were told to 'kill themselves', called 'Feminazis,' sent porn links, had official statistics on sexual violence challenged, told to 'shut up' and 'make me a sandwich.' Since 2014, we have been studying young people's use of digital technologies to challenge gender inequality, sexism and harassment (Mendes et al. 2019). While digital technologies offer new possibilities for change, they make those who speak out vulnerable to vicious, often gendered, sexualized and racialized trolling. Technology-facilitated gender-based and sexual violence (TFGBSV) is a significant public concern around the world (Bailey 2015; Bailey and Mathen 2017; Bailey et al. 2017; Dietzel at press; Dunn 2020; Flynn et al. 2021; Khoo 2021; Regehr 2020). TFGBSV can include sexual name calling or sexual rumour spreading using technology, the nonconsensual distribution of intimate images, online harassment, upskirting, cyberstalking, and doxing (5Rights Foundation 2021; Horeck et al. 2021; Ringrose et al. 2021; Vepsä 2021). Although it affects people of all ages, this violence can be particularly impactful to young people who may be targeted by members of their peer group or by adults that they know in person or have met online. 

While TFGBSV is a broad public concern, it is not consistently taught in school. Although a new Relationship and Sex Education Curriculum was meant to become mandatory in 2020, this was delayed because of the pandemic. At the same time, teachers have not received training on how to deliver this curriculum. 

The aim of this project is to take knowledge and information about TFGBSV and how young people can challenge it, creating content relevant to RSE curriculum, and training teachers around these issues, and how to deliver this content for students. 

Summary

Working closely with the School of Sexuality Education, we have developed workshops and resources for students, parents, and teachers around TFSV and gender-based and sexual violence (GBSV). To date, these workshops and resources have reached over 900 teachers and school leaders, 1,300 young people, and 280 parents across England, Ireland, and Canada.

Key findings

• Schools are currently ill-equipped to deliver RSE content on the topic of TFGBSV, or RSE more generally. Teachers are not trained to teach RSE, and few resources are currently available in schools to deliver high quality RSE. Instead, until teachers are equipped with skills and knowledge around these topics, they are best taught by professionals.
• Students desperately want a comprehensive RSE curriculum that reflects their lived experiences. They want a curriculum that is intersectional and inclusive for students of all genders and sexualities. They want to see material that reflects their lived experiences, giving them a chance to understand, and at times re-frame experiences.
• Most teachers are currently ill-equipped to deliver content that requires an intersectional understanding of power and sexual violence.
• Some schools are inherently unsafe. As a result, it can be risky to deliver content on GBSV without proper supports and resources for students. 

Recommendations

1. Comprehensive Relationships and Sex Education: Students need to be taught about sexual and gender-based violence from an early age, and how it can be facilitated by technologies. Parents and schools have key roles to play in this education, and young people desperately want more information from diverse sources (including Relationship and Sex Education curriculum) to help them form, manage, and maintain healthy relationships. Young people of all genders expressed the ways that many harmful practices such as sending and receiving unsolicited sexual images are routinely ‘normalized,’ and how potential negative consequences are often dismissed. Working with a sex education charity the School of Sexuality Education, we are piloting and rolling out two workshops for students, and accompanying teacher training workshops, which meets this need.
2. School Policy: We recommend that schools adopt specific sexual and gender-based violence policies (including those addressing the prevalence of technology facilitated sexual violence). They also need to develop diverse strategies for reporting, and victim support mechanisms for dealing with (online) gendered harms and sexual violence.
3. Government Policy: The Department for Education and Ofsted must provide clearer language and terminology relating to the scope and forms of technology facilitated gender and sexual violence. This will help young people to recognize practices which are often normalized, trivialized, or dismissed. Current policies do not reflect the breath of young peoples’ lived experiences, particularly digitally facilitated risks and harms, nor offer advice on appropriate victim supports.
4. Government Funding: The government should invest funding into RSE curriculum. In the short term, this includes both CPD and investment in PGCE and SCITT programs to include training on delivering RSE, as well as additional funding for schools to bring experts in to teach this content. In the long run, we hope that all teachers receive basic training in delivering RSE, and schools take seriously RSE as an important part of the curriculum that encourages a child’s holistic development.