Swipe right: the emergence of dating-app facilitated sexual assault
In recent years, the use of dating 'apps' to facilitate real-word social encounters between strangers has become culturally mainstream. A recent study led by Dr Janine Rowse from the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine (VIFM) suggests there has been a marked increase in real life sexual offences facilitated in this manner. We spoke to Dr Rowse who is concerned this may just be the tip of the iceberg.
“Technology facilitated sexual violence is essentially an umbrella term that covers a wide range of harmful behaviours where technology is used to perpetrate sexually based harms. The range of behaviours covered under this umbrella term includes everything from image-based abuse, to cyber stalking and also the use of technology to facilitate real life contact sexual offences.
“Overall, technology facilitated sexual violence is very common and there is a lot we already know; however, I think what is less well understood is the use of technology and online platforms to facilitate real life contact sexual offences. This is something that we started to notice during forensic medical examinations of victims of sexual assault. We were encountering what seemed like a lot of these cases and when we looked further at what was already known about this area, there wasn’t much information,” said Dr Rowse.
In this study, a small retrospective audit of forensic examination caseload from an Australian metropolitan clinical forensic medicine service identified that 14% of alleged sexual assaults where complainants underwent a forensic examination were facilitated following a dating-app meeting.[1] The investigators are currently conducting a state-wide study.
“I think that the real number is much greater than this and it is likely that there is a high level of under reporting of these offences. This is a rapidly evolving and emerging issue and ultimately, we need to know more about this problem. Research into this area has been quite limited and we are doing further research now to better understand it. Given that we are now realising that these sexual offences are occurring, and it is forming quite a large proportion of our case load, we’re hoping to find out a little bit more about the circumstances of these incidents,” said Dr Rowse.
The audit also revealed that, in all cases where it was asked, the alleged incident occurred at the first face-to-face meeting and more than half of the incidents occurred at the alleged perpetrator's private residence.
“It’s really important to educate people and to dispel some of those sexual assault myths that sexual offenders are usually strangers, wearing a hoodie, with a weapon, in the park, in the middle of the night; that is in fact a relatively rare scenario. You’re more likely to be sexually assaulted by someone you know such as an acquaintance or a partner/ex-partner, and, as we are becoming increasingly aware of, somebody you may have met online.
“I think there is an important role for educating people in understanding the nature of these online interactions, and that there is a heightened feeling of trust when communicating online – particularly for a prolonged period of time. This has been described as the online disinhibition effect where you’re likely to think that a relationship is at a more advanced stage from that period of online communication, when actually the parties are real life strangers.
“Moving forward, we are currently working to identify the features of high-risk encounters, for example, which demographics are most at risk, in order to provide information of public health relevance to help inform and empower users in understanding some of the risks of using these dating apps to meet people.” said Dr Rowse.
