Resisting Cyber-located Sexual Violence Through Irish Feminisms
Green square with stylised writing & graphics that says Lorrie and Carol on Resisting cyber located sexual violence.
By Lorraine Hayman & Carol Ballantine
Introduction
The rapid advancement of technology has been accompanied by a troubling rise in its exploitation as a tool for perpetrating abuse. Cyber-located Sexual Violence (CLSV) exemplifies this trend as a profoundly “technosocial” issue rooted not only in harmful human behaviour, but also in structural affordances - the anonymity, ease of content sharing, and lack of moderation online - and the pervasive integration of technology in everyday life. CLSV, such as cyberflashing, cyberstalking, and online sexualised harassment, is an expression of familiar patterns of sexual violence in which technology is utilised to perpetrate non-contact forms of sexual violence in cyberspace. However, despitebeing recognisable as sexual violence, when victim-survivors in Ireland turn to institutions like law enforcement for protection and support, they are too often met not with an awareness of the significance of CLSV, but with the all-too-familiar minimisation of their experiences, dismissal of the harm it causes, and victim-blaming-shaming attitudes.
In Ireland, the Harassment, Harmful Communications and Related Offences Act criminalises various forms of CLSV, seeking to better protect victim-survivors and offer them legal recourse. Yet, as we have shown in our work, several women who report to law enforcement and engage with the Irish criminal justice system are often told that their experiences do not constitute crimes and that, in the eyes of the law, nothing can be done. Critiquing the existing legalistic and carceral responses in Ireland, we look elsewhere for resistance to CLSV, including the recent history of Irish feminisms. While recognising it is not a ‘solution’ to CLSV in and of itself, we highlight how solidarity networks grounded in human connection can serve as powerful informal spaces for victim-survivors, offering validation and a renewed sense of agency in the face of harm.
Conceptualising CLSV:
CLSV captures forms of sexual violence that are non-contact and cyberspace-located, but still “evoke fear and restrict [...] freedoms”. Moreover, as a form of gender-based violence, it disproportionately targets and harms minoritised people, including women and girls. As was brushed upon above, this form of abuse includes various comment and image-based acts, including: (1) “Sexualised threats of violence”, unwanted sexualised comments, threats, and requests that scholar and activist, Emma Jane (2014), refers to as “e-bile”; (2) Cyberstalking, using digital technology to stalk and harass; (3) Cyberflashing, the highly gendered “digital distribution of penis images to another without consent”; and, (4) the nonconsensual creation and distribution, and threat to create/distribute, private intimate images, known as Image-based Sexual Abuse.
Image-based Sexual Abuse also includes recontextualising images and utilising advances in artificial intelligence (AI) to generate nonconsensual deepfake sexual imagery, resulting in the generation of images depicting things that did not happen, seen in the cases of the Spanish School Girls and Taylor Swift. And it goes without saying that the expansion of AI technologies is accompanied by an increasing capacity for CLSV. Frequently, CLSV behaviours are combined as tools of abuse, and, depending on the context of the abuse, can bleed into offline experiences. For example, British tennis player, Katie Boulter, receives daily “death threats, explicit pictures and toxic comments”, through social media, demonstrating a range of CLSV behaviours that fill her with “despair, resignation and fear”. Holly Willoughby was cyberstalked by a man who had thousands of nonconsensual deepfake sexual images of her and plotted to kidnap, rape and murder her, revealing a “grim connection between image-based abuse and violence against women and girls” offline. Yet, despite the exponential and rapidly evolving rise in CLSV, victim-survivors often struggle with the language and shared interpretive tools to “articulate their experiences”, suggestive of the disconnect between legal definitions of online sexual violence and their lived experiences.
As with contact sexual violence, CLSV is not about sex. It is reflective of, and reinforces, gender inequality, specifically the justification of power imbalances and the normalisation of the subordination of women, girls, and other marginalised genders. CLSV reasserts and reinscribes long-standing gender stereotypes that sustain and reproduce oppressive relations of patriarchal dominance. Yet, with new technologies, there exist new tools facilitating the perpetration of old violence. To effectively respond to CLSV requires socio-cultural-political systemic change that recognises this abuse is not only mediated by technology but lived and experienced through the body. CLSV has “real impacts on real bodies in the real world”. Failing to recognise the embodied experiences of CLSV victim-survivors, which punitive, carceral framings continue to do by not positioning it as sexual violence, reproduces a damaging misunderstanding of both the nature of CLSV and its seriousness.
Yet while evidently a form of violence, CLSV is frequently ignored and unrecognised. Our work here then is situated within that which calls for an expansion in the concept of violence, recognising the redundancy of binary offline-online, real not-real dualities, and embracing continuums thinking. This thinking is grounded in the work of Liz Kelly (1988), who identifies sexual violence as temporal and not always physical, happening across a woman’s lifespan, with experiences in adulthood recalling those from childhood. Using the term CLSV articulates the behaviours as sexual violence, seeking to begin addressing what Miranda Fricker (2007) calls “hermeneutical injustices, wherein someone has a significant area of their social experience obscured from understanding owing to prejudicial flaws in shared resources for social interpretation”. With this in mind, CLSV is also situated within socio-cultural contexts, reflective of global systems of discrimination-exploitation-oppression like racism, colonialism, and sexism. For example, Noelle Martin (2021), an activist, lawyer, and “young woman of colour - a daughter of immigrants”, experienced CLSV in her teens. She recounted how, after going public about her experience to raise awareness and seek legal reform, she was “ruthlessly victim-blamed and slut shamed […] The slut was asking for it. Stupid, naive attention seeking whore”. The “backlash” that Noelle faced in the aftermath of her victimisation is steeped in the sexism, misogyny, racism, and colonisation, including the colonisation of women’s bodies, that enabled her CLSV victimisation in the first instance.
Limits in Carceral Responses to CLSV in Ireland:
There are a host of ways in which carceral solutions fail to respond to CLSV; however, here we will focus on five, unpacking their limitations. These are:
Failure to conceptualise CLSV as sexual violence, lacking an embodied understanding of its harms.
Ingrained systemic minimisation and victim-blaming-shaming attitudes.
Laws that fail to deter perpetrators, offering little recourse for victim-survivors.
Systemic failures in providing victim-survivors with protection and justice.
The perpetuation of rape culture in the re-inscription of the ‘ideal’ victim narrative
1. Failures in conceptualising CLSV as sexual violence
Laws fail to capture the severity and complexity of the harms inflicted by all forms of sexual violence. Irish law fails explicitly to respond to CLSV as sexual violence or to recognise its embodied harms and systemic nature. In Ireland, the Harassment, Harmful Communications and Related Offences Act is colloquially referred to as Coco’s law. This is in honour and remembrance of Nicole ‘Coco’ Fox Fenlon, who died by suicide after experiencing a campaign of bullying, including CLSV. The law criminalises the “recording, […] distributing, publishing or threatening to distribute or publish intimate image without consent with intent to cause harm or being reckless as to whether harm is caused” (Image-based Sexual Abuse) and “distributing, publishing or sending threatening or grossly offensive communication” (e-bile). However, by situating these crimes as primarily related to communications offences, the law fails to acknowledge that CLSV is a sexually violent crime.
The narrow legalistic framing of CLSV also does not capture how women in Ireland understand sexual violence, as suggested by the 397 women in Ireland in one of the authors research whoconsider CLSV as sexual violence, embedded in unequal gender norms, and not a matter of interpersonal dispute or individual wrongdoing. Hence, the criminal justice/communications frame is a far cry from the embodied experiences of victim-survivors. It is disappointing that Coco’s law fails in these regards, particularly considering how it came by its colloquial name.
2. Minimisation and victim-blaming-shaming
By situating CLSV in the legal space of online communications rather than sexual violence, the division of the online-offline binary is reinforced. It is well-established that legalistic approaches to violence assert artificial categories that disrupt continuums thinking and misrepresent the nature and impact of sexual violence. For example, Nicola Henry and Anastasia Powell (2015) critique how legal systems fail to capture the scope of technology-facilitated forms of sexual violence, its harms, and frame it as “a problem of user naiveté rather than gender-based violence”. We are concerned that the limited legalistic categorisation of CLSV found in Coco’s law is already adding to this minimisation and downplaying of this form of sexual violence in Ireland, particularly given the context of rising gender-based violence and violence against women. When CLSV is minimised and downplayed, it suggests it isn’t that serious, presumptively casting doubt on victim-survivors who highlight how it has harmed them. This limitation cannot be resolved through laws that stress the seriousness of CLSV but focus exclusively on criminalisation to address it, as this issue is systemic, reflecting the long-standing failure to meaningfully tackle cultures of violence, misogyny, and discrimination.
As an example of how a policing lens frames the crime of CLSV in ways that reflect systemic minimisation and victim-blaming-shaming attitudes, we note that Essex Police (2025) reinforce casting doubt onto victim-survivors, encouraging people to “think before you press send: once an image or video is out there, you lose control over it”, placing the onus on the potential victim-survivor to protect themselves; if they fail to do so, they are to blame for not ‘thinking before sending’. An Garda Síochána, Ireland’s national police force, suggests “there are many ways to minimise the risk of online harassment, many of which can be achieved by using simple common sense [emphasis added]”, illustrative of victim-shaming and a failure to grasp the nature of the crime. Wider society already receives these victim-blaming-shaming messages: The 2024 Eurobarometer survey reveals that 43 per cent of Irish people believe that “if a woman shares intimate images, she is at least partly responsible when those images are shared without her consent”, while 21 per cent think women who express opinions on social media “should accept it elicits sexist, demeaning/abusive replies [emphasis added]”. Law enforcement placing the onus on individuals to prevent their victimisation, while not the only source of victim-blaming-shaming attitudes, does little to address the significant impact of these attitudes on CLSV victim-survivors: One of the author’s research indicates that victim-survivors of CLSV often internalise victim-blaming attitudes, with 29 per cent of 281 women in Ireland who have experienced one or more forms of CLSV blaming themselves for being targeted.
3. Existing laws fail to deter perpetrators
Evidence shows that laws offer little deterrence to those who enact CLSV. Research identifies that CLSV is occurring at scale worldwide. You.Gov (2024) revealed that 36 per cent of women under the age of 40 in the United Kingdom have been cyberflashed (despite the 2023 Online Safety Act) and “studies consistently find that cyberflashing is a common experience, with women […] disproportionately facing the highest rates of victimisation and disclosing the most negative impacts”. Jay, a participant in one of the authors’ research projects, explained she was dating “a nice guy, a teacher in his 40s, a man with life experience”. After she called time on their back-and-forth texting, he sent her an image of his erect penis with the caption “let’s meet so I can show you a good time and we can put this all behind us”. The fact that forms of CLSV, such as cyberflashing, are illegal in Ireland and beyond does not deter men from targeting women and girls with these behaviours.
4. Systemic failures to provide victim-survivors of CLSV with protection and justice
The legal system is also unable to provide victim-survivors with the protections and justice they seek. Instead, victim-survivors who report are pulled into often traumatising, dehumanising processes that centre abuser rights, investigation procedures, and institutional reputations, rather than offering solidarity, inclusion, and resolution. Fran, another participant in one of the authors’ research projects, had “pornographic images” of a woman who looked like her widely circulated on social media, with her name and other identifying information written across them. In response, she sought protection and help through law enforcement. She was initially optimistic that they could help her find justice by recognising the harm and holding the man who abused her accountable. Instead, while Fran highlighted the member of law enforcement she spoke to was kind to her and wanted to help her, something other women in this same research haven’t always experienced, she was dismissed by the system and told that what had happened to her wasn’t a crime of gendered sexual harassment; resultingly, there was little law enforcement could do for Fran.
After this experience of seeking justice through the legal system, Fran continued to pursue justice on her terms, leading to her speaking to one of the authors to raise awareness of what happened to her and the systemic failures she had come up against. Fran’s approach to justice is reflective of “kaleidoscopic justice [which] understands justice as a constantly shifting pattern; justice constantly refracted through new experiences or understandings; justice as an ever-evolving, nuanced and lived experience”. Her experience starkly highlights the limits of the legal system and reflects existing scholarship that finds victim-survivors conceptualise justice in ways that far exceed what the criminal system can offer; seeking (among other things) recognition of their experiences, repair of the harms they have experienced, and connection and solidarity with others.
The legal system’s failure to protect many victim-survivors is deeply embedded in, and reflected across, Irish institutions, where institutional interests are consistently prioritised over the needs of victim-survivors. After experiencing online sexualised bullying and harassment from a man in a rival sports team at university, Dalia, another participant in one of the authors’ research, sought support from the university, but instead received no investigation updates, had emails requesting information repeatedly ignored, and she was told almost a year later that, due to confidentiality, they couldn’t tell her the outcome of an internal university hearing despite her abuser admitting guilt. This outcome chimes with a “criminal justice drift” already noted in university responses to campus sexual violence in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, with the emphasis falling on “adversarial and procedural paradigms” instead of transformative and trauma-informed approaches. Institutions, and the systems and structures they function in, often create and perpetuate the very inequalities that make sexual violence, including CLSV, thinkable and doable by some.
5. The legal system perpetuates rape culture
There exists a system of silence in the face of sexual violence, reflecting rape culture, referring to a “society where sexual violence and abuse is normalised, played down and laughed off […] where women and girls are seen as ‘less than’ men and boys”. The law itself often perpetuates rape culture through the re-inscription of the “ideal victim” construct, whereby victim-survivors are considered credible/believable when they are passive, helpless, sexually inexperienced, modest, have physical signs of assault, are visibly distressed and provide a calm and consistent testimony.
Rape culture is widespread in Ireland, and deeply inscribed in the criminal justice system: As recently as 2018, a defence lawyer during a rape trial of a 17-year-old girl said, “You have to look at the way she was dressed. She was wearing a thong with a lace front”. While this comment evoked widespread protests across Ireland, the man was ultimately acquitted of a rape charge. This outcome reflects numerous trials beforehand where rape victims’ sexual experiences, clothing, and levels of intoxication are used against them under the guise of ‘defence’. Case law in Ireland related to CLSV is limited due to the recent ratification of Coco’s law in 2021. Still, given the already widely reported victim-blaming attitudes related to forms of CLSV like Image-based Sexual Abuse (particularly where intimate images were initially consensually shared), the evidence suggests the same attitudes are likely to be prevalent in future CLSV trials.
Summary of limitations
Despite the existing criminal legislation in Ireland and beyond, CLSV is still widely considered “something women should just put up with online”; (1) if they want an online presence, and (2) because their experiences teach them there isn’t much that can be done about it. One of the authors’ research suggests that if existing carceral solutions to CLSV in Ireland offered women victimised with protection, support, and justice, more of them would likely be willing to report it; whereas, only 4 per cent of 281 women in Ireland who have experienced CLSV reported it to law enforcement. Addressing CLSV and supporting those targeted must engage with non-carceral solutions to meet the needs of these victim-survivors.
Victim-survivors of various forms of sexual violence are unable to trust the criminal justice system to meet their needs. While data on prevalence and reporting data on CLSV behaviours in Ireland is lacking, Rape Crisis England (2024) highlighted that five in six women do not report contact sexual violence, echoed in findings from Ireland’s Dublin Rape Crisis (2025) that 71 per cent of victim-survivors do not report to law enforcement. When victim-survivors do report their experiences of sexual violence and are met with dismissal or minimisation by law enforcement, it sends a troubling message: The criminal legal system is not equipped or willing to prioritise the needs and safety of victim-survivors, particularly women. Resultingly, this message conveys that their pain is not taken seriously, which can deepen their sense of isolation from, and distrust in, the legal system - and open the possibility of looking elsewhere for justice.
Thinking Beyond Criminalisation:
In response to these critiques of carceral solutions to CLSV, we turn to the ways in which Irish feminisms might begin to draw on different tools to envision responses to CLSV that are more liberatory, transformative, and centred on the needs and experiences of victim-survivors. After all, many in Ireland have an appetite for change regarding CLSV, recognising that the state has sought to respond with criminal law, but this isn’t working to provide the protections and justice victim-survivors often seek. The recent background of Irish feminism is instructive in this regard, set within Ireland’s longer history. In the mid-twentieth century, Ireland had the highest number of people incarcerated in institutions in all of Western Europe, at roughly 1% of the population. These incarcerations included the notorious Magdalene Laundries, mother and baby homes, and industrial schools, among others, amounting to a gendered form of what has been referred to as an “architecture of containment”. Scholars note how logics of Catholic nationalism and carcerality have persisted for both government and civil society actors around contemporary issues, including carceral approaches to refugee reception and integration, and sex work.
At the same time, scholar Kelly Gordon (2024) argues that 20th-century feminist encounters with the law in Ireland led to a “productive legal ambivalence” which ultimately provided strategic advantages for Irish abortion advocacy. Given an absolute constitutional ban on abortion in practically all circumstances, Irish feminists were forced into approaching the law “with hesitance and caution”, shifting over time towards “radical and extra-legal action”. The thinking that Gordon proposes is useful to our project in two ways. First, she suggests that Irish feminism is particularly well-equipped for such extra-legal thinking because of its thirty-year history of navigating Ireland’s repressive Eighth Amendment. And second, in proposing decriminalisation as an emphasis for pro-choice advocacy going forward, she invites new ways of thinking about an issue conventionally associated with criminal justice outside of that framework.
We believe legal ambivalence might also serve a more liberatory approach to CLSV. Following Gordon’s invitation, we begin here to imagine coming together in the face of an Internet space that is saturated with misogyny and brutal and violent assertions of patriarchal power. To explore this imagination, we (re)turn to building connections and communities of support through solidarity networks, often informal communities of support built on the shared values of care and collective resistance to the harms of violence.
In one of the authors’ research projects, she found herself forging the beginnings of these solidarity networks with women victimised by CLSV through holding space for them, creating a mutually supportive atmosphere and a combined commitment to overcoming the adversity of CLSV. For each woman who shares her story of CLSV victimisation with this author, it may be the first time she is granted space to name the violence done to her and to describe her resilience in the face of harm. Sharing experiences of abuse that have previously been unspoken, when met with a sense of being heard, believed and validated, is powerful. Resultingly, these conversations, though at times upsetting, were also punctuated with moments of joy and collective resistance as bridges were built and trust was forged.
Solidarity networks built with friends and families, rooted in human connection, can serve as vital spaces for victim-survivors in the aftermath of CLSV, offering them validation (they are heard and believed) and helping to restore their agency. Such networks, following Tanya Serisier and Sara Ahmed, can build responsive, critical listening communities that resist the tendency to doubt and judge victims’ speech, offering instead to “listen with a feminist ear” . The women in one of the authors’ research projects shared that their solidarity networks are often informal, developed through conversations and shared lived experiences. One woman, Jane, highlighted that one way she responds to CLSV is to build cross-generational “whisper networks” with friends and family. Whisper networks, primarily operating through word-of-mouth, private social media groups, or direct messaging, provide informal channels of communication used to share information about CLSV, allowing people to discreetly warn each other outside of official reporting systems.
Another woman, Lucy, described a source of her strength as her “tribe”, the people who help and support her, whom she regularly visualises standing behind her, holding her up and carrying some of the weight of her pain. This author is now enmeshed in Lucy’s solidarity network and can readily recall the image of her surrounded by this web of people - pictured both in her mind and through her physical body as a feeling of lightness across her shoulders. While informal spaces like these networks and “tribes” are full of potential risks, especially for the most marginalised members, we believe that at best, a creative, extra-legal feminist energy can infuse them, generating inclusion, mutual support and protection to bring about transformative change.
We consider that survivor-centric solidarity networks off and online, such as the We Speak platform in Ireland, offer an alternative framework through which resisting CLSV can be (re)imagined. Such networks can result in a loose, nascent collective, providing an informal but powerful form of political action that establishes the foundation of a coalition of “affinity” offering survivor-centric, informed, mutually available peer support, and have the potential to result in social change. Tully O’Neill (2024) highlights how “informal justice experiences are multiple and […] influence each other, in particular, at a community level (of victim-survivors as collective peers) and a societal level”. Solidarity networks can hold space for victim-survivors to interrupt the rape culture that normalises their abuse.
Notably, these networks can also extend beyond victim-survivors to their wider communities, fostering understanding about CLSV, providing guidance to bystanders, and offering the opportunity to collectively reflect on how and why CLSV disproportionately targets minoritised people, including women and girls. In doing so, they also have the potential to reach those who commit CLSV and offer the grounds for reparative and restorative actions. As such, solidarity networks rooted in feminist care, a coalition-based resistance, and a refusal to normalise the harms of CLSV, lay the groundwork for social change by cultivating the shared understanding and identity required for sustained collective action.
Conclusion:
Sexual violence doesn’t end at the edge of the physical world; it follows victim-survivors into their inboxes, group chats, and online lives. Technology has expanded people’s capacity to harm. Yet, legal responses remain rigid, slow, and disconnected from victim-survivors’ lived experiences. In Ireland, existing carceral solutions to CLSV have consistently failed to offer adequate protection, meaningful support, or perpetrator deterrence. Far from being neutral, these systems reproduce rape culture, silencing survivors and reinforcing gendered power hierarchies through disbelief, minimisation, and victim-blaming-shaming. Drawing on Irish feminisms, we consider the opportunities in solidarity networks, which provide spaces for victim-survivors to feel heard, believed, and supported.We posit that solidarity networks can offer an alternative framework through which resisting CLSV can be (re)imagined. Rather than relying on punitive, state-centred mechanisms, these networks foreground care, creating spaces for victim-survivors to explore the harms of CLSV on their terms, seek validation outside the legal system, and offer possibilities for redress and healing. Within these networks, victim-survivors can share experiences without the burden of ‘proving’ harm or presenting as the ‘ideal’ victim. In turn, they can build collective strategies to resist individual perpetrators and the systemic structures that enable them.