The Importance of Context: Describing the Who, Where, and How of Technology-Facilitated Sexual Harassment

An examination of technology-facilitated sexual violence perpetration in Canada among a large sample of adults.

“…NCDII is a specific type of imagebased sexual violence characterized by the creation and/or sharing of an intimate or explicit image or video of an individual without their knowledge or consent (Henry et al, 2019;Powell et al, 2020). Definitions of online sexual harassment vary greatly across studies but tend to refer to unwanted sexual advances made through the use of technology (Oliver et al, 2023). Henry and Powell (2018) further expanded this definition to include gender-and sexuality-based harassment which refers to comments meant to humiliate, demean, or embarrass another individual on the basis of their presumed sexuality, gender, or gender expression (e.g., using the term gay in a derogatory fashion).…”

“…Individual studies that have examined TFSV in Canada have tended to focus on victimization rates rather than perpetration rates (e.g., Snaychuk & O’Neill, 2020) or have examined the perpetration of only one type of TFSV (e.g., Dietzel, 2022; Karasavva & Forth, 2022; Sparks et al, 2023). Almost all of these perpetration studies have also relied on predominantly undergraduate student samples making it difficult to generalize the findings to the broader Canadian population (e.g., Karasavva & Forth, 2022; Oliver et al, 2023). Given these limitations, the goal of the present study was to report the perpetration rates of three common types of TFSV (i.e., nonconsensual dissemination of intimate images [NCDII], online sexual harassment, and cyberstalking) for a sample of adults currently living in Canada.…”

“…Pooling information from five separate youth (i.e., under the age of 18) studies, Mori et al (2022) reported that 14.5% of participants reported sharing a sext with others without the permission of the original sender. When examining online sexual harassment, we were unable to find any study of Canadian perpetration rates; studies using Canadian samples have exclusively focused on rates of victimization (e.g., Oliver et al, 2023). Estimates of online sexual harassment outside of Canada have ranged from below 5% over the lifetime of undergraduate students ( N = 571; Thompson & Morrison, 2013) to as high as 21% for behaviours occurring in the past 12 months among youth aged 10–15 years old ( N = 1,588; Ybarra et al, 2007).…”