This year the UN Women theme for International Women’s Day is focused on the digital world and its opportunities for gender equality. No matter where we are, how privileged or how poor, digital technology has transformed our lives: while there are undoubtedly many benefits to global communication and interconnectedness this technology has also upended previously-held certainties, opened up new battlegrounds in an ever-polarised society and developed new ways to oppress, exploit, shame and dismiss women and girls not least in the area of sexual violence and exploitation. 

The scale of sexual exploitation online is often what we focus on but it is more accurate to think of this as a whole of society issue. There is no online world that is separate from our offline lives. The consumption of violent pornography (which is the vast majority of pornography) and sexual exploitation does not simply create repeated abuse and colour the worldview, behaviour and mental health of the consumer, it impacts all those around them who encounter their groomed relationship to our boundaries. If the influence of pornography back in 2003 could be described as creating the wallpaper of our lives, digital sexual exploitation today has folded itself into our DNA. 

In rape crisis we are all too familiar with the terrible reality of ongoing abuse for survivors who know or fear that their abusers took images or videos of the abuse. But survivors of sexual violence are not alone in this fear. Since the advent of smartphones, a growing percentage of people in sexual relationships over the past few decades have consented to or shared sexualised images of themselves at some stage – many now live with the unknown that this material may be ‘out there’ and potentially used against them. 

Then there is the terrifying vista of deep faking where someone’s face can be grafted onto images making that person ‘perform’ the sexualised and violent fantasies of another without their knowledge, never mind consent. This phenomenon has now moved offline with sex doll manufacturers creating the dolls of a customer’s choosing, this includes creating sex dolls of children whose photographs were supplies by the paedophilic customer.  

The digital enabler is the problem but equally much of the solution. Many of the software giants have been creating AI and algorithms to tackle child abuse imagery. For victims who know their image is being used in this way contacting hotline.ie or an Garda Siochana should see the material removed within days. But this take down capacity is only a tiny segment of the problem. 

Cleaning up the internet where victims are unaware of the abuses, is more complicated. Training AI to detect abuse images runs into ethical problems and AIs today remain notoriously poor at discerning abuse. Even if AIs could be well trained we would then need to address the serious questions of potential mass surveillance and by whom. While AI might assist, the solution lies with the corporations and their regulation. 

The power to make our online world safer and by extension our offline world too, rests almost entirely with the for-profit industries of our online lives, these are the platforms, the social media companies, the search engines, as well as the sexual exploitation industry itself.   

These private, global companies create the opportunities and gateways, they also work hard to create the appetite – in effect, much of their business is building algorithms and AI to groom our appetite towards the objective of increasing their profits. Safety-by-design would have understood how inequality, misogyny and sexual exploitation would be key drivers of their profit margins from the outset and built safety in, instead they are largely patching safety on top of profit-by-design systems.  

There are heroic campaigners working tirelessly in this field, pursuing leverages to force safer online spaces, whether that is campaigning against the banks supporting profiteering from rape on Pornhub or the survivors whose rape videos are being shared on paid platforms, pursuing those individual platforms and companies. They are forcing accountability on unregulated spaces. 

Self-regulation of the online opportunities for harm corporations create, has come largely as an afterthought, often lacklustre. Thus, governments are creating rules and regulation of this space. Ireland has a newly appointed Online Safety Commissioner, Niamh Hodnett, who is soon to be joined by a Commissioner of Digital Services, both part of the new Comisiúin na Méan under the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act 2022. 

The new Irish Media Commissioners will be joining an international community of champions part of whose jobs it will be to ensure that the for-profit global corporations learn that there is no profit in tolerating child exploitation, grooming, misogyny and sexual exploitation. 

Dr Clíona Saidléar, Executive Director, Rape Crisis Network Ireland  

Originally published in Irish Examiner here