Anna Gjika is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Her research explores the relationships between gender, violence, youth, and technology, particularly as they pertain to sexual harm and sociolegal responses to gender-based violence. Her work has been published in Crime, Media, Culture, Gender & Society, the Journal of Interpersonal Violence,and Social Media & Society,among others. She is the author of the award-winning book, When Rape Goes Viral: Youth and Sexual Assault in the Digital Age (2024, University of California Press). You can find her on BlueSky: @gjikaphd.bsky.social and Twitter: @GjikaPhd
Here I ask her 3 questions about her new book, When Rape Goes Viral: Youth and Sexual Assault in the Digital Age.

AMW: In your book, you critique surveillance-oriented approaches to teens’ digital activities and instead emphasize peer cultures, gender norms, and sexual ethics. How might families and educators shift from surveillance to fostering critical conversations that address these underlying issues?

AG: In my interviews for the book, young people stated that risk messages and surveillance responses from their parents and schools were often unhelpful and counterproductive, ignoring the primacy of technology for their identity and relationships. For teens, like for many of us, digital platforms are important for everyday communications, connecting with friends, developing and maintaining romantic relationships, and for the exploration and performance of gender and sexual identities. Rather than equipping youth with the skills necessary to navigate this social landscape, we are advising them – and young women, in particular – to protect themselves by limiting their digital engagement. This can contribute to reinforcing victim-blaming attitudes, and ignores common situations where individuals are coerced to share intimate images, or where images are created without the knowledge or consent of the victim. Monitoring teens’ devices and online activity can also normalize privacy invasions and even non-consent. It can send the message that love and care are expressed through surveillance, which young people may then go on to mirror in their own relationships and digital practices. Surveillance responses also generally communicate to teens that they are untrustworthy, which makes them more hesitant to reach out for help when they need it.

Perhaps most importantly, solutions that aim to restrict digital practices do not get at the causes of that behavior, which is what we need to understand to effectively support young people. They also fail to address one of the most harmful and underdiscussed effects of the digital turn, which is the way it has compromised our relationship with consent and ethics. By making the capture and sharing of information easy and routine, social media and mobile technologies have seriously eroded notions of consent in digital praxis and communication. And they have helped blunt human decency and concern for others by, instead, prioritizing and rewarding the sharing of information for likes and attention, which helps normalize abuse as a strategy for improving one’s status.

What I learned from my conversations with teens about image-based abuse is that when they are creating and/or sharing intimate images, whether consensual or not, whether real or fake, they are doing so with specific goals in mind. Sometimes their motivation is to bully or humiliate. More often, as my research shows, their digital activity is heavily driven by a desire to perform a valued identity (e.g., hetero-masculinity) and gain status and approval from their peers. I think the first step for us as parents and educators should be to identify what those motivations are in a non-judgmental way by asking young people to explain their thinking where problematic or abusive digital practices are concerned. Were they responding to pressure? Was it curiosity? A desire to show off to one’s friends? As I argue in the book, the explanations teens provide will tell us about how they understand gender, how boys and girls relate to each other, sexually, their thinking on consent, and the peer norms and power dynamics that inform their sexual and digital practices. I think from there, we can open further conversations about sexual ethics, gender inequality and harm, about consent and bodily autonomy, as well as privacy and ethical technological engagement. Such efforts would take young people’s voices and experiences seriously, while helping them consider the ethical implications of their digital activity and providing them with multiple strategies to better negotiate the digital landscape.

AMW: Your research highlights how digital cultures and platforms play a paradoxical role, both enabling image-based sexual abuse and providing crucial evidence to support survivors. Can you explain this tension and discuss how we might navigate these dual realities ethically and effectively?

AG: Image-based sexual abuse, which refers to the nonconsensual creation and/or distribution of private sexual images, including deepfake images, would not be possible at the present scale without digital technologies. We use our phones and various apps to create these images, which we then digitally distribute across social media platforms, online forums, and so on. These same platforms enable harm not only through the original violation, but also through the continuing and compounding trauma of the subsequent circulation, viewing, commenting, and downloading of images and videos they make possible. The scale and unbounded nature of social media often expose survivors to additional abuse and victimization through public shaming, intimidation, and harassment, further multiplying the harmful effects for many. That most platforms fail to regulate such behavior, and often reward perpetrators with likes and followers, also works to normalize and further sanction such abuse.

At the same time, every interaction with new technologies creates a digital trail that can be used as evidence by survivors and criminal legal actors. Smartphones and archives of one’s digital activity can provide proof of crime and corroborating evidence, which have historically been major obstacles in criminal justice responses to sexual violence and image-based abuse. For survivors not interested in engaging with the legal system, or in cases where law enforcement fails to investigate, digital platforms can also go some way in providing victims with spaces where they share their experiences and find validation and support. As I detail in the book, this potential is not always realized, and factors such as gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and age, among others, continue to inform and complicate both legal and social responses to survivors.

We have a long way to go towards navigating image-based abuse ethically or effectively. Despite improved efforts in recent years, how law enforcement treat victims and perpetrators of digital abuse remains inconsistent, especially where adolescents are concerned. We need more robust regulation of tech platforms and search engines to ensure measures such as content moderation, easy image removal, de-platforming of harmful apps, and investment in technologies that help identify abusive content (e.g., hash and watermarking). In the criminal legal system, we can redirect resources towards and improve processes for collecting digital evidence, which is often timely, invasive, and laborious, delaying justice for survivors. I also think we need to standardize practices with a focus on trauma-informed care around how digital evidence is used in investigations and proceedings, considering how such evidence might further traumatize victims. And I think we need to be much more critical about our reliance on digital evidence where sex crimes are concerned because while useful, the digital trail can also open survivors to increased scrutiny, deepening some of the system’s existing inequalities.

AMW: When Rape Goes Viral suggests that online sexual violence among teens mirrors broader societal values around gender and sexuality. Can you elaborate on how the book connects individual digital behaviors of teens to wider cultural attitudes, and what this reveals about our society’s implicit messages on gendered violence and accountability?

AG: Adolescents’ values and behaviors do not emerge in a vacuum. When young people participate in sexual violence, including digital abuse, they are telling us something about the cultural values and beliefs that shape their views and experiences of gender, sexual norms, and sexual victimization. If teens think such behavior is funny or normal, then that indicates that parents, educators, mentors, and the broader culture has provided them with specific scripts and narratives to normalize and sanction sexual harm. We know from a substantial body of research that dominant heteronormative discourses help excuse and minimize sexual violence by representing heterosexual relations as predatory, framing boys and men as natural sexual aggressors and women as gatekeepers of male sexual desire. We also know that often, we rely on victim-blaming narratives and rape myths to excuse sexual violence and perpetrator accountability – this is what is commonly referred to as rape culture.

One of my goals in speaking with young people was to tease out how many of these norms they have internalized, and the answer is most of them. In the book I offer extensive quotes from teens showing their essentialist understandings of gender, and their perception of heterosexual relations as hostile and exploitative, consisting primarily of male entitlement and female objectification. Both young men and women talked about the value of women’s bodies – and images of women’s bodies – as currency in young men’s masculinity performances and peer groups and seemed resigned to this reality. Rarely did girls frame nonconsensual image sharing as abusive. Rather, along with male participants, they fell back on traditional conceptions of gender and heterosexuality that posit boys as sexually aggressive and untrustworthy (e.g., boys will be boys), and girls as responsible for protecting themselves, to excuse sexual and image-based abuse and minimize their harm. They also often drew on victim-blaming narratives to trivialize the sexual violence, such as focusing on the victims’ intoxication and ‘irresponsible’ behavior to implicate them in their victimization.

One of my favorite sections of the book is when I compare these responses – especially the victim blaming and rape myths – with the responses of the parents, school officials, police officers, and attorneys involved in the high-profile cases discussed in the book, as well as reactions by the broader public, which I was able to document through social media postings and media interviews. The overlaps are striking, laying bare the connections between teens’ explanations and the rape-supportive attitudes expressed by parents, communities, and the media in the aftermath of the assaults. The sympathy voiced for the young offenders, juxtaposed against the vitriol and bullying directed at the young victims communicates to teens that sexual violence is trivial and normative, that we are not interested in holding perpetrators accountable, which works to further sanction such violence.

Social media has further reinforced and amplified this message, not only by providing a platform for people to voice and distribute their views and opinions to broad audiences, but also by consistently rewarding and promoting shocking and humiliating content because it drives traffic and user engagement. By commodifying attention, these platforms foster an environment where users are incentivized to create or circulate harmful or abusive material to enhance their status online. We see evidence of this in the rapidly increasing rates of gendered, racialized, and homophobic violence online, including online abuse and harassment, cyberbullying, doxing, nonconsensual and deepfake image creation and sharing, and the growth of rape and humiliation porn, among others.

Teens are learning about gender norms, sex, and digital ethics at the intersection of this culture that dismisses sexual violence while rewarding digitally abusive behavior. They see celebrities, athletes, and politicians skate free on charges of sexual abuse, violent misogynists like Andrew Tate becoming TikTok superstars, and the online abuse of women skyrocket without intervention from tech platforms, but certainly with more followers for the perpetrators in the manosphere. Why would our youth be immune to these messages? It should not surprise us if some teens espouse these values, if they think sexual and image-based abuse is funny or harmless, when so much of our culture communicates this message to them. I hope that by making these connections explicit, my book provides parents, educators, and policy makers with key insights and a framework from which they can create targeted and effective educational and prevention interventions for youth.

Alicia M. Walker is Associate Professor of Sociology at Missouri State University and the author of two previous books on infidelity, and a forthcoming book, Bound by BDSM: Unexpected Lessons for Building a Happier Life (Bloomsbury Fall 2025) coauthored with Arielle Kuperberg. She is the current Editor in Chief of the Council of Contemporary Families blog, serves as Senior Fellow with CCF, and serves as Co-Chair of CCF alongside Arielle Kuperberg. Learn more about her on her website. Follow her on Twitter or Bluesky at @AliciaMWalker1, Facebook, and Instagram @aliciamwalkerphd