November 12, 2025

What does sexual violence look like in the digital age? As social life increasingly unfolds through screens, a new continuum of harm has emerged—one where technology not only mediates intimacy but also magnifies violation. In ‘When Everything Goes Online, It’s Never Really Gone: Understanding Technology-Facilitated Sexual Violence (TFSV) in Singapore’, (Journal of Gender Studies, 2025) Assistant Professor Michelle H. S. Ho (NUS Communications and New Media) and an interdisciplinary team of researchers examine how digital technologies have enabled new forms of sexual violence in Singapore. This study forms part of the Campus Sexual Misconduct in a Digital Age (CASMIDA) project, which investigates how digital technologies shape experiences of sexual harm and safety across university settings in Singapore. Using mixed methods—an online survey of 3,000 students and elicitation interviews with 20 participants—the study reveals how digital sexual harassment, image-based sexual abuse, and voyeurism have become widespread forms of TFSV.

While most students recognised TFSV as sexual violence, many also viewed it as expected or inevitable, reflecting how gender norms, shame, and victim blaming shape online behaviour in Singapore’s campus culture. By analysing both digital artefacts such as screenshots, blurred or manipulated images, and chat logs, and lived experiences shared through elicitation interviews—for instance, Sienna’s* reflection on how her intimate images could “circulate forever” online, or Finn’s* account of being sexually objectified on dating apps—the team demonstrates how online harms persist beyond the original act, circulating endlessly in what one participant called a “never really gone” internet. Their findings fill a major gap in research on sexual violence in Asian contexts, where such issues remain underexamined.

Methodologically, the project is distinctive in its digital data collection and elicitation interview design, which invited participants to share screenshots, images, and other digital traces of their encounters with online sexual harms. This innovative method allowed the research team to analyse not only what victim-survivors say but how they visualise and make sense of harm in the digital sphere. The team’s feminist and reflexive approach, shaped by sexual assault first-responder training and ethical protocols, foregrounded participants’ safety, consent, and agency throughout the research process.

Ultimately, this interdisciplinary project calls for greater public awareness, institutional support, and digital safety education to confront the new realities of gender-based violence in the online age, where, as the study reminds us, when everything goes online, it’s never really gone.

Read the article here.

In addition, for a policy lens on these issues, watch Asst Prof Ho discuss deepfake harms and victim-support frameworks with Minister Josephine Teo in the first episode of this new series, drawing on insights from the CASMIDA project. The conversation also introduces the proposed Online Safety (Relief and Accountability) Bill and the forthcoming Online Safety Commission. View the full discussion here.

*Pseudonym used to mask the respondent’s identity.