Resisting rape culture in digital society

This chapter examines the promise and potential of feminist activism, focusing foremost on sexual violence and rape culture, in order to contribute to feminist criminological accounts of feminism and anti-rape activism in the context of an increasingly digital society. The potential impacts of the reach and immersion of rape culture in digital society are difficult to quantify. Although the incel community presents just one extreme example of rape culture, it does serve to highlight the challenges of regulating violence-supportive and gender-based hate speech in the context of global, dispersed, and often anonymous, digital networks of hate. The chapter considers the features characteristic of contemporary social justice activism, which is always simultaneously online and offline. Feminist criminologist Tully O’Neill, for example, has described the ways in which the anonymous online platform reddit and less public sites and forums have become communities of support and even informal justice-seeking for some survivors of sexual violence.