If You Build It, Will They Stop? Feeling the Past and Future of Sexual Violence Prevention Technologies
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21665786 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rena Bivens (0000-0002-2893-0547, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 51 |
| Pages | 114-143 |
| Publication date | 2025-09-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | TOPIA Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1206-0143 • E-ISSN: 1916-0194 |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/topia-2025-0024 |
| OpenAlex | W7161955312 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 24 |
From hat pins and keys to apps and bracelets, we have come up with many ways to prevent sexual violence. In this article, the author reconfigures these objects as grabbable technologies, positioning them in relation to other categories of prevention uncovered in a technology scan: wearables, watchables, and knowables. Speculative design workshops complement and extend this historical timeline into the future. These workshops invited sexual violence and technology experts to design fictional technologies that could maintain a future world free of sexual violence. By theorizing prevention as a space that mediates how we understand the problem of sexual violence, the author questions whether prevention also mediates how we inhabit the world. Using a spatial analysis, it is argued that the role of prevention eclipses any instrumental function, and it is this excess that enables ideas related to prevention to enter our relationship with space and other people more broadly
Emerging technologies · Feeling · Human sexuality · Sexual violence · Timeline · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Innovative Human-Technology Interaction · Sexual Assault and Victimization Studies
How Artifacts Afford
Carceral feminisms
Physical Dating Violence, Sexual Violence, and Unwanted Pursuit Victimization
The Reality of Tonic Immobility in Victims of Sexual Violence
Using Applied Theater in Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Prevention of Intimate Partner Violence
Any Four Black Men Will Do
From Design Fiction to Design Friction
The Problem with “Cyber Safety”
Security, Suspicion, and Surveillance? There’s an App for That
Never Go Out Alone”
Shining Light on the Dark Places
Critical Making as Materializing the Politics of Design
Mapping the Margins
Keeping the ‘Lady’ Safe
| Highly cited | No |
|---|