FIU Study Describes Gendered Impacts of ‘Nonconsensual Pornography’

According to findings from a recent study, one out of every twelve respondents in a survey said they have been victims of “nonconsensual pornography.”

FIU News, reporting happenings from Florida International University (FIU) in Miami, recently summed up the findings of a new study titled “Nonconsensual Pornography Among US Adults: A sexual scripts framework on victimization, perpetration, and health correlates for women and men.” The work, conducted by FIU PhD candidate Yanet Ruvalcaba and Asia Eaton, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the university, was published earlier this month in the journal Psychology of Violence.

According to the researchers’ findings, as summed up by FIU News, women and “sexual minorities” reported higher rates of victimization via “nonconsensual pornography,” which they defined as “the distribution of sexually explicit images without consent.”

In order to gather their data, the researchers made online surveys available to adult-aged US residents via Facebook. According to the work’s publically available abstract, Facebook Ads Manager was used to apply “a proportional quota sampling technique to target and collect data from men and women in each of the 50 US states proportionate to their representation in the nation’s populace.”

This is an interesting sampling strategy, however it comes with some issues that certainly impacted the results. It does not account for members of the population not on Facebook, nor does it consider potential corruptions in Facebook’s internal tools. Rather, there appears to be blind reliance that every adult in equally engaged with Facebook and that Facebook is sampling Facebook correctly. As such, this data can be used to describe phenomena observed in a sample of Facebook users only. No note indicating the researchers were aware of these methodological limitations was publically available.

Regardless, qualifying for their methodological limitations aside, the results are interesting. Of the 3,044 adult participants – 54 percent of who were women — one in twelve reported at least one instance of nonconsensual pornography victimization in their lifetime. One in twenty reported perpetrating the distribution of such content. Women reported higher rates of victimization and lower rates of perpetration than men. These patterns correspond with the researchers’ predictions based on a “sexual scripts framework,” which describes norms for men and women’s sexual interactions. Further, as a result of experiencing nonconsensual pornography, women victims reported lower psychological wellbeing and higher somatic (physical) symptoms than women non-victims, as well as higher somatic symptoms than men victims.

According to the researchers, results support nonconsensual pornography as a gendered form of sexual abuse that emerging adults are especially susceptible to – meaning, it impacts men and women in different ways, especially relative to age, with variable intensity. In addition, nonconsensual pornography victimization has a greater negative relationship with wellbeing for women. According to the researchers, this is consistent with narrative accounts and previously conducted qualitative research.

I mean, no kidding? The researchers, however, to their credit, seem to be aware of their findings’ obvious nature.

“Our findings help to situate nonconsensual porn in the broader literature on gender-based sexual violence and provide quantitative evidence for what victims have been saying all along — this is abuse, and it can negatively affect every aspect of your functioning,” Eaton said via FIU News.

The researchers also seem to be aware that criminalizing “nonconsensual pornography” is only one step in a wider cultural shift that needs to occur.

“Passing a national law criminalizing nonconsensual porn is an important part of the picture, but we also need a cultural shift in the narratives around this form of violence. Professionals and the general public need to stop blaming victims for the spread of their intimate images,” Eaton said via FIU News.

These observations are great, however there is a bit of irony that comes along with them.

Though Eaton et al may not be aware, for better or for worse, this research helped take a half step towards contributing to this shifting narrative. By calling out “nonconsensual pornography” in lieu of the burdensome, colloquial “revenge porn,” they did some good. But by not accurately describing the issue as unrelated to pornography overall – recall that we are discussing the nonconsensual generation and distribution of sexually explicit images here, and there’s nothing “pornographic” about that – they continued to support the narrative that these behaviors are somehow overlapping with professional adult content production. They’re not.

Also of note: This research was conducted in partnership with the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, which offers resources to help victims of the nonconsensual generation and distribution of sexually explicit images (among other things). There was no publically available note describing the nature of this partnership though.

Just like the methods issue, I want some answers. Or at least more detail.

Image via gratisography.com via Pexels.