Sexual Deepfakes and Image-Based Sexual Abuse: Victim-Survivor Experiences and Embodied Harms

Abstract

The democratization of deepfake technology over the last six years has resulted in an unprecedented emergence and growth of a new type of image-based sexual abuse: sexual deepfakes. Sexual deepfakes are a pernicious form of sexual violence that profoundly impacts the physical, emotional, and social aspects of victims’ lives. While academic research has addressed the lived experiences of victim-survivors of other forms of image-based sexual abuse, because of their relative recency, sexual deepfakes are an under-researched phenomenon, leaving victims with little recourse or recognition of their experience as a legitimate form of sexual violence. The purpose of this phenomenological study is to explore the lived experiences of victim-survivors of image-based sexual abuse, with a specific focus on exploring the lived experiences of victim-survivors of sexual deepfakes. I chose to incorporate a purposeful mixed sampling, combining three different sampling techniques that were most consistent with the study’s research purpose: voluntary homogeneous sampling, criterion sampling, and confirming case sampling. Each sampling technique corresponded with one of the study’s three phases, screening survey, semi-structured interviews, and amplifying emerging themes through confirmed cases of lived experience experts (LEE). LEE cases were selected to amplify the voices of the victim-survivors interviewed in the current study, four of five of whom revealed participation in semi-structured interviews to be the first time they had spoken out about their experience. Recruitment occurred from August 2022 until November 2022, in which a total of 58 individuals were invited to participate in semi-structured interviews; 63% (37) of participants reported experiences of sexual deepfake abuse, all of whom reported that their sexual deepfakes had been monetized online. One-on-one (N=5) semi-structured interviews with victim-survivors of image-based sexual abuse, including experiences of sexual deepfake abuse, were conducted between October 2022 and November 2022. Semi-structured interviews were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), in which preliminary coding of emerging themes provided a foundation for selecting a total of seven public cases from sexual deepfake lived experience experts (LEE). Findings from this study suggest that sexual deepfake abuse is a severely gendered phenomenon in which heteronormativity has become the template for enacting sexual violence – irrespective of the victim’s sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation. Additionally, this study found sexual deepfake abuse to be particularly harmful because of the fluidity and co-occurrence of online-offline experiences of abuse, resulting in endless reverberations of abuse in which every aspect of the victim’s life is permanently disrupted.