Survivors, Hashtags, and Justice: The Ethics of Investigating Sexual Violence Online
By Catherine Chang and Kavya Nambiar, Human Rights Center Investigations Lab, UC Berkeley
Content warning: This story covers rape and sexual assault in the context of international human rights abuses.
Today’s human rights investigators tackle a wide range of crimes: from torture to violence against healthcare infrastructure to extrajudicial killings, and more. Information from these investigations is often used to spread awareness and gain accountability when human rights abuses happen. This information is often publicly available in the form of open source information: information that one can find online, on social media sites and with practices as simple as a Google search. As open source information is increasingly being utilized to pursue justice, its various attributes must be considered. Nowhere is this more relevant than in the investigation of sexual violence.
As a team of investigators researching sexual violence online through UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center Investigations Lab, we grappled with whether open source methods should even be used in the context of sexual violence. In our investigations, we found social media posts documenting gross sexual violations against women and men, with survivors and witnesses speaking about their experiences on video. We found photos of survivors’ clothing left in the places where they were violated. We found posts giving private details of survivors’ lives.
Ask yourself what we asked ourselves — will your investigation put the survivor in harm’s way?
All of this information was deeply personal, yet once we found it, we felt a responsibility to use the information for our investigation. This didn’t sit quite right with us. So, we contemplated: What are the costs and benefits of using this sensitive, but openly sourced information in our investigation? What ethical and contextual factors should be considered to ensure dignity and justice for survivors?
A major question for us revolved around obtaining survivors’ consent, which would entail “survivors and other witnesses hav[ing] the ultimate authority to consent to participate”[1] in the investigation. Consent is particularly important in the context of sexual violence because these acts of violence are deeply personal and deny survivors the right to give true consent; this denial should not be perpetuated in the investigation of the violation. Yet, in our investigations, we found and analyzed public information about survivors who had not explicitly consented to having their information shared with us for investigative purposes. We asked: Should this lack of consent lead us to reconsider using open source methods to investigate sexual violence?
Another ethical concern centered on cultural differences. Sexual violence is a universal violation of the human rights guaranteed to all. Yet, we investigated sexual violence in the context of a non-Western nation, as investigators in the United States, influenced by Western cultural norms and views about sexual violence. Thus, on the one hand, our work involved investigating sexual violence as a universal crime — an incredibly harmful violation of survivors’ fundamental rights regardless of their cultural context. On the other hand, culture shapes views on sexual violence, including how sexual violence crimes are treated, the ways in which survivors and perpetrators discuss sexual violence, and approaches to restoring justice. These cultural differences and contexts are important considerations that can easily be ignored by open source investigators who access information directly from public platforms and view that information through the lens of their own cultures and biases. We asked: How should we balance investigation of the crime of sexual violence on the one hand, and respecting cultural differences and contexts on the other?
Lastly, we struggled with concerns about taking away survivors’ rights to tell their own stories. In using open source methods, we extracted public information about survivors to contribute to a narrative of sexual violence. In this process, we did not seek or elicit direct input from the survivors or other witnesses themselves. Thus, we separated the survivors from their stories and the surrounding context. In using open source methods to investigate sexual violence and produce outputs related to our investigations, we chose the timing and method of communicating the survivors’ experiences. We asked: Did we take away survivors’ rights and opportunities to tell their own stories?
Despite these concerns, we found that using open source methods can be extremely beneficial to investigating sexual violence because these tools and techniques provide a new avenue for justice. Open source information detailing instances of sexual violence may help preserve accounts of survivors’ experiences and be the first step in gaining justice for survivors, including in cases in which survivors themselves do not volunteer information due to social stigma or other factors. In our investigations, we witnessed social media users using hashtags and creating movements dedicated to pursuing justice and publicizing incidents that may have gone unreported or ignored, especially in the face of state denial of any crimes. Piecing together and analyzing the information from these movements through open source methods can help survivors preserve their voices and experiences and gain justice.
Moreover, using open source methods can help lead to justice by lending credibility to survivors whose accounts may not be easily believed and by providing context to those accounts. Open source evidence can be used to corroborate other sources of evidence and data, including survivor and witness testimony and physical evidence, providing an alternative source of information. Even when open source methods are limited in independently providing direct, unequivocal evidence of violations, they can be useful in gaining justice by establishing context. In our investigations, we did not find much media directly depicting instances of sexual violence, though the information we did discover helped to establish a broader picture. We not only confirmed locations and approximate times of incidents of sexual violence to help support other types of evidence but also used open source methods to confirm the contexts in which these violations occurred.
As we moved through this complicated ethical terrain, we concluded that open source methods can provide a new and critical avenue for justice for sexual violence crimes and therefore should be used. We feel we have a responsibility, indeed, an imperative, to act once information has been found — even if the information is used “only” for providing context. Through discussion and reflection, we determined that given the context of our investigation, it seemed far worse to find information and do nothing with it than to find information and respond imperfectly. However, we feel it is also vital to attend to the ethical concerns we have raised around open source methods related to consent, cultural differences, and the ability and opportunity for survivors of sexual violence to tell their stories. They point to a need for critical reflection and implementation of investigation-specific ways to maintain the dignity of survivors, who should be at the center of documentation and investigation. This includes developing cultural competency and managing survivors’ consent, as well as considering how to protect and respect survivors. Open source investigations into sexual violence require an enhanced effort to mitigate any ethical concerns — including the concerns raised by activists and other organizations experienced with and close to the context — so that consent and other issues can be managed and addressed in the best way possible.
With this, we turn this issue around to you. As you all explore this issue within the contexts of your own investigations, keep in mind the ethical complexity of using open source information as a tool to investigate sexual violence. Ask yourself what we asked ourselves — will your investigation put the survivor in harm’s way? Are you exercising cultural competency? And, at every avenue of your investigation, are dignity and justice for the survivor the main priority? Because if we are not focusing on justice for the survivor, what are we focusing on? Whose justice are we fighting for?
[1] “International Protocol on the Documentation and Investigation of Sexual Violence in Conflict”
