Exploiting a Dystopic Future to Unsettle Our Present-Day Thinking About Sexual Violence Prevention

Abstract

After researching 215 existing apps designed to prevent sexual violence (Bivens & Hasinoff, 2017), I propose a fictional app called ‘Ultimate Witness.’ Using ‘Protect 2 End’ software, this factory-installed app analyzes real-time data recorded within a 10 foot radius, with the help of an algorithmically curated rendering of attitudes, behaviours, and biomedical shifts that signal future perpetration of sexual violence. Importantly, this is not a desired, future prototype – it is a speculative design (Disalvo, 2012; Forlano & Mathew, 2014). Alongside the app description, I examine what became possible in the future setting – what infrastructures, discourses, and social dynamics emerged – and how that future connects to the present. Based on critical extensions of historical and present-day expert discourses surrounding sexual violence, I use Ultimate Witness to open up space to think and talk about the kind of future worlds we would like to see – and those we may wish to avoid.