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ISSUE NO. 13
Exploiting a Dystopic Future to Unsettle Our Present-
Day Thinking About Sexual Violence Prevention
Rena Bivens
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.
 
From Circle of 6 (https://www.circleof6app.com/) to LadiesSafe
(https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appypie.appypie3349f4da0283&hl=en) and the YWCA
Safety Siren (http://ywcacanada.ca/en/pages/mall/apps) , there are hundreds of mobile phone
applications (or ‘apps’) designed to keep you safe from sexual violence. All you have to
do is pick one and press download.
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We can register these apps within a long history of designed interventions geared
towards ‘ending’ sexual violence. Consider female condoms with teeth (https://rape-
axe.com/) , nail polish that detects date rape drugs (http://www.undercovercolors.com/) , anti-
rape underwear (https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ar-wear-confidence-protection-that-can-be-worn#/)
, belts with labyrinth-like closures, and – this next example is a bit extreme – lingerie
(https://www.bustle.com/articles/29655-indias-electric-shock-anti-rape-bra-society-harnessing-equipment-is-
terrifying-and-necessary) complete with pressure sensors covering the breast area that can
deliver up to 82 electric shocks while sending text messages to the police and your
parents with your GPS coordinates (Gibson, 2014; Wilkinson, 2013).
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Scholars like Noble (2018), Balsamo (2011), Bardzell (2010), Wajcman (2010), and SSL
Nagbot (2016) have demonstrated that design is a political act. Technologies always
carry with them assumptions, goals, and values since they are never designed in a
social vacuum. They are both shaped by society and play a role in shaping society.
Drawing on scholarship from communication studies, science and technology studies,
human-computer interaction, and design, we can ask questions about who the intended
and unintended users are (i.e., potential victims, perpetrators, bystanders), which
scripts (gendered, racialized, etc.) are baked into these designed artifacts, and what
work they do in the world.
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Recently, Amy A. Hasinoff and I compiled a list of 215 apps
(https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/suppl/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1309444?scroll=top) designed to prevent
sexual violence (2017). We were curious what was being communicated by this entire
set, or population, of apps. As a collective intervention, how have apps been designed to
respond to the problem of sexual violence? Instead of analyzing each app as an
individual tool or act of resistance, we answered this question by examining all features
programmed into this field of design. Our findings indicated a strong orientation
towards ‘incident intervention’ (74% of all 807 features in our sample). In other words,
designers predominantly chose to program features that would alleviate specific
incidents of violence, largely by ‘alerting other people that an incident is happening’
(Bivens & Hasinoff, 2017, p. 4). It was overwhelmingly victims (or potential victims)
who were mobilized by designers since 94% of ‘incident intervention’ features were
designed exclusively for this group. While the vast number of apps do not explicitly
specify the gender of the victim or perp (72% leave the victim undefined while 95%
leave the perpetrator undefined), there is still a tendency towards naming the potential
victim as female (26%) and the perpetrator as male (4%). Also, no apps specified victims
or perpetrators that exist outside of the male/female gender binary.
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As a collective intervention, we were disappointed by these design choices.
Misconceptions about sexual violence that experts have been debunking for decades
had been reproduced in and through these apps (Bivens & Hasinoff, 2017). Sexual
violence experts have long argued that persuading perpetrators to stop assaulting
might be a more effective prevention strategy, yet this field of design largely placed the
responsibility on victims to prevent their own rape. Only 0.02% of apps in our sample
targeted potential perpetrators. Also, perpetrators are rarely strangers; sexual violence
usually occurs between people who know one another. However, the ‘incident
intervention’ approach is oriented towards interrupting sexual violence by sending
help to the scene. The most typical arrangement of features involves pre-loading the
app with contact details of the user’s closest and most trusted friends and family
members so that the user can activate an alarm which sends location coordinates, and
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other potentially useful data such as an image or audio file. Collected data can also be
used as evidence to later help convict the perpetrator. However, known perpetrators
may use forms of coercion that would decrease the effectiveness of these features (e.g.,
abusing a power relationship and emotional manipulation). Some features involve
asking friends or family to watch over the user via location-based data, or send an
alarm when the user deviates from a pre-selected pathway. Others are designed to turn
off when the user has entered a ‘safe’ space like home or work. Again, these features
presume a sudden, unexpected attack, likely by a stranger. Hasinoff and I (2017, p. 15)
argue that, collectively, this field of design imagines and promotes an understanding of
sexual violence as ‘an inevitable force of nature’ that cannot be prevented but only
‘avoided by vigilant and responsible individuals.’
Enter Speculative Design
Speculative design lets us step outside of the limits of our present-day society. It is an
approach that relies heavily on imagination to conjure up new designs set in future
worlds (DiSalvo, 2014). When we begin to imagine the future, technological
developments are typically invoked. Futures presented to us from the realm of science
fiction have helped forecast this imagined world. From universal translators to
teleporters and hoverboards, futuristic technologies are seen as spectacular
developments. We watch sci-fi films or read sci-fi novels in awe of the future societies
depicted for us, yet at the same time we find ourselves struggling to unravel what social
impacts result and whether we should fear these reconfigured societies or hotly
anticipate them.
By imagining a fictional, future app that would ‘end’ sexual violence, speculative design
exercises detach us from the present and encourage us to engage in future world-
making practices. The point is not to predict the future but ‘to better understand the
present and to discuss the kind of future’ that we desire along with – as the example I
will soon share demonstrates – the future worlds we wish to avoid (Dunne & Raby,
2013, p. 3). In these discussions, we can consider what became possible in the future
setting –  what infrastructures, discourses, and social dynamics – and, importantly, how
that future connects to the present.
Speculative designs can offer us a spectacle by being extreme. They can force us to
pause, unsettling our assumptions and worldviews. However, as DiSalvo (2012) argues,
spectacle alone is not enough. Speculative design should provoke discussion and
debate, pushing us beyond our current ways of knowing, understanding, and
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intervening in the world. Ranging from manufactured prototypes to mere descriptions,
the intention is not to develop tangible design solutions. Instead, speculative design can
be mobilized to help us critically reflect on the broader relationship between
technological development and social change.
Ultimate Witness: An App to End Sexual Violence
Ultimate Witness comes factory-installed on every mobile device and cannot be
disabled or removed. This app records and permanently stores a complete repository of
detectable data within a 10 foot radius of the device, including the device user and
anyone else within this range. Imaging and auditory technologies capture sound, still,
and moving images based on XSC3 heat and light filament sensors. Biomedical
technologies capture comprehensive data on heart rate, blood pressure, drug and
alcohol levels, hormonal and adrenaline levels, as well as neural activity in the brain
and physical movements (including 24/7 tracking and recording of eye movements).
All data is stored in an encrypted raw file format. Several copies of the data are sent
through high-performance filtering and processing software programs. The most
crucial filtration process is the Protect 2 End software program. This software uses a
state of the art prevention algorithm that was initially based on 250,000 actual sexual
violence cases brought to Canadian courts over the last few decades, focusing
particularly on the evidence given to describe the events preceding the crime.
Alongside this data, the algorithm is always adapting due to its machine learning
capabilities, which permits the category of sexual violence to achieve maximum
malleability. Protect 2 End analyzes audio and images for misogynistic language and
incidences of rape culture, making links to an algorithmically curated rendering of
expected attitudes, behaviours, and biomedical shifts that signal future perpetration of
sexual violence. This data is continuously checked against historical data about the
individual in question. Identity data sets, including but not limited to gender, race,
socioeconomic status, and nationality, offer further alerting mechanisms tailored to the
individual’s social position.
Here’s just one example of how it works: if someone hears a song like Blurred Lines,
which normalizes sexual violence, a flag is raised on that individual’s profile (a unique
identifier that is associated with all devices known to be used by the individual). Later
on, he casually objectifies a woman in a private conversation to a friend: another flag is
raised. Let’s say he goes out to a drinking establishment a few days later in the evening
(as captured by time/date/GPS recording) and stares at a woman for more than 10
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seconds, scanning her body and glancing repeatedly at her breasts and hips: more flags
will be raised. If he then approaches the woman, a sedative will be delivered, rendering
him unconscious within 2 minutes. Any identity-related mobility access devices
(vehicles, doors, passports) and currency-related access (bank accounts, credit cards)
associated with the individual become instantly inoperable. Authorities will be alerted
and the immobilized would-be perp will be taken in for questioning at a local law
enforcement facility. The flagged actions that led to his sedation would be revealed and
a facilitator would take him through the appropriate unlearning exercises and isolation
procedures.
What Work does Ultimate Witness do?
I am using Ultimate Witness to extend and magnify elements of our contemporary
cultures surrounding sexual violence prevention. I considered a wide range of
prevention efforts and broader technocultural contexts, including the intensification of
datafication, surveillance, and computation-driven policing. Contemporary discourses
that have taken shape on university and college campuses relating to sexual violence
and rape culture have also influenced my thinking. As well, I am thinking through
discussions over the past two years sparked by the Ontario government’s 2015 report
It’s Never Okay: An Action Plan to Stop Sexual Violence and Harassment and Bill 132
(Sexual Violence and Harassment Action Plan Act) that required all Ontario colleges and
universities to put together a sexual violence policy, including my own.
Ultimate Witness is also modeled as an extension of the field of design that Hasinoff
and I encountered in our sample of 215 existing apps. Like those technological
interventions that came before it, Ultimate Witness is not designed to reprogram
attitudes, beliefs, norms, or values that function at the individual, interpersonal,
community, or societal level to perpetuate sexual violence. There is no serious effort to
reprogram the systems that generate and sustain the power relationships that enable
perpetrators to commit sexual violence and escape sanctions. Instead, the strategy is to
intensify surveillance, datafication, and extreme policing measures to improve
apprehension rates as a preventative measure in and of itself, while covertly
accumulating profit by selling data and identity profiles.
Sexual violence remains inevitable with Ultimate Witness, but there is a shift from
interrupting sexual violence to avoiding it altogether. Ultimate Witness attempts to turn
the social antecedents of sexual violence perpetration into measurable indicators. In
this way, the app moves from the measurement of sexual violence that has occurred to
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the measurement of future perpetration. The future of sexual violence becomes the
technologically-manufactured, premature capture of the presumed antecedents of
sexual violence. Whereas existing apps were oriented towards ‘incident intervention’
that aimed to interrupt a particular type of sexual violence (namely stranger assault),
Ultimate Witness is only successful in its promise of a future free of sexual violence if it
can accurately predict, measure, calculate, and monitor the factors that precede
perpetration. This approach echoes preventative policing strategies that have
disproportionately targeted marginalized groups, reifying implicit biases in the process.
Predictive measures are prone to the possibility of generating the very identities (in this
case, perpetrator or abuser) that the categorization seeks to observe, merely through
categorization and measurement (Cheney-Lippold, 2017).
While everyone becomes an active user of Ultimate Witness by definition, it is
perpetrators who are the intended user. This design choice explicitly reverses the
outcome of our earlier study where victims were the primary target of design. On the
surface, Ultimate Witness presents an open and non-discriminating orientation towards
perpetrators. Underneath that surface, however, are the mechanisms that Ultimate
Witness deploys to recognize and identify perpetrators. Relying on data about sexual
violence from court cases is limited by the disciplinary, cultural, and structural domains
of power that function to influence who reports, who is arrested, and who faces trial.
Biases are already baked into these legal and judicial systems, and experiences of
sexual violence in Ultimate Witness only appear if they are read as legible by these
systems. This is intended to mimic the erasure of experiences of sexual violence that
are not reported or otherwise made invisible to authorities and thereby have less
capacity to influence policy. While most people do not report, those who do may also
find their case to be deemed unfounded by the police (that is, dismissed as baseless).
According to a recent study, one in every five sexual assault allegations in Canada is
unfounded, which is twice as high as the unfounded rate for physical assault and much
higher than other crimes (Doolittle, 2017).
The impulse towards translating the social world into data informed Ultimate Witness.
Collecting, storing, and processing data is a common strategy to track and manage
social problems. Governments and practitioners often advocate for a data-driven
strategy since numbers are legible to both the public and funders, despite the downfalls
that collection entails. In 2017, the Government of Canada announced a $101 million-
dollar federal response to gender-based violence. While the details are sparse, most of
the funds ($77.5 million) have been allocated towards a new Gender-Based Violence
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Knowledge Centre housed within Status of Women, which will facilitate knowledge
sharing, increased data collection, and aid efforts to address the ‘new frontier’ of
‘cyberviolence’ (Smith, 2017).
An interesting aspect of the speculative design approach is the capacity to play with
temporal dimensions of a social problem. In this way, the history, present, and future of
sexual violence can be reconfigured or alternatively arranged. For example, many in
the anti-violence field champion the necessity of always believing survivors. This makes
sense given the historical memory of anti-violence experts who can easily recall why
the voices and experiences of survivors of sexual violence ought to be centered.
Decades of anti-violence work were required to raise awareness and achieve legal
reforms because survivors were not believed, or they were blamed for their own
assault. Yet these are not the only histories and present-day realities. When we focus on
issues like racialized criminalization practices and the relationship between anti-Black
terrorism and the specter of Black rape – that is accusations against Black men,
particularly by or in defense of white women – we find another reality: due process for
the accused. At times, these perspectives – survivor-centered approaches and close
attention to due process – appear to be in conflict. Instead of co-existing, they take up
different amounts of space in the material-discursive practices surrounding anti-
violence work.
Ultimate Witness aims to provoke a sense of fear and anxiety that may be productive in
bringing some of these tensions and temporal relations to the surface. As a future-
oriented speculative design that is explicitly (although only temporarily) detached from
the present, there is potential to open up space for difficult conversations regarding
how to navigate survivor-centric approaches and due process for the accused. By
design, Ultimate Witness invites us to think of anyone – including ourselves and loved
ones – as possible targets of a machine-driven accusatory mechanism. At the same time,
the example included in the description closes off this possibility. While anyone can
theoretically become a perpetrator in this future-world, the victim-perpetrator
relationship is intentionally gendered in the explanation of how the app works. This
echoes the dominance of the female victim – male perpetrator dyad within mainstream
conversations about sexual violence, and was highly visible among the set of 215 apps
we studied. Yet scholars have pointed out that continuing to rely on this dyad
invisibilizes other forms of sexual violence, such as lesbian and gay experiences
(Edwards et al., 2015). Ultimate Witness is thereby designed to simultaneously conceal
and open up these difficult discussions, permitting multiple pathways for engagement.
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Finally, Ultimate Witness is designed to create a flexible and adaptable category of
sexual violence. The description intended to surface this anxiety, only identifying
sexual violence after the far-reaching data collection capacities had been unveiled.
Here I am gesturing towards the concerns – currently voiced only by a few scholars –
regarding expanding terms. For example, Khan (2016b) argues that ‘“[r]ape culture” has
become a surprisingly elastic term.’ Khan (2016a) discusses the variety of examples that
have been claimed as part of rape culture, including songs (e.g., Blurred Lines),
sexualized advertisements, speaking invitations to defence lawyers, and calls for due
process. Karaian (2014; 2017) has also been critical of the term ‘rape culture.’ Her work
examines sexting and revenge porn, raising critical questions about the utility of
equating non-consensual distribution with sexual violence. Since we are already
engaging in critical debate about predictive policing, racial profiling, and algorithmic
biases, Ultimate Witness extends these discussions to the realm of sexual violence to
encourage deliberation on our contemporary conceptualization of the category of
sexual violence.
Concluding Visions
It is a dystopic future world that is constructed here; a world that we would wish to
avoid. If my use of speculative design is intended to disrupt the ways in which we think
and talk about sexual violence, a dystopic design tends towards extending those aspects
of our discourses and technocultures that are potentially problematic, making them
more visible. By merely exposing these elements, the assumption is that we will be
more aware of them and eager to discuss and dismiss any assumptions and ideas that
we now wish to avoid. Recent commentary about films like Blade Runner suggests that
‘[a]t their best, dystopian visions … are helpful self-preventing prophesies’ (Bankston,
2017). Could a dystopic speculative design be artfully deployed in a way that would shift
our understanding of sexual violence as fundamentally sociotechnical and compel us to
resist such a future?
Or, perhaps, would a utopic app better perform this work? A utopic vision could
similarly conjure up a world without sexual violence, but actively build one that we
would actually want to inhabit. We would then be forced to distill which ideas about
prevention are essential for this future world and therefore which ideas we ought to
focus on in the present.
At the same time, a dystopic/utopic distinction may be too simple. While many
organizations and government strategies are committed to ‘ending’ sexual violence, is
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there any utility to imagining worlds where we do not presume to be able to eradicate
this problem? If there is, perhaps we could explore how to think differently about
issues such as justice, victimhood, reduction, and recovery, and how to implement our
future renderings into present-day action.
 
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—CITATION— 
Bivens, Rena (2018). “Exploiting a Dystopic Future to Unsettle Our Present-
Day Thinking About Sexual Violence Prevention.” Ada: A Journal of
Gender, New Media, and Technology, No. 13. 
10.5399/uo/ada.2018.13.5 (https://dx.doi.org/10.5399/uo/ada.2018.13.5)
 
This work has been openly peer reviewed at Ada Review
(https://adareview.adanewmedia.org/?page_id=3098) .
 
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
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MOBILE PHONE APPS PEER REVIEWED RAPE PREVENTION SEXUAL VIOLENCE
SOFTWARE DESIGN SPECULATIVE DESIGN
Rena Bivens (https://adanewmedia.org/author/renabivens)
Rena Bivens is an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at
Carleton University. Her research interests include software design, normativity, gender,
and violence. She is the author of Digital Currents: How Technology and the Public are
Shaping TV News (University of Toronto Press 2014) and her work has appeared in peer-
reviewed journals such as New Media & Society, Feminist Media Studies, Information,
Communication & Society, Social Media + Society, the International Journal of
Communication, and Journalism Practice.
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Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 
ISSN 2325-0496
https://adanewmedia.org/2018/05/issue13-bivens/ 15/15