Crossing Borders Online: Criminal Law, Digital Platforms, and Transnational Sexual Violence

• In Event: Sociology of Law Section Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Sociology of Law Section Roundtables: Table 6 — Punishment, Governance, and Social Control

Abstract

Digital platforms heighten visibility, anonymity, and access, thereby expanding opportunities for sexual and gender-based abuse and exposing victims to vast—sometimes effectively limitless—audiences. Police are under pressure to adapt to these shifts, yet uneven training and resource gaps in digital policing often hinder investigation and enforcement. Women and girls are disproportionately targeted, often within gendered dynamics such as misogyny and slut-shaming. Using an affordances framework, Ballucci (2023) examines how digital platforms generate new opportunities for online crime and the challenges police face in investigating and responding to it, while also offering practical recommendations for policing in the digital age. Henry and Powell (2016) review criminal-law responses to technology-facilitated sexual violence but emphasize that criminal law should not be treated as the sole remedy for these harms. Dodge (2018) further shows that digital evidence can create new avenues for intervention and prosecution, yet it can also be weaponized against complainants or deemed insufficient to establish guilt.
Despite these contributions, existing scholarship has paid limited attention to the boundary-crossing and jurisdictionally ambiguous character of online sexual crimes. Victims and perpetrators may be located in different countries, and non-consensual images or videos may be distributed via websites hosted overseas—conditions that complicate legal authority, evidence collection, and inter-agency coordination. Building on this literature, this paper asks: How do criminal-law responses operate in cross-border sexual crimes? What legal and practical constraints arise when content is hosted abroad? How are digital policies and enforcement efforts coordinated across national, regional, and global levels? Finally, what social movements have emerged to address transnational forms of sexual violence, and how effective have they been in shaping governmental action?
Methodologically, the study synthesizes existing literature and reviews relevant policy frameworks governing cross-border digital enforcement. It also analyzes selected case studies of social movements that have pressured governments to respond to technology-facilitated sexual violence, highlighting the mechanisms through which advocacy translates into policy change.

Author

• Daseul Kim, Stony Brook University