Victims of Technology-Facilitated Abuse: Prevalence, Awareness, Dynamics, Help-seeking and Reporting

The proposed study will conduct a national survey of victims to help law enforcement and policy-makers to better understand and respond to technology-facilitated abuse (TFA), including non-consensual pornography, sextortion, and cyber-stalking. The study will gather victimization information from a nationally representative sample of 4000 young adults between the ages of 18 and 28, including an estimated minimum of 1000 victims of TFA, among whom an estimated 200 will have sought help from authorities such as police, school officials, and Internet service providers. The international survey research firm, Ipsos, will provide the national sample of respondents. The nationally representative sample of young adults will fill out an online questionnaire with questions about TFA victimizations, incident dynamics, their awareness about the problem and other victims, and features of the respondents’ digital environment. Victims will be asked about help-seeking behavior from police, schools and Internet service providers, obstacles to seeking help, and the cost and consequences of victimization. Population rates will identify the proportions of young people who have experienced the different kinds of TFA. Odds ratios will show how the TFA types are related to each other and to other forms of victimization. Multivariate analyses will examine the background factors and Internet activities that may create risk or protection from TFA. Percentage rates will describe the various forms of victims’ help-seeking behavior and their level of satisfaction with the help-seeking. Multivariate analyses will help target the types of experiences a TFA victim seems to be least likely to report and least well served when they do. Products, reports, and data archiving include: 1) a final report including an executive summary suitable for a non-technical audience; 2) a minimum of three practitioner-friendly reports highlighting study findings; 3) a minimum of three articles published in peer-reviewed, scientific journals; and 4) an archived dataset and documents submitted to the NACJD. Note: This project contains a research and/or development component, as defined in applicable law, and complies with Part 200 Uniform Requirements - 2 CFR 200.210(a)(14). CA/NCF