Tanya Horeck

This chapter explores to what extent Netflix’s binge-able programming strategy and its effect on serialised narrative structures open up new avenues for interrogating rape culture in popular storytelling. Taking two Netflix original series – Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Unbelievable – as case studies, Havas and Horeck analyse the binge-able serial format’s engagement with rape narratives, and considers how this thematisation is shaped by factors such as the company’s branding logic, critical discourses around the cultural value of binge-watching, and the current political mainstreaming of feminist concerns around women’s bodily autonomy.

This article explores how British secondary school students responded to and made sense of the rising public awareness of sexual violence in British society that emerged during lockdowns for COVID-19. Based on the findings from a 2021–2022 study conducted in five secondary schools, the article explores the gendered discrepancies in girls’ and boys’ awareness of violence against girls and women. In particular, it examines how the youth participants in this study responded to two related media stories during lockdown: the news of Sarah Everard’s kidnapping and murder by a police officer and the viral spread of sexual abuse testimonies on the ‘Everyone’s Invited’ Instagram page and website. The article demonstrates how girls were more likely to experience, recognize, and discuss sexual violence, in part due to feminist consciousness raising during lockdown via digital technologies like Instagram and TikTok. Although some boys did recognize the problem of violence against women, in gene...

Online sexual abuse and violence have become an urgent global problem for women and girls, and in particular for poor women, women of colour and LGBTQ women (Ging and Siapera, 2019). Online sexual harassment and abuse is an especially urgent issue for young people, for whom digital spaces are key sites of communication, identity formation, self-expression and sexual interaction. The toxic dynamics that frequently underpin these complex entanglements thus pose a significant threat to ethical digital intimacy. This situation became substantially more extreme during COVID-19, with rates of online abuse and harassment rising as young people have been forced to spend more and more time online. During this period, usage of particular platforms (e.g. TikTok) dramatically increased. A substantial rise in screen time also impacted young people’s experiences and digital intimacies in important ways. This paper reports on the findings of a cross-national study conducted in England and Ireland,...

As we write this introduction in early 2022, this themed issue provides us with the opportunity to reflect on the intersection of education and sexual violence. Although educational institutions – from primary schools to universities – have long been identified as structurally violent (Stein 1994) there has recently been (more) intense and renewed focus on this issue. More than four years after the #MeToo movement first emerged, and centuries after women raised sexual violence as a political issue (Serisier 2018), it has once again captured public attention and has been identified not only as an issue that education might help alleviate, but as a crisis which educational institutions must combat from within. The endemic problem of sexual violence in educational contexts has been foregrounded in documentaries such as The Hunting Ground (Dick and Ziering (Dir) 2015), which traces the prevalence of rape culture in US colleges and universities, and in national reports of systemic sexual violence and abuse against Indigenous children institutionalized within Canada’s residential school system (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015). Although sexual violence is a longstanding issue, in the UK and Australia, sexual violence in schools (re)emerged as a pressing public concern in early 2021. In Australia, it was linked with a viral social media poll conducted by Chanel Contos asking her friends if they experienced sexual violence while attending private schools (Chrysanthos 2021). Around the same time in the UK, Soma Sara started an Instagram site Everyone’s Invited as a safe space for survivors to share experiences of violence while at school and university (Hall 2021). To date, Everyone’s Invited has received over 54,000 anonymous testimonies, triggering a government report on the issue (Ofsted 2021). In the UK and Australia, as in many other nations around the world, students, campaigners, and activists have called for better and more comprehensive relationship and sex education (Campbell 2021; Engleman 2020; Hill 2021; Makleff 2021) as a key way of tackling this pervasive issue. The need for better sex education has also been highlighted by the Covid-19 pandemic which saw violence against women and girls rise. Identified as a ‘shadow pandemic’, reports from front line workers across the world noted how all types of violence against women and girls were on the rise (UK Women 2020). Not only are many frontline services overwhelmed by increased calls for help, but worryingly, in some contexts, resources used to support survivors have been diverted to provide immediate Covid-19 relief (UN Women 2020). In our own research into online harms and risks just prior to

This chapter explores to what extent Netflix’s binge-able programming strategy and its effect on serialised narrative structures open up new avenues for interrogating rape culture in popular storytelling. Taking two Netflix original series – Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Unbelievable – as case studies, Havas and Horeck analyse the binge-able serial format’s engagement with rape narratives, and considers how this thematisation is shaped by factors such as the company’s branding logic, critical discourses around the cultural value of binge-watching, and the current political mainstreaming of feminist concerns around women’s bodily autonomy.

This Conclusion chapter brings together the different views on the various ways binge-watching or ‘bingeability’ is structured into texts. Re-visits some of the arguments made in the section and reflects on the ways the different articles work to create a range of understandings of binge-watching as textual property.

This article considers the salience of extreme art cinema across a range of different cultural, historical, and socio-economic contexts. It asks what happens to the specificity of the notion of a 'new extremism in cinema' when the net is cast a bit wider, to include more global and mainstream instances of cinematic violence and provocation.

This document offers comprehensive guidance for schools on how to deal with the issue of online sexual harassment, which refers to a range of behaviours where digital technologies are used to facilitate both virtual and face-to-face sexually based harms. <br>This document lays out the complete context of online sexual harassment, including who is likely to be a target, how the abuse might be manifested, and the impact of this type of harassment.<br>The document provides an overview of laws relating to online sexual harassment, and demonstrates why a whole-school joined up approach is necessary, along with a change to consent-oriented education to replace the abstinence-based approaches which don't work. <br><br>It concludes with key recommendations, including the need for dedicated RSE and PSHE lessons to address this issue, zero-tolerance stances on (online) sexual harassment. <br>The document provides specific recommendations for staff who encount...