Digital technologies and artificial intelligence have fundamentally reshaped the landscape of gender-based violence over the past decade, creating unprecedented avenues of technology-facilitated abuse. To map this evolving crisis, Monash University’s Professor Asher Flynn, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (CEVAW), will deliver her inaugural professorial lecture.
Held at the State Library of Victoria on Thursday 21 May, Professor Flynn’s lecture will examine, through her research, technology-facilitated violence and the rise of image-based abuse to track how advancing technologies facilitate greater digital harms.
Titled AI, Deepfakes and Digital Abuse: Reflections from a Decade of Research, the lecture will draw on extensive empirical work to track the expanding ways perpetrators use technology to threaten, humiliate and control, and what this means for safety, wellbeing and public life in Australia.
Reflecting on her research, Professor Flynn highlights not just the proliferation of digital harms but also the way technology-facilitated abuse has become normalised among perpetrators.
“Whether it is workplace tech-harassment or AI-generated deepfakes, we consistently see a profound disconnect between the recognition of these behaviours as harmful, and perpetrators acknowledging their own actions. This casual normalisation allows them to completely distance themselves from the devastating reality of the harm caused, echoing the same patterns of denial and victim-blaming found in other forms of gender-based violence.”
Professor Flynn has been at the forefront of documenting these shifting digital behaviours, with extensive national research exposing how mainstream platforms are weaponised. Her nationally representative study on technology-facilitated abuse found one in two Australian adults reported experiencing these harms, and one in four reported perpetrating such behaviours.
Her national workplace study revealed that one in seven Australian adults admit to tech-facilitated harassment at work. Her groundbreaking research into sexualised deepfakes was the first of its kind to interview both perpetrators and victims, providing a frightening insight into how perpetrators use the accessibility of AI tools to rationalise their abuse.
While tracking a decade of expanding digital harm, the lecture will also highlight emerging areas of progress, including recent shifts in Australian legal responses, improved pathways of victim support, and new preventative technologies.
Professor Flynn believes these systemic changes are critical to tackling technology-facilitated abuse.
“To truly disrupt AI-enabled and digital harms, we must look beyond individual tech platforms and address the broader cultural attitudes and regulatory structures that allow this abuse to occur. Tackling this effectively means combining tighter regulation of emerging AI tools with robust digital safety built directly into our workplaces and educational environments to help policymakers and communities dismantle the attitudes driving these behaviours.”
The inaugural lecture will be hosted by Professor Katie Stevenson, Dean of Monash’s Faculty of Arts, and will take place from 6.00pm to 8.30pm at the Conversation Quarter, State Library of Victoria.
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