The world watched on in horror in 2024 as Dominque Pelicot and 50 other men were tried in a French court for repeatedly drugging and raping Gisele Pelicot over almost a decade. All of them were found guilty.
While such horrific abuse can feel far away and rare, it’s more widespread than many realise. There are private online communities with thousands of members all over the world, including in Australia, trading in video and photos of sedated women being abused.
A recent investigation by CNN revealed there are thousands-strong groups on messaging app Telegram who share tactics and videos assaulting and raping their girlfriends and wives.
In April, France launched an investigation into the website Pelicot used to recruit dozens of strangers to rape his wife. During the trial, police uncovered 20,000 videos and photos of his wife’s abuse, recorded by Pelicot himself.
So why do men do it, and how can we stop it?
Global, organised abuse
While the CNN report and Pelicot’s case shocked the world, these cases are not unique, with private pages and group chats being uncovered in Australia, Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Spain, China, and Poland.
These reports show how widespread this issue is, underscoring that these are not isolated episodes. They are organised crimes committed by dedicated communities that support such violence, hosted on platforms that provide the essential infrastructure.
One report from the New York Times reported China-based group chats with as many as 100,000 members. A study of Telegram networks across Italy and Spain showed groups with nearly 25,000 users.
The Telegram group CNN reported on had more than 1,000 members with some videos posted in the group amassing over 50,000 views.
The groups identified in these stories and reports are part of a broader digital ecosystem often referred to as the manosphere, an online network of group chats, influencers and communities that perpetuate misogynistic ideas.
Read more:
From violence to sexism, the manosphere is doing real-world harm
Why are people doing this?
As the CNN report puts it “while the platforms vary, inside such groups, video is king”. The more perverse, humiliating and risky the visual material, the higher the engagement and the greater the reward.
Telegram, like other platforms, provides financial incentives for engagement. Members can earn points through their activity and earn a place on leader boards. Telegram has its own internal crypto system, which members can spend through affiliate links.
Research from Australia shows men who non-consensually share images and videos online are motivated by more than revenge. What these men crave is the chance to prove their manliness to other men.
While research on perpetrators of online violence is still emerging, those who study the cultures of these online groups observe that a kind of homosocial bonding is created when share their abuse with one another. As feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye put it:
from women they want devotion, service and sex. Heterosexual male culture is homoerotic; it is man-loving.
While the men in these groups are sharing images and videos of women, commenting on women’s bodies, degrading women and objectifying women, it is men who are at the centre of the exchange. They seek the validation and praise of other men. One way this is achieved is by getting comments and likes on their videos.
Another popular form of bonding is the solicitation of comments from other members. One study described how users requested descriptions of what others would do, such as “describe how you would rape this bitch”.
Others commission sexualised deepfakes – realistic but fake sexually explicit images – using nudify apps and other artificial intelligence (AI) platforms.
In these groups, the practices and the language are meant to degrade women, to reduce them to raw material, objects to be consumed to satiate men’s desire, and to reinforce the bonds between men. Misogyny is the “social glue” that holds these communities together.
What can we do about it?
Traditional approaches and responses to gender-based violence still tend to individualise the problem, focusing on single perpetrators. What this approach fails to do is address the social, structural and technological enablers of this abuse.
Take the Telegram platform: why has this become the safe haven for perpetrators?
Telegram has specific design affordances that both enable and amplify image-based sexual abuse.
Groups can have up to 200,000 members. End-to-end data encryption allows for anonymity, and its content moderation regulations are weak. Telegram allows users to share visual and audio material (including large files). And perhaps most importantly, it has interactive features: likes, comments and disappearing messages.
Dimitri Karastelev/Unsplash
All of these features collide to create the perfect storm for perpetrators. They are large, private, largely unregulated and allow them to anonymously share non-consensual sexual material.
There are efforts to stop this abuse, with emerging legislation such as the Take It Down Law in the United States that came into effect in May, and regulatory bodies such as the eSafety Commissioner in Australia, that aim to tackle the creation of image-based sexual abuse (including using sexualised deepfakes).
While these laws are aimed at individual perpetrators, the Pelicot case in France prompted the arrest of the creators of the website Dominique used to recruit others to assault his wife. In 2024, Telegram’s founder was arrested and charged in France for allowing illicit behaviour on the platform, including the distribution of child sexual abuse material. The case is still before the courts.
These arrests represent a welcome shift in how we tackle this issue by holding tech executives, not just their companies, responsible for providing the infrastructure that allows this abusive and degrading behaviour to proliferate and thrive.
—
The author would like to acknowledge Siân Human from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence Against Women for her insights and support during the process of writing this piece.
