Hesitancy, Solidarity, and Whiteness: The Limits and Possibilities of Rape-Reporting Apps Available to Purchase

This chapter examines digital technologies designed to facilitate gender violence reporting in the wake of #MeToo, focusing on the racial dynamics and how political whiteness organizes experiences of sexual violence disclosure. The logic underpinning rape-reporting platforms is that digital and artificial-intelligence-mediated apps can offer alternative modalities to disclose violence and place demands on institutions to act on serial perpetrators. The chapter sheds light on how approaches to design for social justice require thinking about the multiple and situated power dynamics shaping gender violence. Designing for power requires confronting the multifaceted creep of whiteness through radical feminist and antiracist ways of seeing. It is only through such a politics of resistance and visibility that antirape technologies can challenge the creep of political whiteness.