Online Dating Has Created a Six-Fold Increase in Sexual Assaults | Mary Aiken | Big Think

Lots of people have a positive experience of online dating. One of the criticisms of my book is that I showcase a lot of negative content in terms of all things cyber. But there’s a good reason for that. We have an army of marketers over here telling us it’s all good. I want to position myself over here saying, well, it’s not so good. And hopefully then we can meet in the center and have a balanced debate.

So, online dating. What could go wrong? Well, like all things in life, it comes with risk. So, the NCA, which is the National Crime Agency in the UK police force, recently issued a report to say that there has been a six-fold increase in sexual assaults associated with online dating. And what was really disturbing about that report is that 71 percent of these assaults took place on the first date and either in the home of the victim or the offender.

So, the question is, well, why is that happening? If you look more closely at the research as a forensic cyberpsychologist, the thing that really disturbed me is that the offenders reported didn’t have the typical profile of a sex offender in that they didn’t have previous convictions, and they didn’t have a criminal record. A large number of them did not have a typical profile.

So, what does this mean? Does it mean that sex offenders are now moving online to online dating forums to find victims more easily? Or does it mean that something else is happening in the dating world, and it’s ending up with this catastrophic outcome?

Let’s think about it from a cyberpsychology perspective. When you date online, you create this avatar, this profile, this representation of self. But is it really you, or is it an idealized version of self? And let’s not forget the person that you’re trying to date is also creating this profile.

Princess Diana – we all remember Princess Diana. She said that her marriage was a little crowded because there were three people in it. Well, online dating, you’ve got four people in the relationship. You’ve got two cyber selves, and you’ve got two real-world selves. So, the question is, do you really know the person you’re dating?

We talk to kids about stranger danger. I want to talk to you guys about stranger danger in terms of online dating. As the police say, get to know the person and not the profile. So, what is the science behind why you think this stranger is suddenly an intimate friend?

In cyberpsychology, we talk about hyper-personal interaction, which basically means that people move towards extreme amounts of self-disclosure online very quickly. Self-disclosure in the real world operates at around 40 percent, according to one study, but increases to 80 percent once you go online. This is a lean medium. Very few visual cues.

What happens is that as you get pieces of information, you can tend to fill in the blanks and turn this person into something much more aspirational, your ideal partner. But it’s not a reality, and you don’t know the person. It’s a little like what we call stranger on the train syndrome. It’s easy to sit down with a total stranger and totally disclose. But there are consequences and real-world consequences.

In the report, the police report, their researchers felt that the root of the problem was what they classified as misdirected expectations, which means that the chat online, whatever platform, whether it was text-based or chat-based platforms, had quickly escalated into very intimate and sexualized content. In some of the cases, this in turn meant that when there was a real-world meeting, there were misdirected expectations.

To be clear, sex without consent is a crime. So, if anybody has been a victim of a sexual assault associated with online dating, you must report it immediately. One of the big problems we face from a policing perspective is the underreporting of crime associated with online dating. It is estimated that less than one in five of these assaults are reported.

Possibly because a victim may feel that the digital trace they have left online somehow may have compromised their position. That is not the case. A crime is a crime is a crime irrespective of the way that the victim engaged with the offender.