The number of technology-enabled sexual violence cases reported, such as upskirting and revenge pornography, has almost tripled since 2016, according to the Association of Women for Action and Research (Aware).
Such cases jumped from 46 in 2016 to 99 in 2017 and 124 last year, said Ms Anisha Joseph, head of the gender equality group's Sexual Assault Care Centre (SACC), yesterday.
These cases involved acts enabled by digital communications technology such as social media and messaging platforms, digital cameras and dating apps, and included behaviours such as unwanted and explicit sexual messages or calls.
Image-based sexual abuse - defined as creating, obtaining or distributing images or videos of a victim without consent, or threatening to carry out the act - has more than doubled in the past three years, with 64 reported cases last year, up from just 30 in 2016.
While perpetrators of image-based sexual abuse may include the victim's acquaintances, family or colleagues, almost half of the cases were committed by the victim's partners. Aware also reported that two in five perpetrators of unwanted or explicit messages or calls were colleagues of the victims.
Ms Joseph said victims of such cases tended to approach the centre more quickly than those in other kinds of sexual abuse cases.
In the past three years, one in two reached out to the centre within a month of the incident, as compared with other general cases where about three in five did so within a year of the incident.
Speaking to a 150-strong crowd at the Taking Ctrl, Finding Alt 2019 event held at the Lifelong Learning Institute in Paya Lebar, Ms Joseph said technology is not the villain or cause of sexual violence but the medium that facilitates such acts.
"We see it 'folded into' pre-existing practices of violence, harm and harassment. New factors, such as the widespread availability of recording technology and our 24/7 channels of communication, make these actions all the more pervasive and damaging today," she said.
Overall, the number of sexual abuse cases the centre has seen, with and without the use of technology, has also more than doubled since 2016, from 338 cases to 808 last year.
Yesterday's event marked both the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and the one-year anniversary of Aware's Aim For Zero campaign against sexual violence.
The panel discussion featured Ms Monica Baey, an advocate for victims of sexual violence; Ms Amber Hawkes, head of safety policy for Facebook Asia-Pacific; Mr Benny Bong, president of Society Against Family Violence; and Ms Priscilla Chia, a volunteer lawyer with SACC.
The discussion revolved around the psychological and practical impact of tech-facilitated sexual violence on victims, as well as the legal options available to them.
Panellists agreed there were limitations to victims' ability to contain the spread of images once they have been uploaded, as well as to how perpetrators would be held accountable across platforms.
Commenting on the latest figures from Aware, criminal lawyer Rajan Supramaniam noted that technology-facilitated sexual abuse can be committed easily under the cloak of anonymity.
He said: "A possible reason for the increase in reported cases could be that more people are misusing technology, but on a more positive note, more might also be coming forward to report incidents."
