If You Build It, Will They Stop? Feeling the Past and Future of Sexual Violence Prevention Technologies

From hat pins and keys to apps and bracelets, we have come up with many ways to prevent sexual violence. In this article, the author reconfigures these objects as grabbable technologies, positioning them in relation to other categories of prevention uncovered in a technology scan: wearables, watchables, and knowables. Speculative design workshops complement and extend this historical timeline into the future. These workshops invited sexual violence and technology experts to design fictional technologies that could maintain a future world free of sexual violence. By theorizing prevention as a space that mediates how we understand the problem of sexual violence, the author questions whether prevention also mediates how we inhabit the world. Using a spatial analysis, it is argued that the role of prevention eclipses any instrumental function, and it is this excess that enables ideas related to prevention to enter our relationship with space and other people more broadly.