This project will provide new evidence to advance academic, police, and practitioner knowledge of sextortion.
Sextortion involves a perpetrator threatening to expose sexually compromising information (such as sexually explicit private images or videos of the victim) unless the victim meets certain demands.
The project will explore how sextortion is defined, recorded, and responded to by police and capture the characteristics and prevalence of victims’ experiences and perpetrator tactics, to support the development of responses by police. Crucially, the project will work with partner organisations with experience and knowledge of victim-survivor support (The Revenge Porn Helpline) and lived experience of fraud and cybercrime perpetration (We Fight Fraud). Doing this will help the project team to understand the needs of victim-survivors and processes of victimisation more holistically, and co-produce resources to enhance the police’s performance around sextortion.
Sextortion is a type of image-based sexual abuse (IBSA) often referred to as online blackmail, whereby intimate images or videos are recorded or manufactured and the victim is extorted, often for financial gain. The 2024 Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) Strategic Threat Risk Assessment states that IBSA is likely to be the fastest growing threat in the next 12-24 months. Whilst all types of IBSA have become a priority for academic, police, and government activity, sextortion has received less attention, despite reports rising significantly for children and adults. The arrival of AI technologies presents new and exacerbated challenges for police, and it is essential that they are equipped to prevent and respond to the dynamics and extent of perpetration.
Existing research demonstrates the widespread impacts of IBSA on victim-survivors, but there is a significant knowledge gap about:
- sextortion re/victimisation methods
- which communities are affected (particularly using an intersectional lens)
- how police identify and respond to it, and
- victim-survivor experiences of reporting and help-seeking.
Sextortion is also a type of IBSA perpetrated at individual scales (intimate relationships) and national or international scales (serious and organised crime, e.g. romance fraud networks), so identifying effective prevention and response tactics for police will have widespread multi-scaled and international benefits for crime disruption.
The study will focus on four research questions, collaboratively developed by the team and partners:
- What is the nature and prevalence of sextortion and how does it manifest across different digital platforms and victim/perpetrator relationships?
- How do police record and respond to incidents of sextortion, either when victims directly present to the force, or when data is shared by organisations such as Action Fraud?
- How often does victimisation and re-victimisation occur, and what forms does this take?
- What are victims’ experiences of the response to their reporting or help-seeking from the police and/or other organisations?
Co-production is an integral feature of the project, which utilises mixed methods and combines two different datasets:
- Quantitative and qualitative assessment of police crime data on sextortion cases.
- A victim-survivor survey, to provide a national overview of prevalence, experiences, and practice gaps.
The combination will likely capture both reported and unreported victim-survivor experiences, which is important for developing practice responses that are inclusive. An interactive workshop with research partners and other key stakeholders will be used to contextualise and agree findings and co-produce a toolkit which will be piloted.
Lead investigator
- Dr Emily Cooper (University of Central Lancashire)
Co-investigators
- Dr Clare Scollay (University of Central Lancashire and University of Manchester)
- Dr Nathan Birdsall (University of Central Lancashire)
- Dr Scott Keay (Edge Hill University)
Project partners
- We Fight Fraud
- The Revenge Porn Helpline
- Lancashire Police
