Sexual Violence and Racial Capitalism: How Datafication Deepens Injustice
Written by Elisa Garbil – 26.05.2025
Sexual violence is often framed as a deviation from the social order, a personal or individual tragedy. Yet, as many abolitionist and critical feminist scholars show otherwise: sexual violence is systemic, structured by racial capitalism itself. In London there is a rape reported every hour. And those are only the reported cases, so many women do not report sexual violence or rape. In addition, sexual violence is a critical component of racial capitalism, where racialised exploitation and capital accumulation are intertwined. Racial capitalism posits that capitalism relies on systems of racial inequality and racialised forms of expropriation to produce capital. Sexual violence, particularly in the context of colonialism and its legacy, has been a tool of control, a means of accumulating resources, and a way of reinforcing existing social hierarchies. Understanding this relationship between systemic and structured sexual violence and racial capitalism is crucial not only for theorising harm, but for building pathways toward justice beyond carceral and capitalist frameworks.
The Fabric of Sexual Violence in Racial Capitalism
Sexual violence is not a deviation from capitalism; it is a tool that organises bodies for exploitation.
In her forthcoming book Sexual Violence in Racial Capitalism, Alison Phipps, which we have on the podcast in Episode 234, argues that sexual violence plays an integral role in racial capitalist systems. It is not incidental but foundational, supporting the enclosure of bodies, extraction of surplus value, and the disposal of populations deemed surplus to economic needs.
Colonialism’s racialised violence, including sexual violence, was a key aspect of territorial expansion and the accumulation of wealth. Colonial structures often emasculated Indigenous men and elevated them in provincial terms, leading to increased sexual violence in colonised societies. This violence provided a pretext for violent regulatory control, with white men often portrayed as protecting brown women from brown men. Under racial capitalism, the exclusion and marginalisation of those who occupy racialised spaces are often accomplished through exploitation and expropriation. Unfree and frequently racialised and gendered labor is used to extract gains, and sexual violence can be a tool in this process.
A striking example is the use of sexual violence narratives to justify mass atrocities, such as the Gaza genocide. Reports of “Hamas rapes” were weaponised to fuel a colonial feminist justification for mass violence against Palestinians, framing Israel as a vulnerable woman under threat. Phipps conceptualises this as part of the coloniality of sexual violence, a framework showing how racial capitalism uses sexual violence, real and alleged, to entrench domination.
Datafication and the Commodification of Survivors
Reporting apps promise justice but often reinforce whiteness and commodify survivors’ experiences.
Anti-violence apps and other digital platforms used for intervening in sexual harassment and gender-based violence can also be implicated in racial capitalism. These platforms, while intended to help, can extract data from users, rely on complex financial partnerships, and often have problematic relationships with the criminal legal system, exacerbating existing racial inequalities.
Beyond explicit political violence, these dynamics also manifest within contemporary digital infrastructures. Although these apps claim to facilitate justice, they primarily serve institutional needs. By extracting survivors’ reports and personal data, they create economic value for universities, corporations, and tech partners. Survivors’ trauma becomes a resource to be owned, traded, and reinvested, without meaningful transformation of the conditions that produced the violence. And in a digital age, data is power, making the misuse of the data on these apps rampant.
Crucially, these platforms universalise the figure of the survivor, designing tools that reflect the experiences of normatively white, middle-class users, while sidelining the realities of racialised, disabled, LGBTQ+, and working-class survivors.
The Carceral Logic of “Protection”
Carceral responses to sexual violence uphold the very systems that produce it.
Sexual violence mediates between the state-organised institutions of the family (and heterosexuality) and the prison (and policing), which are crucial for maintaining the accumulation of wealth. The family, traditionally seen as a unit of production and reproduction, can also be a site of sexual violence, while the prison system further marginalises and exploits individuals, often along racial lines. As Abolitionist Futures highlights, the prevailing response to sexual violence, more policing, harsher punishment, expanded surveillance, does not create safety. Instead, it entrenches carceral logics that harm the very communities most impacted by violence. In addition, it has not shown to be effective. Women still get raped, there is still stigma around reporting sexual assault or a rape, and, often the women bear the burden of ensuring their own safety, when really, sexual assault and rape should not be normalised.
The concept of the racial capitalist protection racket helps illuminate this trap. Under this system, the promise of “safety” for (white) women justifies intensified policing, border violence, and incarceration, tools that disproportionately target racialised communities.
Toward Abolitionist Futures
Dismantling sexual violence requires dismantling racial capitalism.
If we are to dismantle sexual violence, we must dismantle racial capitalism itself. This requires moving beyond carceral responses and toward abolitionist visions grounded in collective care, mutual aid, and structural transformation. Technology cannot save us if it is built on extractive, racialised logics. Reporting apps that commodify survivors’ experiences without challenging structural violence only deepen harm. Instead, justice must centre the needs of those historically marginalised and must confront the material conditions, capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, that produce sexual violence in the first place.
Conclusion
Racial capitalism is a global system that has been attributed to various historical and contemporary conflicts, including apartheid in South Africa and the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict. It is not simply about individual acts of violence but about the systemic ways in which racialised power structures and economic forces interact to create and perpetuate violence. Showing that sexual violence is a systemic feature of racial capitalism, not a glitch to be patched by new technologies or harsher laws. Whether through war, incarceration, data extraction, or corporate branding, the same logics of exploitation and dispossession are at work. Challenging sexual violence therefore demands an abolitionist politics: one that seeks to dismantle oppressive systems at their root and build new worlds grounded in care, dignity, and justice.
We are called to imagine more – and to act toward it.
