“This is not a nice safe space”: investigating women’s safety work on Tinder

ABSTRACT

As dating app use continues to rise, so too do women’s experiences of intrusion in digital dating contexts. The extent to which dating apps facilitate intimate intrusions—defined in this article as behaviour that makes women feel uneasy, uncomfortable, or unsafe—has been the subject of burgeoning scholarly and media attention. While this research provides important evidence for the range of intrusions women experience on dating apps, to date, little is known about how women protect themselves in digital dating contexts. Drawing on qualitative interview and walkthrough data, this research investigated the strategies women employ to protect themselves—referred to throughout this paper as “safety work”—from men’s intrusive behaviour on the dating app Tinder. Findings from this paper demonstrate the range of online and offline strategies women employ to respond to, avoid, and cope with men’s violence. Given the burden placed on women to protect themselves, this paper argues that women’s safety work limits their ability to participate freely on dating apps.

KEYWORDS:

• Dating apps
• Tinder
• safety work
• continuum of sexual violence
• intimate intrusions

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, those who provided feedback related to the research, and the women who shared their experiences.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rosalie Gillett

Rosalie Gillett is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the QUT node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Her research sits at the intersection between online gender-based violence, automation, and platform governance. E-mail: [email protected]