Cyberflashing is non-consensual sexual conduct which intrudes on women's privacy, autonomy and everyday lives. It can induce fear, alarm and significant other harms. It can also interfere with daily life on a more mundane but troublesome level, with women having to navigate and anticipate men's conduct and reactions. It therefore inhibits and restricts women's freedoms, as they take steps to avoid being cyberflashed, often at considerable cost to their personal and professional lives. In this light, we suggest that cyberflashing is best understood as a form of sexual intrusion which sits on a continuum with other forms of sexual violence experienced by women and girls.

To develop this argument, this chapter provides a deeper understanding of the nature and extent of cyberflashing, as well as examining the range of circumstances and contexts in which it takes place. We consider first the commonality of cyberflashing, outlining the available prevalence data identifying women, and particularly younger women, as the main targets. We then examine the variety of contexts in which cyberflashing is perpetrated, drawing primarily on the wide range of publicly available testimonies of women who have shared their experiences of cyberflashing, as discussed in the introduction. We consider how women are cyberflashed in public spaces and particularly on public transport, to being bombarded with penis images on dating apps, to intrusions in everyday social media and online interactions. As explained in the introduction, our focus is predominantly on men's perpetration of cyberflashing against women, recognising that sending unsolicited penis images in other circumstances, such as to other men, can involve different contexts and reactions (Tziallas, 2015). We then explore current understandings of the motivations of perpetrators, followed by an outline of our conceptualisation of cyberflashing as a sexual intrusion.

How common is cyberflashing?

There is a shortage of data identifying the extent of cyberflashing, although much needed research in this area is beginning to emerge (Amundsen, 2020; Mandau, 2020; Marcotte et al, 2020; Oswald et al, 2020). These studies have focussed on specific contexts of cyberflashing, such as in dating environments, and involved particular age groups, sexualities or geographic location. They deepen our understanding of specific aspects of cyberflashing, though questions remain regarding overall prevalence.