Swipe right: the emergence of dating-app facilitated sexual assault. A descriptive retrospective audit of forensic examination caseload in an Australian metropolitan service

Abstract

The use of dating ‘apps’ to facilitate real-word social encounters between strangers is culturally mainstream. Sexual assaults facilitated following dating-app meetings have been reported in the media, and anecdotally noted at increasing frequency by clinical forensic physicians. Limited empirical data suggests there has been a marked increase in real life sexual offences facilitated in this manner. There is little additional information known about the circumstances of these alleged incidents. This retrospective audit of a small forensic examination caseload from an Australian metropolitan clinical forensic medicine service identified that 14% (11 of 76) of alleged sexual assaults where complainants underwent a forensic examination were facilitated following a dating-app meeting. Further analysis of these cases identified that all complainants were female, most under 30 years of age. All alleged a single male perpetrator and in over half of the cases the complainant was impaired. In all cases where it was asked (n = 9), the alleged incident occurred at the first face-to-face meeting. More than half of the incidents occurred at the alleged perpetrator’s private residence. Anogenital injuries were observed at the time of forensic examination in 60% of cases, and 70% had visible body injuries. There was no reported condom use. Only one complainant had no observable injury. This small case series quantified a high proportion of forensic sexual assault examination caseload as being facilitated by dating-app meetings, and identified some common features that may be characteristic of alleged sexual assaults occurring in this manner. The authors propose a larger prospective period of data collection at the time of forensic medical examination, to characterize the features of sexual assaults allegedly occurring following app-based meetings.