CPP assistant professor advocates against online sexual harm
By Kenna Jenkins, February 24, 2026
A new policy bill expanding the definitions in Title IX policy to include tech-facilitated sexual violence content is being sponsored by Survivors + Allies, a University of California, Los Angeles student organization co-founded by a Cal Poly Pomona faculty member.
Tech-facilitated sexual violence can be defined as “a range of behaviors where digital technologies are used to facilitate both virtual and face-to-face sexually based harm,” according to a 2018 research study that Survivors + Allies referenced in their 2025 research.
After following the stories of AI being used for nonconsensual sexual material, both toward adults and children, over the past year, Sara Wilf, an assistant sociology professor at CPP and co-founder of the organization, said Survivors + Allies started to wonder what universities were doing about the issue.
Over the past few years AI usage has increased in popularity and companies have continued to refine their AI models. Usage of AI tools to make non-consensual deepfakes pornography of people, mainly women, has been reported on since 2023.
Deepfakes are videos, photos or audio that is manipulated to replace faces, manipulate facial expression, synthesize faces or synthesize speech, according to Government Accountability Office.
In 2024, sexually explicit and abusive deepfake images of Taylor Swift began to circulate on X, Elon Musk’s social media platform.
Recently, Grok, the AI chatbot available on X, has been used to generate new images from user’s photos. According to The New York Times, users will ask Grok to generate new images of people, usually of women and children, in lingerie, bikinis or completely nude sometimes asking to bot to pose people’s bodies in suggestive ways.
Though nonconsensual publication of deepfakes and AI-generated sexual abuse content have been made illegal under Senate Bill 146, also known as the TAKE IT DOWN Act that was signed into law in 2025, AI-generated content is not included in the current Title IX policy’s definitions of sexual violence.
Survivors + Allies’ 2025 research, which included participants from UCs, CSUs and community colleges and will be available for public viewing April 10, is what sparked them to bring the issue of technology-facilitated sexual violence to the state legislature .
According to the preliminary research findings on tech-facilitated sexual violence among California higher education students, nearly one in seven survivors across the UC, CSU and community college systems reported experiencing online sexual harm. Even then, almost 70% never reached out to their school for support and more than 40% didn’t reach out to anyone at all.
The study found that survivors of tech-facilitated violence who didn’t report to their campus’ Title IX office about their experience didn’t know there were resources for this type of sexual abuse or didn’t feel like they would be taken seriously. Some survivors who did report to their campus’ Title IX office felt like the Title IX staff didn’t believe them or were just pretending to care about their situation.
“Suddenly, images are out there online, and people might need help taking them down,” Wilf said. “They might need legal support, right? It’s like a very different set of services that you need … because it’s so public and because sexual violence is so stigmatized, and people feel so much shame having everything public.”
Wilf co-founded Survivors + Allies with her fellow UCLA graduate students in 2020 after she said they’d heard of survivors having negative experiences interacting with UCLA’s Title IX office, specifically instances of re-traumatization.
Re-traumatization is the reliving of stress reactions from a traumatic event brought up by a new or similar incident that feels as intense as the original trauma, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
Wilf said since any changes done to a University of California’s Title IX office has to be done through the University of California Title IX office, so Wilf and her co-founders had to ask the UC Title IX office to implement a feedback form.
“We asked, ‘Can we do a feedback form for survivors who go through the process? because we’re hearing about a lot of re-traumatization?’” Wilf said. “And the director said, ‘We can’t do a feedback form because it would be demoralizing for Title IX employees. We know everyone has a bad experience.’”
Wilf said this inspired them to do the research themselves, which led to Survivors + Allies doing their first survey across all 10 UC schools in 2021.
“(The UC Title IX offices) will only implement what is in state legislation,” Wilf said. “They won’t go above and beyond at all. They’ll just do exactly what is written. And so that’s why we’ve kind of changed our strategy a little bit from trying to work within the UCs and within the CSUs to let’s go straight to Sacramento, get the laws changed.”
The bill, Assembly Bill 2212 or HEAR Survivors Act, Survivors + Allies is sponsoring with Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan aims to update the definitions to include tech-facilitated sexual violence, as well as updating Title IX websites, resources and mandated trainings with tech-facilitated sexual violence in mind.
In the standing committee for Privacy and Consumer Protection in the California State Assembly, Bauer-Kahan said that tech-facilitated sexual violence has become a common conversation.
When the idea to change Title IX policy with tech-facilitated sexual violence in mind was presented to Bauer-Kahan she said she it was definitely an area where higher education institutions were falling behind.
“I thought it was both based on brilliant research, which I think in the foundation of all good policy and really touching on a critical protection for our students on campus,” Bauer-Kahan said.
Bauer-Kahan said there are people across California and beyond who have been impacted by these issues either personally or through someone they love.
While Wilf said Survivor + Allies wanted to add an “emergency fund” to give students legal support and financial support for get non-consensual sexual content taken down, Bauer-Kahan said she believes that would be better achieved through changes in the budget.
Bauer-Kahan said she was in a meeting with other members of the state assembly and that access to justice and legal aid made the top of the list for thing they hope to achieve in the budget.
“The more expensive the bill, the harder it is to get through the appropriations committee … the policy changes in here we felt were so important that we wanted to make that path as successful as possible,” Bauer-Kahan said.
Now that the bill has been introduced, it will move through committees that been deemed to have jurisdiction over the bill, Bauer-Kahan said that is when the research Survivors + Allies did will be presented and where the public can comment on the bill.
Caryn Bell Gerstenberger, an assistant sociology professor at CPP who studies domestic violence and violence against women, said a lot of current laws were written based on the technology available at the time. But, as technology changes, those laws and definitions have to change with them.
“People who are victims of this kind of violence experience the same kinds of psychological and social difficulties,” Gerstenberger said. “… They can certainly develop a lot of the same things that we see with victims of sexual violence in general in terms of (issues) like declining mental health.”
If campus organizations would like send a letter of support or if community members would like to share their experience, either anonymously or in witness testimony in Sacramento, they can reach out to Survivors + Allies at their email address uclasurvivorsandallies@gmail.com.
Feature image courtesy of the Survivors + Allies group