Content warning: This article contains mentions of sexual assault.
Alex, a University of Michigan student who chose to remain anonymous and is referred to here by a pseudonym, first downloaded a dating app the summer after high school. As a gay man from a small rural community, he found it difficult to explore his sexuality. In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Alex described a forced sexual encounter with someone he met through a dating app.
“I met up with someone in Ann Arbor, and we started having sex,” Alex said. “I was not into it, and I was kind of in a lot of pain — I was like, ‘This is painful, I’m really uncomfortable.’ The person was like 7 feet tall too. I was like, ‘Can I stop? Can we stop? Can we stop?’ and then they just don’t … and I can’t really do anything because they’re taller than me and they’re stronger than me.”
In a world of icks, ghosting and mindless doomscrolling, more and more college students are swiping right and using dating apps to meet people. Despite their increasing cultural relevance, many University of Michigan students have come face to face with the risks these apps carry.
In an interview with The Daily, Engineering junior Nathan Le said he has used Tinder, Hinge and Grindr, but rarely takes time to think about his safety while using dating apps.
“I feel really safe on campus, and Tinder and Hinge feel like an extension of meeting people on campus,” Le said. “I’ve definitely let my guard down at times — all the time, really — when I’m using the apps. I just inherently trust that, ‘Oh, you’re not catfishing me. You’re not a fake person.’ But then when I really think about it, or when I take a step back and look at it, I’m like, ‘Okay, maybe I should triple-confirm that I know exactly who I’m talking to.’”
Tinder has developed a Face Check feature that requires users to verify their faces via live video selfie, ensuring they match users’ profile pictures. Despite this, Le said dating apps often don’t require people to confirm their identities to use the apps, leading to catfishing.
“There’s a chance that older people could try to catfish you, especially in the gay community,” Le said. “I know a lot of older men, specifically in the gay community, try to prey on it a little bit, or there’s a chance that somebody could be lying about their age. … There’s a bunch of things that could happen.”
Margie Pillsbury, Division of Public Safety and Security Special Victims Unit investigations coordinator, works closely with cases involving dating violence, sexual assault, intimate partner violence and stalking. In an interview with The Daily, Pillsbury said dating app users need to take preventive measures and trust their instincts to prevent catfishing.
“Someone who doesn’t have a photo, or they don’t have a lot of friends or it’s a recently created profile — all of those things, I think, should raise concern and cause people to take a step back,” Pillsbury said. “You ask about doing FaceTime or having some sort of video chat, and they don’t want to do that — that would be a red flag.”
Grindr requires access to users’ locations and makes it visible to others on the app, including precise distance measurements in feet. Le said this feature led him to delete the app and switch to primarily using Tinder and Hinge.
“There’s a grid of people, and then you can see how close they are to you,” Le said. “There was one time I was at Bursley (Residence Hall) my freshman year because I lived there, and there was this one guy, and it said he was zero feet away. I got so scared, I deleted the app. I was like, ‘What if it’s my freaking roommate?’”
Moreover, Le said the culture of Grindr endangers user safety and can expose users to privacy violations.
“There’s a lot of explicit things that happen on the app because it’s kind of meant for that,” Le said. “A friend of mine had his (explicit) pictures on the app, and then people had threatened to post them on the internet or send them to friends and family members.”
While at the University, Alex studied abroad in France. There, he said he had a dangerous encounter meeting a man at an unfamiliar tram station.
“When I got there, I immediately realized that the person I was meeting up with was not the same person that was on the profile that I had been texting,” Alex said. “It was just not the same person. … I am so afraid of hurting other people’s feelings (that) I was like, ‘Whatever, I’ll go. I’ll just do it.”
He said he thought he was meeting up with another college-aged student, but the man standing in front of him was 35 years old and had a completely different physical appearance than the profile picture he used on Grindr. Alex said his sense of danger heightened after the man asked him to wait alone on a terrace before entering his apartment. Eventually he thought of a way to escape.
“So then I texted him, and I was like, ‘Oh I’m feeling really really sick. I have to go. I’m so sorry. Like we will totally meet up at a different time, but I have to go,’” Alex said. “He told me, ‘I can see you, and I have your location.’ He texted me (that), and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh,’ I was so scared.”
After reading this text, Alex panicked and was unsure of how to get home safely. He did not want to go to the tram station they met at because the man could see it from his apartment. He started walking home using the outskirts of the city, where felt unsafe with the unfamiliar surroundings.
“Then I finally got home and just laid on my bed and cried because I was just really flustered,” Alex said. “I fully believe he would’ve followed me and tried to do something if I went down to the tram station again.”
Pillsbury said telling friends where you are going beforehand can prevent situations like these.
“Think ahead of time and try to make your in-person interactions in a populated place that you’re familiar with,” Pillsbury said. “Also making sure that your support network — whether it’s a close friend or a family member — knows what you’re doing and where you’re going to be is really important, and then having an escape plan.”
However, Alex said he sometimes finds it too embarrassing to let his friends know where he is when meeting people from apps.
“I don’t want them to know that I’m doing that stuff,” Alex said. “I don’t want people to think differently of me, and I don’t really tell people what I’m going to do a lot of the time.”
In an interview with The Daily, Apryl Williams, associate professor of communication and media, said while many dating apps have anti-discrimination features to protect safety and create an inclusive environment, people of Color, the LGBTQ+ community and women face disproportionately more discriminatory and aggressive behavior online. Williams said digital dating platforms don’t take these groups into consideration when creating their guidelines.
“They have these terms of service or community agreements or community guidelines that are supposed to protect everyone, but honestly, those are primarily written for the mainstream user, which is typically white men,” Williams said. “Because of that, those safety guides aren’t necessarily thinking about people of Color or (transgender) people or Queer people.”
To address these problems, Amie Gordon, associate professor of psychology, co-created Revel, a dating app specifically designed for U-M students. The app only works for U-M students, as it requires the user’s uniqname and password. It also contains an internal code of conduct and includes a feature allowing users to block certain individuals from viewing their profile. Gordon said that, while these features keep most interactions safe, they cannot eliminate all risks, but students should not be so afraid of these apps that they avoid connecting with others.
“It’s a balance — if you’re so afraid that you’re going to get hurt, you’re going to miss most of the people who are not looking to hurt you,” Gordon said. “I think we need to be smart and realistic and not put ourselves into situations where we can get hurt if we can avoid it, but also not be so afraid that we don’t open ourselves up to the possibility of creating new connections.”
Pillsbury said students have access to resources including the U-M Public Safety App and a DPSS SVU-sponsored empowerment self-defense program focusing on boundary setting, situational awareness and physical defense.
“We have a Special Victims Unit because we know that a large percentage of our population is impacted by things like harassment or stalking, and we want people to know that there’s a resource here to assist them and help them through that,” Pillsbury said. “Whether they choose to file a police report and seek a criminal process, or they just want some assistance, we want to be a resource to our campus.”
Daily Staff Reporter Patricia Leoncio and Daily News Editor Dominic Apap can be reached at pleoncio@umich.edu and dapap@umich.edu.
