Its Not Always Obvious | Fiona Cruickshank

It's not always obvious

Online Sexual Violence Campaign

Created to spread awareness of available resources for victims of online sexual violence, "It's Not Always Obvious" is a social campaign that utilizes hidden meaning and anonymity to convey the message of potential harm and vulnerability faced by adolescents online. This project was created in partnership with Nicki Skelhorn and Scott Clemmer.

Programs Used

Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe After Effects

Overview

It’s Not Always Obvious is a comprehensive campaign focused on providing support for victims and spreading awareness about online sexual violence. The campaign uses imagery from direct messaging environments, such as text bubbles and emojis, as this is one of the main spaces that online sexual violence occurs. The campaign also incorporates hand-rendered illustrations and scribbled textures to bring the survivors into the conversation and soften the approach of an otherwise serious topic. The colour palette uses red, purple and peach; inspired by common suggestive emojis, paired with high-contrast orange and blue-green to represent perpetrators and survivors, respectively. Chat bubbles utilize common, suggestive text messages to highlight how simple and yet coercive messaging can be, and to acknowledge the victim stories through examples of messages they would frequently see. The bright orange and use of emojis, as well as shading, is used to highlight these messages, contrasting the campaign headline: It’s Not Always Obvious.

Project Objectives

Translate Harsh Messaging Through Visuals
Connect with Adolescents
Improve Resource Awareness

Did you know?

28%
of teens aged 13-18 have experienced online sexual violence.

Half
of teen victims receive unwanted sexual or nude images online.

79%
of teen victims experience unwanted sexual talk.

700
incidents of sextortion were reported to the Waterloo Regional Police between 2020 and 2025.

Online sexual violence is a serious and growing problem for adolescents because their everyday social lives now unfold on digital platforms where harassment, coercion, and exploitation can occur quickly and often invisibly to adults. It can include being pressured to send sexual images, having intimate content shared without consent, exposure to unsolicited sexual material, and grooming by adults or peers through social media, messaging apps, and online games. Studies show that large proportions of teens report at least one form of online sexual victimization, with unwanted sexual content and sexual pressure among the most frequent experiences. These violations can have lasting impacts on adolescents’ mental health, sense of safety, and development, and many young people either do not recognize them as crimes or feel too ashamed, afraid, or unsure to seek help, which further compounds the harm.

Statistics from:

Canadian Center for Childhood Protection. (2025, November 25). Research by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection sheds new light on child sexual victimization online in Canada and gaps in tech industry, government response. protectchildren.ca. https://www.protectchildren.ca/en/press-and-media/news-releases/2025/osv-poll-report

Nau, C., Dietzel, C., & Reyes, E. (2025). More than a quarter of Canadian teens have experienced sexual violence online. The Conversation. https://doi.org/10.64628/aam.s3qvkym7x

Development

Inspiration

This campaign was guided by common motifs associated with online messaging, such as the iconic text-bubble shape, popular emojis often used with sexual connotation, and the idea of hidden dangers both in messages themselves and the often anonymous perpetrators behind the screen.

Concept

Final concepts focused on portraying the idea of hidden dangers and highlighting how they can often go unnoticed, especially in the online world where millions of messages are sent every second. Using this concept, the tagline of Its Not Always Obvious was used to accompany the visuals, calling viewers to assess and locate what they would often miss on first glance.

The campaign

It's Not Always Obvious was created for numerous channels, including posters, public transit ads like bus shelter ads and bus decals, and social media posts.