Democratising harm? Sexual violence, wellbeing and the digital collection of the Rijksmuseum

Engagement with cultural heritage is often presented as beneficial for mental and physical wellbeing, and museums increasingly promote themselves as inclusive institutions. Yet digital heritage practices can unintentionally perpetuate inequalities and reproduce harm when sensitive subjects such as sexual violence are euphemised or recontextualised without care. This paper examines how the Dutch Rijksmuseum’s digital collection mediates sexual violence through its cataloguing language, multilingual search functions and visitor-generated content. Quantitative mapping of search results in Dutch and English was combined with qualitative interpretation of metadata descriptions, institutional tags and interface pathways to analyse how depictions of sexual violence become visible or obscured. The results reveal systematic patterns, including euphemistic and sanitising language, inconsistent terminology across languages and unmoderated visitor features that can expose users to triggering content. These patterns demonstrate how well-intentioned efforts to democratise digital heritage risk undermining inclusivity. This article proposes feminist ethics of care and trauma-informed approaches to digital heritage practices, prioritising non-euphemistic metadata, critical contextualisation of patriarchal structures, content warnings and points of pause, and community-based moderation of visitor features. Centring survivor wellbeing reframes digital heritage not as a neutral repository but as a care infrastructure, positioning museums as accountable to users and survivor communities.