As the 16 Days of Activism campaign comes to a close, the Journal of Gender-Based Violence editors call for urgent feminist action to recognise digital violence as a critical and growing part of the continuum of violence against women.
How does digital violence against women and girls compare to ‘analogue’ violence? Feminist practitioners, advocates and scholars are increasingly grappling with this question.
‘Digital contexts’ are spaces in which abusers engage in familiar patterns of entitlement, power and control. For women and girls, these contexts are too frequently spaces for sexual harassment, rape and murder threats, and stalking.
In 2023, a United Nations expert report linked ‘technology-facilitated violence against women’ to the continuum of violence that Liz Kelly named in 1988, by noting that such acts result in ‘physical, sexual, psychological, social, political, or economic harm, or other infringements of rights and freedoms’: the same impacts that are produced by all forms of violence against women.
This suggests that, in many ways, as noted by the End Violence Against Women coalition, digital violence entails the use of ‘new technology’ to create the ‘same old problems’.
Recognising global patterns in technology-facilitated abuse
Although digital violence takes many forms, it reflects known local and transnational patterns. Access to technology can be more limited for women and girls in low- and middle-income countries, yet the patterns of how social media and internet-based communications are used to harm women – and the ways in which young men normalise their use of online violence – are strikingly alike, regardless of the location.
Digital violence is also on the rise: Recent years have witnessed an increase in online romance scams, the use of dating apps as a ‘hunting ground’, and so-called ‘revenge porn’, as well as ‘semiotic’ violence that is often directed at elected politicians and journalists. The harms caused by digital violence require specific, immediate interventions. By gaining a more nuanced understanding of what technology-facilitated violence can look like for everyone, we can challenge stereotypes about victim-survivors and perpetrators. These may differ from our knowledge about offline violence.
Moreover, attacks on marginalised groups carry symbolic meanings and can increase the sense of alienation from, and distrust in, the political system. This means that it is imperative to study digital violence against women politicians and political actors.
Policy makers must hold social media platforms accountable for creating accessible routes to report harassment, threats and violence, and commit to improving support for all victim-survivors, including those who occupy positions of power as politicians or engage in political activism.
Developing new feminist concepts for emerging forms of online abuse
Just as technology affords new routes for old abuses, scholarship on digital violence needs new concepts that build on existing insights.
‘Online sexual harassment’ has parallels with street harassment – women’s freedom in the public sphere is constrained. Young women frequently share with us how they self-censor themselves online, thinking through every photograph they post and living with anticipatory anxiety about being subjected to sexually abusive, sexist, racist and/or homophobic comments.
Similarly, the research on ‘digital coercive control’ captures how domestic violence perpetrators use technological surveillance, including tracking software and spyware.
Reframing forms of violence such as ‘revenge porn’ as ‘image-based sexual abuse’ underscores the need for specialist survivor support and sanctions against perpetrators. Increasing attention on ‘deepfake’ pornography – artificially created sexually degrading images of women – is reinvigorating the feminist concerns about the well-established links between pornography and sexual violence.
We urgently need to determine how to enable young men to challenge and resist misogyny in the online ‘manosphere’ and prevent them from being drawn into online incel communities, where the language used to describe women mirrors that of mainstream pornography: Women are positioned as the objects of men’s desire and exist purely to be humiliated and abused.
Understanding institutional abuse and how race, gender and migration shape digital abuse
Alongside the constant risk of digital violence to which women are routinely exposed in their everyday online interactions, this violence can also manifest in contexts where institutional power is abused.
In their recent research, Megan Isaac and Aisha K. Gill sought to identify whether interviewees working in the anti-corruption, gender-based violence and human rights fields had encountered cases of sexual corruption. Asylum accommodation, immigration detention, the abuse of position for sexual purposes by police officers, sex for rent and corruption during migration were identified as key sites.
Abuse experienced at one site may influence the vulnerability to and experiences of sexual corruption/sextortion in another. What we see, then, is that, in contexts such as migration, where race and gender intersect in complex ways, the use of technology can amplify violence and exploitation.
Work in Australia and New Zealand has shown how technology is facilitating the sexual exploitation and trafficking of Asian and Pasifika women and girls.
More broadly, the analyses of online abuse consistently find that women of colour are targeted with a combination of sexism and racism. Moya Bailey’s concept of ‘misogynoir’ describes the specific targeting of Black women, as exemplified by the abuse directed at UK Member of Parliament Diane Abbott through social media.
Building feminist movements to confront digital violence
As feminist activists and scholars continue to name these practices, we must continue to connect digital violence to intersecting inequalities and the continuum of patriarchal violence.
The revelation, for example, that ordinary men from a village in France had sought out an online forum where Dominique Pelicot offered his wife Gisèle to be raped has shone a light on how abusive men can exploit technology. At the heart of these rapists’ actions is the presumed male right of sexual access to women and the stories that men tell themselves about sexual consent.
We still have a long way to go to change these behaviours. Responding only to regulatory questions about technology, without asking deeper, more far-reaching questions about gender, power and violence will fail to end digital violence.
These issues form the impetus for our work at the Journal of Gender-Based Violence. As the journal’s new editorial team, we seek to expand on the potential of online technology, particularly social media, as a new arena for movement-building against digital violence.
We need more research in order to understand the complex contours of digital violence, so that our interventions respond to new routes as well as old abuses. More now than ever, we need feminist conceptual insights, the fierce commitment of those delivering support for survivors, and effective ways to prevent digital violence.
Maddy Coy, Co-Editor, University of Florida, US
Aisha K. Gill, Co-Editor, University of Bristol, UK
Tamsin Bradley, Co-Editor, University of Portsmouth, UK
Kirsten Campbell, Co-Editor, Loughborough University, UK
Find out more about the Journal of Gender-Based Violence on Bristol University Press Digital here.
Bristol University Press/Policy Press newsletter subscribers receive a 25% discount – sign up here.
Follow Transforming Society so we can let you know when new articles publish.
The views and opinions expressed on this blog site are solely those of the original blog post authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the Policy Press and/or any/all contributors to this site.
Image credit: Gor Davtyan via Unsplash