The Emerald International Handbook of Technology-Facilitated Violence and Abuse

Jane Bailey, Asher Flynn, Nicola Henry, Jane Bailey, Asher Flynn, Nicola Henry, Jane Bailey, Asher Flynn, Nicola Henry

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781839828508
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online
Digital technologies have led to many important social and cultural changes worldwide, but they are also implicated in the facilitation of violence and abuse. While cybercriminality is often described as one of the greatest threats to nation states and global security, the wide range of interpersonal crimes comprising technology-facilitated violence and abuse (TFVA) - including, but not limited to, image-based sexual abuse, hate speech, online sexual harassment and cyberstalking - has received little attention.
This handbook features theoretical, empirical, policy and legal analysis of TFVA from over 40 multidisciplinary scholars, practitioners, advocates, survivors and technologists from 17 countries. Addressing a spectrum of abuse perpetrated online, offline and through new technologies, the book sets TFVA in the context of intersecting underlying systemic drivers - including misogyny, racism, classism, colonialism, ableism, ageism, transphobia and homophobia - and discusses ways forward in effectively responding to TFVA. Adopting a holistic approach, it explores a host of issues relating to TFVA, including the nature and experience of harmful and criminal conduct; organisational responses; regulatory, legal and ethical concerns; corporate and social responsibility; justice for victims; bystander intervention; and cultural and social attitudes.
The handbook's international, interdisciplinary and intersectoral nature affords opportunities for learning from common experiences, but it also emphasises the equality-affirming importance of avoiding one-size-fits-all analyses that fail to reflect rich and diverse experiences from around the world.

Section 1
TFVA Across a Spectrum of Behaviors

Chapter 1

Introduction

Jane Bailey

As the introduction to this Handbook made clear, Technology-Facilitated violence and abuse (TFVA) includes a spectrum of behaviors carried out through a diverse range of digital technologies. The eight chapters in the book's first section focus on TFVA issues and experiences across that spectrum, creating a foundation for subsequent sections that focus on particular forms of TFVA.

The first two chapters by Suzie Dunn and Chandell Gosse set the stage for this section and, in many ways, for the collection as a whole, by grappling with some key underlying concepts and concerns, particularly the importance of language, and the deep interplay between so-called “online” and “offline” experiences of violence and abuse. Dunn's chapter addresses the not infrequently asked question of whether the term “violence” is actually applicable to the broad range of behaviors that this Handbook argues fall under the umbrella of TFVA. She examines this question from both sociopolitical and legal perspectives. In particular, she draws on feminist and critical race scholar approaches which, respectively, conceptualize sexual violence as falling on a continuum (Kelly, 1988) and identify systemic violence arising from often intersecting oppressions such as racism and misogyny (Matsuda, Lawrence, Delgado, & Crenshaw, 1993), as well as legal analysis of particular instances of TFVA in Canada and the European Union. Ultimately, Dunn argues that “violence” is an apt and necessary term for ensuring socio-cultural recognition and condemnation of harmful Technology-Facilitated behaviors.

Like Dunn's chapter, Gosse's chapter highlights the importance of language for ensuring more widespread recognition of the harms suffered by TFVA targets. In her chapter, she reports on findings from interviews she conducted with women who had been targets of TFVA. Her women participants' experiences help to illustrate the negative impacts of what she refers to as the “increasingly redundant distinctions between online and offline.” Ultimately, she argues that the “digital dualism” of the online/offline distinction leads to the “treatment of offline life as more real than online life,” thereby denying “women who experience online abuse the space they deserve to have the abuse seen, interpreted, and treated as real and embodied.”

The next six chapters in this section engage with these insights in a variety of ways in the context of examining TFVA-related experiences within communities less frequently accounted for in the literature.

Walter S. DeKeseredy, Danielle M. Stoneberg, and Gabrielle L. Lory's chapter offers additional insights undercutting the online/offline distinction explored by Gosse. Their chapter examines the literature relating to the polyvictimization of North American women university/college students and considers the contribution of TFVA to these women's multiple victimization experiences. Noting emerging research demonstrating that TFVA has become “part and parcel of women's polyvictimization experiences at institutions of higher learning,” they argue for comprehensive multi-pronged strategies that recognize the “co-occurrence of offline and online victimization,” as part of a broader problem of male-to-female abuse on North American post-secondary campuses.

The chapters by Olusean Makinde, Emmanuel Olamijuwon, Nchelem Ichegbo, Cheluchi Onyemelukwe, and Michael Ilesanmi, and by Edgar Pacheco and Neil Melhuish report on the results of quantitative studies relating to a broad range of TFVA behaviors among two lesser studied communities. Makinde et al. report findings from their online survey of young people in sub Saharan Africa, a relatively understudied population in a geographic location where digital connectivity is an increasingly emphasized tool of economic growth and development. Among other things, their findings hint at the interconnection between “online” and “offline.” For example, they suggest that their finding that the reporting of “gender-related abuse was much higher in women than several other forms of abuse,” may be indicative of a “carry over to the digital space” of more broadly based patriarchal norms.

Pacheco and Melhuish's chapter details survey results relating to adult perpetrators of TFVA behaviors (e.g., unwanted sexual solicitations, etc.) in New Zealand. Given that much existing research focuses on targets of TFVA, as well as on young people (especially in the context of cyberbullying), their findings offer perspectives on TFVA from a different standpoint – that of the adult perpetrator. Better understanding the perspectives and motivations of perpetrators is likely to be an important component of developing meaningful, preventative approaches to TFVA. Like Makinde et al.’s chapter, aspects of Pacheco and Melhuish's chapter also speak to online/offline connections. For example, while almost half of their participants who had engaged in TFVA behaviors “indicated their actions occurred online only,” significantly higher numbers of younger participants (aged 18–29 and 30–39) reported a connection between their online behavior and an offline or face-to-face situation.

The final two chapters in this section by Jane Bailey and Sara Shayan, and Bronwyn Carlson and Ryan Frazer focus on the experiences and effects of TFVA on Indigenous peoples – communities not often focused on in existing TFVA research. Both chapters illustrate the deep imbrication between “real/virtual” and “online/offline,” highlighting how pre-existing systemic prejudices and cultural norms and practices are reflected in and re-entrenched through technologies. Bailey and Shayan's chapter discusses the impact of technology on the missing and murdered Indigenous women crisis in Canada, pointing not only to technology's use in perpetrating interpersonal violence and abuse against Indigenous women and girls, but also its use by the state to facilitate ongoing colonialist and misogynist abuses targeting Indigenous women, as well as Indigenous communities at large.

Carlson and Frazer's chapter focuses on cyberbullying and Indigenous peoples. They compellingly illustrate why “there are good reasons to assume that online conflict is different for Indigenous peoples because of diverse cultural practices and the broader political context of settler-colonialism.” Their insights demonstrate the profoundly negative impacts of standardized scholarly approaches to cyberbullying on developing nuanced understandings of the ways in which cyberbullying is enacted and experienced. Noting that such approaches are “delimiting [scholarship's] ability to attend to social difference in online conflict,” they “join calls for more theoretically rigorous, targeted, difference-sensitive studies into bullying.”

References

Kelly, L. (1988). Surviving sexual violence. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Matsuda, M. , Lawrence, C. , Delgado, R. , & Crenshaw, K. (1993). Words that wound: Critical race theory, assaultive speech and the first amendment. New York, NY: Routledge.

Chapter 2

Is it Actually Violence? Framing Technology-Facilitated Abuse as Violence

Suzie Dunn

Abstract

When discussing the term “Technology-Facilitated violence” (TFV) it is often asked: “Is it actually violence?” While international human rights standards, such as the United Nations' Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (United Nations General Assembly, 1979), have long recognized emotional and psychological abuse as forms of violence, including many forms of Technology-Facilitated abuse (United Nations, 2018), law makers and the general public continue to grapple with the question of whether certain harmful Technology-Facilitated behaviors are actually forms of violence. This chapter explores this question in two parts. First, it reviews three theoretical concepts of violence and examines how these concepts apply to Technology-Facilitated behaviors. In doing so, this chapter aims to demonstrate how some harmful Technology-Facilitated behaviors fit under the greater conceptual umbrella of violence. Second, it examines two recent cases, one from the British Columbia Court of Appeal (BCCA) in Canada and a Romanian case from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), that received attention for their legal determinations on whether to define harmful Technology-Facilitated behaviors as forms of violence or not. This chapter concludes with observations on why we should conceptualize certain Technology-Facilitated behaviors as forms of violence.

Keywords: Technology-Facilitated violence; transgender; critical race theory; coercive control; continuum of violence; law

Introduction: Words Matter

The words used to describe a phenomenon shape the legal and social understanding of that experience. A change in terminology around a particular behavior can in turn change the norms of that society. This was demonstrated in the 1970s when feminist advocates in North America began calling for the recognition of and end to sexual harassment (Backhouse, 2012a; Backhouse & Cohen, 1978; MacKinnon & Siegel, 2004). Prior to that time, much of what was redefined by these advocates as “sexual harassment” had previously been considered harmless flirtation or “boys being boys.” In many situations, women were expected to take responsibility for provoking or encouraging men's sexual aggression toward them (Weiss, 2009). Unwanted sexual attention from men was something that might not have been viewed as entirely polite but should be tolerated by women, if not considered complimentary. At any rate, such behaviors were normalized and minimized.

Reframing unwanted sexual attention as sexual harassment altered the social acceptability of that behavior. This change in understanding did not come easily; in fact, many entrenched norms around gendered sexual expectations remain in place today, with some individuals continuing to brush off the harms of sexual harassment (Quinn, 2000). However, following the work of feminists who developed new terminology and reframed the issue, new laws that helped protect women from this harmful and discriminatory behavior were introduced. For example, in Canada, sexual harassment was recognized under human rights legislation as discrimination based on sex (Campbell, 2013). Due to the cultural changes that came along with the advocacy work undertaken by feminists and the shift in the legality of the behavior, people began to see sexual harassment as unacceptable and harmful. This altered the social and legal boundaries of what was considered sexually appropriate behavior (Balos, 2004). As this demonstrates, identifying and naming harms can have significant societal impacts.

At the present time, TFV is a relatively new phenomenon that is not well understood by general society. It faces the same challenges of tolerance and minimization that sexual harassment faced – and continues to face (Fairbairn, 2015). Scholars, legislators, advocates, and the general public are still grappling with what new behaviors such as online stalking, image-based sexual abuse, and harmful digital misrepresentations are and how they should be condemned or regulated, if at all (Henry et al., 2020; Powell & Henry, 2017). Even with some emerging laws that address certain forms of TFV, such as those that prohibit the nonconsensual distribution of intimate images, people continue to be blamed for the Technology-Facilitated abuse they experience (Henry et al., 2020; Waldman, 2019). For example, some abusers feel entitled to hack into women's online accounts in order to steal their nude photos to share on the internet (Massanari, 2017) or create simulated images of women engaging in sex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Technology-Facilitated Violence and Abuse: International Perspectives and Experiences
• Section 1 TFVA Across a Spectrum of Behaviors
• Section 2 Text-Based Harms
• Section 3 Image-Based Harms
• Section 4 Dating Applications
• Section 5 Intimate Partner Violence and Digital Coercive Control
• Section 6 Legal Responses
• Section 7 Responses Beyond Law