“It Feels Like a Prison”: Students, Teachers, and Administrators Speak to the Ubiquity and Impacts of Technology-Facilitated Violence in Secondary Schools

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 11:40 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Perspectives in Digital Spaces for 21st-Century Learning (Table 3)

Abstract

As part of a larger study on technology facilitated sexual violence (TFSV) in Ontario secondary schools, this article focuses on teachers’ and administrators’ narratives on how online violence appears in everyday conversations, interactions, and relationships. Informed by the concepts of institutional betrayal and courage, a qualitative content analysis of semi-structured interviews with nine teachers and four administrators yielded three themes that speak to how participants experience, observe, and address TFSV in schools: the systemic normalization of TFSV; overburdened and under resourced teachers, leading to negation and lack of support for victimized students; and ineffective teacher training, leading to barriers to survivors’ accessing information to resist TFSV in their lives.

Authors

• Laxana Paskaran, York University

• Salsabel Almanssori, University of Windsor