Technology-Based Violence Against Women: Responses to Online-Harassment, Cyber-Stalking, Image Based Abuse and Other Types of Cyber-Aggression

• In Event: Roundtable: Gender-Based Violence and Social Media: The Online Feminist Counter-Public, Alternative Justice, and Backlash

Abstract

This presentation covers technology-based violence against women by examining acts of cyber-aggression, along with responses to these transgressions. Specifically, the presentation highlights findings from a study that examines the ways by which social media and other new technologies have been used to communicate, facilitate, and perpetrate harmful behaviors against survivors of sexual assault and intimate partner violence. It also considers how survivors respond to these re-victimization experiences, and how they navigate through various obstacles in attempt to do "damage control", obtain justice, and restore order in their lives. In addition to reviewing survivors' actions, the study reviews proactive and reactive strategies used by social media platforms as well as criminal justice practitioners in an attempt to understand how victims may be protected and how offenders may be controlled. Recommendations are considered for future research and practice.

Author

• Alison J. Marganski, Le Moyne College