Integrating the Field of Computer-Mediated Communication to Approach Violence and Victimization in School Settings

• In Event: Lightning Talk: School Approaches to Reduce Delinquency and Improve Safety

Abstract

Assaults and victimization in school settings, including gender-based assaults, have evolved a further harmful side involving technology. For instances, videos of physical bullying are circulated on social media, sex assaults adapt into image-based forms, while victimization is added the layer of extortion and shaming among and beyond peers from the online realm.
To help systematically examine this emerging side of assaults and victimization in school settings, we propose to integrate the scholarship of Computer-Mediated Communication. Especially, the theory of Communication Visibility (CV) could help explicating the formation of harmful incidents. CV framework speaks to the essence of online endeavors as formation of digital traces, by sorting out digital contexts systematically into variations in actors, viewers, and socio-material environments.
Violence of Communication Visibility (VoCV) is proposed as one particular realization of CV, being the innovative form of violence specifically molded to digital contexts, and thus resisting recognition. We identify VoCV as a critical element in technology-facilitated crimes, and especially harmful in school settings for how significantly Computer-Mediated Communication embedded in minors’ sociality. With such identification, we hope to direct necessary efforts of analysis, prevention, and intervention to the level of communication behaviors in approaching violence and victimization in school settings.

Author

• Z. Georgie Shao, Rutgers University