Reel Girls: Approaching Gendered Cyberviolence with Young People Through the Lens of Participatory Video

Abstract

This study analyzes young women’s descriptions and conceptualizations of cyberviolence and cyberbullying, including how they both challenge and reify mainstream cyberbullying discourses. The central themes analyzed include the way(s) in which self-representation in social networking sites are constrained through the limited options young women describe as being available for self-expression in these spaces, how notions of publicity, privacy and context-specific communication in social networking sites factor in girls’ descriptions of platform architecture, and how platform architecture often amplifies cyberviolence. Finally, the study unpacks the reasons that young women offer to explain why adults are often so out of touch when it comes to understanding cyberbullying and its relationship to young people’s digital culture. This dissertation contributes to cyberviolence studies, feminist new media, and girls’ digital culture studies, and has relevance for critical feminist criminology, by centring the voices of young women in order to investigate cyberviolence through participatory video with a sizable number of young women. The findings are based on data collected through eight participatory video workshops, two co-produced short documentaries and six focus groups with one hundred and twelve (N=112) participants in total under the larger umbrella study “Cyber & Sexual Violence: Helping Communities Respond” (2013-2016). This project was a community partnership between the Atwater Library and Computer Centre in Montreal and the TAG Lab at Concordia University, and was funded by Status of Women Canada. I employ an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that puts feminist new media studies, feminist approaches to online misogyny and girls’ digital culture studies into conversation with the extant literature on cyberbullying and cyberviolence. This theoretical approach is used to examine how the social norms in the discourse communities of social networking sites that girls outline in their descriptions of cyberviolence are structured through age-old misogynistic myths and impossible contradictions around femininity. Employing a participatory arts-based feminist lens allowed me to invite participants to share their perspectives in an accessible and fun way while examining their work through qualitative thematic analysis. Among the many findings this research produced, three key themes extend as threads that run throughout the dissertation. First, my participants did not relate to the term ‘cyberbullying’ in the way that adults often use it. While researchers and policy-makers continue to debate how to define cyberviolence and cyberbullying, participant responses illustrated the need for more dialogue around the toxic social norms and assumptions that currently structure young people’s digital culture, mainstream cyberbullying debates and anti-cyberbullying programming. Secondly, young women’s focus on issues of publicity versus privacy, anonymity, and peer surveillance highlights both the nuances that girls’ voices contribute to ongoing cyberbullying debates and how social networking sites amplify age-old double standards facing women and girls in visual culture and the public sphere. Finally, the themes of empathy and education that emerged from participants’ suggestions for strategies with which to address cyberviolence underscore the systemic changes that will be necessary in tackling the continually evolving and widespread phenomenon of cyberviolence. Participants conceptualize cyberviolence and cyberbullying as existing along a continuum of daily interactions in social networking sites that include encountering everything from mean jokes to sexual violence.