Tech-facilitated violence

Thinking structurally and intersectionally

Bibliographic Data

ID15748871
AuthorsJane Bailey (0000-0002-5120-7744, University of Ottawa, corresponding author), Jacquelyn Burkell (0000-0003-2645-8127, Western University)
Year2021
Volume5
Issue3
Pages531-542
Publication date2021-09-16
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Gender-Based Violence (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2398-6808 • E-ISSN: 2398-6816
PublisherPolicy Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1332/239868021x16286662118554
OpenAlexW3200657197
LanguageEN
Citations received14

Technologically-facilitated violence (TFV) can take many shapes and forms, In this thought piece, we reflect on TFV from structural and intersectional perspectives, examining how these might change our understanding of TFV, with particular attention to gender-based TFV. We are motivated to engage in this reflection for two main reasons. First, traditional understandings of violence, including gender-based violence, tend to prioritise physical acts (whether in word or in application), contributing to a trivialisation of the kinds of harms effected through digitised communications networks (Dunn, 2021). Second, if TFV is understood primarily in terms of individual interpersonal acts, our ability to understand how intersecting oppressions such as sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, colonialism affect the likelihood of being targeted and the experience of violence will be compromised. As Black feminist and critical race scholars such as Crenshaw (1991), Hill Collins (2017), and Jiwani, Berman and Cameron (2010) have ably demonstrated, individualistic single axis accounts of violence outside of technologised contexts have resulted in exclusionary and dangerous outcomes that selectively harm members of equality-seeking communities. The result of these individualised understandings of violence is that structural oppressions are ‘erased, trivialised, or contained within categories that evacuate the violation of [structural] violence’ (Jiwani, 2006, xi–xii). Among other effects, such erasure risks rendering invisible opportunities to intervene with respect to violence not carried out by individuals, often resulting in ‘remedies’ that emphasise interventions by the state against individual actors (for example, through criminal law), powers that already disproportionately target members of equality-seeking communities, and misses the potential need to intervene on capitalistic corporate systems and behaviours. In both cases, the prospect of achieving justice recedes

Criminology · Harm · Sociology · Psychology · Social Psychology · Sociopolitical Dynamics in Russia