THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO

GENDER, MEDIA AND VIOLENCE

With heated discussion around #MeToo, journalistic reporting on domestic abuse, and the
popularity of true crime documentaries, gendered media discourse around violence and
harassment has never been more prominent.
The Routledge Companion to Gender, Media and Violence is an outstanding reference
source to the key topics, problems and debates in this important subject and is the first
collection on media and violence to take a gendered, intersectional approach. Comprising
over 50 chapters by a team of interdisciplinary and international contributors, the book is
structured around the following parts:

• News
• Representing reality
• Gender-based violence online
• Feminist responses

The media examples examined range from Australia to Zimbabwe and span print and
online news, documentary film and television, podcasts, pornography, memoir, comedy,
memes, influencer videos, and digital feminist protest. Types of violence considered include
domestic abuse, “honour”-based violence, sexual violence and harassment, female genital
mutilation/cutting, child sexual abuse, transphobic violence, and the aftermath of conflict.
Good practice is considered in relation to both responsible news reporting and pedagogy.
The Routledge Companion to Gender, Media and Violence is essential reading for students
and researchers in Gender Studies, Media Studies, Sociology, and Criminology.

Karen Boyle is Professor of Feminist Media Studies at the University of Strathclyde,

Scotland.

Susan Berridge is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media at the University of Stirling, Scotland.
 ROUTLEDGE COMPANIONS TO GENDER

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For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-
Companions-to-Gender/book-series/RCGENDER
 THE ROUTLEDGE
COMPANION TO
GENDER, MEDIA AND
VIOLENCE

Edited by Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge

 Designed cover image: Getty Images
First published 2024
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2024 selection and editorial matter, Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge; individual
chapters, the contributors
The right of Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge to be identified as the author of the
editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Names: Boyle, Karen, 1972- editor. | Berridge, Susan, editor.
Title: The Routledge companion to gender, media and violence / edited by Karen Boyle
and Susan Berridge.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. |
Series: Routledge companions to gender | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2023011063 (print) | LCCN 2023011064 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781032061368 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032061382 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003200871 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Violence in mass media. | Violence‐‐Sex differences. | Sex role in
mass media. | Women in mass media. | Women‐‐Violence against. | Feminism and
mass media. | LCGFT: Essays.
Classification: LCC P96.V5 R68 2024 (print) | LCC P96.V5 (ebook) |
DDC 302.23‐‐dc23/eng/20230713
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023011063
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023011064
ISBN: 978-1-032-06136-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-06138-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-20087-1 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871
Typeset in Times New Roman
by MPS Limited, Dehradun
 CONTENTS

List of figures and tables xii

List of contributors xiii
Acknowledgements xxvii

Introduction 1
Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge

PART 1
News 13

News: Introduction to Part 1 15

Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge

1 “Sensational spikes” and “isolated incidents”: Examining the

misrepresentation of domestic abuse by the media using the
case studies of football and Covid-19 23
Nancy Lombard

2 The media and male victim-survivors of domestic abuse 34

Stephen R. Burrell and Alishya Dhir

3 Invisible feelings, anti-Asian violences and abolition feminisms 44

Salonee Bhaman and Rachel Kuo

v
 Contents

4 Towards a fair justice system in Canada: Women and girls homicide

database project 55
Kandice Parker, Melanie A. Morrison, Todd G. Morrison,
Senator Lillian Eva Quan Dyck, and Karissa Wall

5 Familicide, gender and “mental illness”: Beyond false dualisms 65

Denise Buiten

6 Femminicidio in Italian televised news: A case study of La Vita in

Diretta 75
Federica Formato

7 Cruel benevolence: Vulnerable menaces, menacing vulnerabilities

and the white male vigilante trope 84
Kathryn Claire Higgins

8 Exploring US news media portrayals of girls’ violence in the 1980s

and 1990s: The emergence of a moral panic 95
Tia S. Andersen, Jennifer Silcox, and Deena A. Isom

9 Child sexual exploitation and scapegoating minority communities 105

Aisha K. Gill

10 Hidden or hypervisible? Mapping the making of a moral panic over

female genital mutilation/cutting 116
Emmaleena Käkelä

11 Examining the Zimbabwean news media’s framing of men as victims

of sexual assault 127
Mthokozisi Phathisani Ndhlovu

12 The HIV man, Alexandra man and Hotboy: Swedish news coverage
of rape as a folklore of fear 136
Gabriella Nilsson

13 Forward and backwards: Sexual violence in Portuguese news media 145

Júlia Garraio, Inês Amaral, Rita Basílio Simões, and Sofia José Santos

14 Representations of gender-based violence against children in Nigeria 155

Onyinyechi Nancy Nwaolikpe

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 Contents

15 Media, courts and “#RiceBunny” testimonies in China 163

Li Jun

16 Journalism, sexual violence and social responsibility 174

Einar Thorsen and Chindu Sreedharan

PART 2
Representing reality 185

Representing reality: Introduction to Part 2 187

Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge

17 The politics of the traumatised voice: Communicative injustice and

structural silencing in contemporary media culture 194
Jilly Boyce Kay

18 Public survivors: The burdens and possibilities of speaking as a

survivor 204
Tanya Serisier

19 Telling an authentic, relatable #MeToo story on YouTube 213

Carol Harrington and MacKenzie Gerrard

20 Mental images and emotive voices in true crime podcasts focused on

female victims 222
Jennifer O’Meara

21 Sexual violence and social justice: The celebrity #MeToo

documentary in the US 232
Tanya Horeck

22 Remediating the “Yorkshire Ripper” event in the era of feminist true

crime 242
Hannah Hamad

23 Class, victim credibility and the Pygmalion problem in real crime

dramas Three Girls and Unbelieveable 251
Helen Wood

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 Contents

24 Victimhood and violence: Weaponising white femininity in South

Africa 261
Nicky Falkof

25 Pregnant and disappeared: The Missing White Woman Syndrome in

magazines 271
Jennifer Musial

26 Discourses and narratives of gender-based violence in Greek

women’s magazines 281
Rafaela Orphanides

27 Just a fantasy: How the discourse of fantasy attempts to resolve the

conflicts of porn consumption 290
Maria Garner and Fiona Vera-Gray

28 Patriarchal protectors of the national body: Violence, masculinity

and gendered constructions of the US/Mexico border 300
Lucia M. Palmer

29 Militarised masculinity and the perpetration of violence in Chilean

documentary 310
Lisa DiGiovanni

30 Women’s activist filmmaking against gendered violence in Pakistan 319

Rahat Imran

PART 3
Gender-based violence online 329

Gender‐based violence online: Introduction to Part 3 331

Susan Berridge and Karen Boyle

31 Technology-facilitated abuse: Intimate partner violence in digital

society 337
Anastasia Powell

32 Tactics of hate: Toxic “creativity” in anti-feminist men’s rights politics 348

Debbie Ging

viii
 Contents

33 Bad actors or bad architecture? Rethinking gendered violence online 358

Emma A. Jane

34 Networked misogyny on TikTok: A critical conjuncture 369

Sarah Banet-Weiser and Sophie Maddocks

35 Naming and framing the harms of cyberflashing: Men sending

non-consensual dick pics 380
Clare McGlynn

36 The non-consensual dissemination of intimate images on Telegram:

The Italian case 391
Silvia Semenzin and Lucia Bainotti

37 Online child sexual exploitation in the news: Competing claims of

gendered and sexual harm 401
Michael Salter

38 Responding to transphobic violence online 412

Ben Colliver

39 Homophobic humour in rape memes 423

Maja Brandt Andreasen

40 Online discourses of violence against men: Portrayals of neglect,

discrimination and equality gone too far 432
Satu Venäläinen

41 The curious case of Karen Carney: The argument for equity over
equality in curbing the online abuse of women in sports media 442
Guy Harrison and Melody Huslage

42 “Online othering”: The case of women in politics 452

Emily Harmer

43 Cyberviolence against women in politics 462

Eleonora Esposito

44 Violence and the feminist potential of content moderation 473

Carolina Are and Ysabel Gerrard

ix
 Contents

PART 4
Feminist responses 483

Feminist responses: Introduction to Part 4 485

Susan Berridge and Karen Boyle

45 Engaging men online: Using online media for violence prevention

with men and boys 491
Michael Flood

46 Hashtag feminism in Brazil: Making sense of gender-based violence

with #PrimeiroAssédio 501
Gabriela Loureiro

47 After the affect: The tenuous leadership of viral feminists 511

Angela Towers

48 Mediatisation of women’s rage in Spain: Strategies of discursive

transformation in digital spaces 522
Sonia Núñez Puente and Diana Fernández Romero

49 Hashtag feminism straddling the Americas: A comparison between

#NiUnaMenos and #MeToo 531
Francesca Belotti, Vittoria Bernardini, and Francesca Comunello

50 Digital feminist activism against gender violence in South Korea 543

Kaitlynn Mendes and Euisol Jeong

51 Women 2020: How Pakistani feminisms unfolded between Twitter

and the streets 553
Munira Cheema

52 Digital feminist and queer activism against gender violence in China 563
Jia Tan

53 Controversies, protests, coalitions: Screen media’s lessons from the

past 573
Gary Needham

x
 Contents

54 Collective action, performance and the body-territory in Latin

American feminisms 582
Paula Serafini

55 Doing feminist activism through creative practice research 592

Eylem Atakav

56 Rethinking the curriculum: #MeToo and contemporary literary

studies 601
Mary K. Holland and Heather Hewett

57 I won’t look: Refusing to engage with gender-based violence in

women-led screen media 611
Rebecca Harrison

Index 621

xi
 FIGURES AND TABLES

Figures
4.1 Victim-perpetrator relationships by presumed or confirmed victim
race (percent) 58
4.2 Conviction types based on presumed or confirmed victim and
perpetrator race (percent) 59
4.3 Second-degree murder sentencing length (years) by presumed or
confirmed victim and perpetrator race 60
15.1 Xianzi and her supporters before the first trial. Her placard reads
“Must Win”. Photography: Zhang Yiyi 165
15.2 Xianzi and other feminists show support for He Qian and Zou
Sicong during the Deng Fei trial. Photo provided by Xianzi 166
30.1 Emphasising vulnerability in Swara (Samar Minallah) 322

Tables
6.1 Corpus of televised news recalling episodes of femminicido in La
Vita in Diretta 79
8.1 Description of the analytical sample of print news media articles
(1980–1999) (n = 97) 97
8.2 Print media coverage of girls’ violence over time (1980–1999) (n = 97) 98
26.1 GBV in Global North and Global South settings in women’s
magazines 287

xii
 CONTRIBUTORS

Inês Amaral is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University
of Coimbra. She holds a PhD in Communication Sciences from the University of Minho
and is a researcher at the Centre for Communication and Society Studies. She has been
researching sociabilities in digital social networks, media and digital literacy, technologies
and ageing, audiences and media consumption in the digital age, gender and media. Inês has
published in journals including the International Journal of Communication, El Professional
de la Información, Media Studies and the European Journal for Research on the Education
and Learning of Adults.

Tia S. Andersen, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology and

Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina. Her main areas of research include
mentoring and other strength-based approaches to positive youth development, service-
learning and media constructions of girls’ violence, and gender and racial disparities in
juvenile justice system processing.

Maja Brandt Andreasen is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender Studies at the University of

Stavanger, Norway. She holds a PhD in Gender Studies from the University of Strathclyde.
Her research is interdisciplinary, focusing on the discursive construction of gender, race and
sexuality in online humour. Her research interests include Internet memes, rape culture,
online extremism, the manosphere, and online misogyny, racism and homophobia.

Carolina Are is an Innovation Fellow at Northumbria University’s Centre for Digital

Citizens. Her work on social media moderation, platform governance and algorithm bias
has been published in Feminist Media Studies, Porn Studies, First Monday and Journalism,
and featured in MIT Technology Review, The Atlantic, Vice, Wired and Mashable. She is
also a blogger, writer, pole dance instructor and award-winning activist.

Eylem Atakav is Professor of Film, Gender and Public Engagement at the University of
East Anglia where she teaches courses on women and world cinema; gender and Middle

xiii
 Contributors

Eastern media and documentary. She is the author of Women and Turkish Cinema: Gender
Politics, Cultural Identity and Representation (2012) and editor of Directory of World
Cinema: Turkey (Intellect, 2013). She is the director of Growing Up Married – an
internationally acclaimed documentary about forced marriage and child brides in Turkey;
and co-director of Lifeline, a documentary that reveals the reality of working in the frontline
of the domestic abuse sector in the UK during the pandemic.

Lucia Bainotti (PhD) is Lecturer in New Media and Digital Culture and a postdoctoral
researcher at the University of Amsterdam. As a postdoctoral researcher, she works on the
SoBigData++ project, focusing on visual analysis for social media research. Her main
research interests revolve around digital consumer cultures, social media influencers, digital
methods and gender-based abuse online. She is the author of the book Donne tutte puttane.
Revenge porn and maschilità egemone (with Silvia Semenzin, Durango Edizioni), which
addresses the phenomenon of the non-consensual dissemination of intimate images on
Italian Telegram channels.

Sarah Banet-Weiser is Distinguished Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg

School for Communication and Professor of Communication at the University of Southern
California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. She is the founding
director of the Center for Collaborative Communication at the Annenberg Schools (CCAS).
She has authored or edited eight books, including the award-winning Authentic™: The
Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture and Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular
Misogyny. Her latest book, co-authored with Kathryn Higgins, is forthcoming in 2023 with
Polity Books, titled Believability: Sexual Violence, Media and the Politics of Doubt.

Rita Basílio Simões is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the
University of Coimbra. She holds a PhD in Communication Sciences and is a researcher at
the NOVA Institute of Communication. Rita serves as coordinator of the Portuguese
Association of Communication (SOPCOM) Working Group on Gender and Sexualities and
of the Portuguese participation in the Global Media Monitoring Project. She has expertise
in feminist media studies, digital media, journalism studies, gender violence and media
policy. Her research focuses on feminist studies, digital media, journalism, gender violence
and media policy.

Francesca Belotti (PhD) is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of

Communication and Social Research, Sapienza University of Rome (Italy). Her research,
carried out between Europe and Latin America, focuses on alternative media practices of
grassroots organizations, ranging from Indigenous communities to feminist and youth
climate movements. She also investigates digital media usage practices across generations,
with a focus on ICT-related sexist and ageist stereotypes.

Vittoria Bernardini (PhD) is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of

Economics, Engineering, Society and Business Organization, University of Tuscia (Italy).
Her main area of research is gender-based violence and feminist digital activism. She has
also worked on young people’s constructions of gender and intersectional identities.

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 Contributors

Susan Berridge is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media at the University of Stirling, Scotland.
Her research focuses on gender inequalities on- and off-screen in film and television. She has
published on these themes in journals including Feminist Media Studies, European Journal of
Cultural Studies and Journal of British Cinema and Television as well as in edited collections
on gender and media. She is currently working on a BA/Leverhulme funded project on
intimacy coordination in contemporary UK television (with Tanya Horeck).

Salonee Bhaman is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History and programme in

Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her research interests focus on
histories of race, gender, social welfare, migration and labor in the twentieth century United
States. She also leads historical walking tours of New York City and is a co-leader of the
Asian American Feminist Collective.

Karen Boyle is Professor of Feminist Media Studies at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland.
Her research focuses primarily on gender, violence and representation and publications
include #MeToo, Weinstein and Feminism (Palgrave, 2019), Everyday Pornography (as editor,
Routledge, 2015) and Media and Violence: Gendering the Debates (Sage, 2010). She is
currently working on a BA/Leverhulme funded project on the use of trigger warnings in higher
education.

Denise Buiten is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Social Justice at The University of Notre
Dame Australia and Senior Research Associate of the University of Johannesburg. Her
research focuses on understanding gender-based violence and tracing the evolving discourses
surrounding gendered violence in media, policy and public debates.

Stephen R. Burrell is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in the Department of

Sociology at Durham University. His research focuses on men, masculinities and violence.
He is currently exploring the impact of climate change on these issues and how to engage
men and boys in caring for the environment. Stephen is the Deputy Director of Durham’s
Centre for Research into Violence and Abuse, a trustee at White Ribbon UK and steering
group co-chair for a local community interest company, Changing Relations. He also co-
hosts a podcast called Now and Men: Current conversations about men’s lives.

Munira Cheema is Lecturer in Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College,
London. Her research interests are at the intersection of cultural studies, media and politics.
She is currently working on two projects: the first looking at the rise of social media as an
alternative public sphere in Pakistan; the second evaluating female politicians’ participation
across mediated and parliamentary contexts in Pakistan. Her books include Women and TV
Culture in Pakistan: Gender, Islam and National Identity (Bloomsbury, 2018) and the
forthcoming Spaces of Protest in Pakistan: Debating National Identity on Social Media and
in Cafes (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024).

Ben Colliver is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Birmingham City University. His research
interests focus on hate crime, gender and sexuality. His research broadly investigates the
role of gender and sexuality in relation to victimisation. He has published extensively on
transgender people’s experiences of hate crime, online hate speech and the representation of

xv
 Contributors

lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people in video-games. He is also a member of
the British Society of Criminology “Hate Crime Network” as a steering group member.

Francesca Comunello (PhD) is Full Professor in the Department of Communication and

Social Research, Sapienza University of Rome (Italy), where she teaches “Internet and Social
Media Studies” and “Gender and Media Studies”. Her research and publications focus on the
intersections between digital technology and society, including digitally mediated social
relations, ageing and digital communication, gender and digital platforms, digital media and
disaster communication.

Alishya Dhir is a PhD researcher and Teaching Fellow based in the Centre for Research into
Violence and Abuse (CRiVA) in the Department of Sociology, Durham University, UK.
Alishya’s PhD is focused on youth image-based sexual abuse and police responses. She has
also carried out research into technologically-facilitated sexual violence and sexual violence
at music festivals.

Lisa DiGiovanni is Professor of Spanish Peninsular and Latin American Studies, jointly
appointed in the Departments of Modern Languages and Cultures and Holocaust and
Genocide Studies at Keene State College (USA). She is also affiliated faculty in Women’s
and Gender Studies. Her interdisciplinary research and teaching centers on representations
of war and dictatorial violence in 20th – 21st century Spain and Latin America. Her first
book, Unsettling Nostalgia in Spain and Chile: Longing for Resistance in Literature
and Film, was published in 2019. Her current book, Militarized Masculinity in Spain and
Chile, focuses on narratives that render visible the causes and consequences of militaristic
culture.

The Honourable Senator Lillian Dyck, PhD, occupied roles as both Professor and Associate
Dean at the University of Saskatchewan. The Honourable Lillian Dyck is a member of the
Cree Gordon First Nation in Saskatchewan as well as a first-generation Chinese Canadian.
Dr. Lillian Dyck has dedicated her life to the pursuit of equity, equality and justice, and was
the first Indigenous woman to occupy the role of Senator in Canada and the first Canadian-
born Senator of Chinese descent.

Eleonora Esposito is a Researcher at the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the
University of Navarra (Spain) and a Seconded National Expert at the European Institute
for Gender Equality (EIGE). A Marie Skłodowska-Curie Alumna (2019-2021), Eleonora
has been investigating complex intersections between language, identity and the digitalised
society in a number of global contexts, encompassing the EU, the Anglophone Caribbean
and the Middle East.

Nicky Falkof is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Wits University in Johannesburg.

Her books include Worrier State: Risk, Anxiety and Moral Panic in South Africa (2022),
Intimacy and Injury: In the Wake of #MeToo in India and South Africa (2022), Anxious
Joburg: The Inner Lives of a Global South City (2020) and The End of Whiteness: Satanism
and Family Murder in Late Apartheid South Africa (2015).

xvi
 Contributors

Diana Fernández Romero holds a PhD in Communications. She is Senior Lecturer in

Communications and Media at Rey Juan Carlos University (Madrid, Spain). Her research
interests include Discourse Analysis, Communication and Gender, Gender-based Violence
and Digital Feminist Activism. She has been Visiting Researcher at Birkbeck, University of
London, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and Università di Bologna. Her recent research
has been published in journals like Journal of Gender Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Social
Science Computer Review, Feminist Theory and European Journal of Women’s Studies.

Michael Flood is an internationally recognised researcher on violence against women,

violence prevention, and men, masculinities and gender. He has made significant
contributions to scholarly and public understanding of men’s involvements in preventing
violence against women and building gender equality, and to scholarship and programming
regarding violence and prevention. Professor Flood is also an educator and advocate. He is
the author of Engaging Men and Boys in Violence Prevention (2019), the co-author of
Masculinity and Violent Extremism (2022) and the lead editor of Engaging Men in Building
Gender Equality (2015) and The International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities (2007).

Federica Formato is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Brighton. Her

research interests range from gendered and inclusive language to masculinities and to male
violence against women. Her work has been published in international peer-review journals.
In 2019, Palgrave published her first monograph Gender, Discourse and Ideology in Italian.
She is currently working on Feminist, Corpus-Assisted Research and Language Inclusivity
(under contract with Cambridge University Press).

Maria Garner is Research Fellow at the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit, London
Metropolitan University, where she researches violence against women.

Júlia Garraio is researcher at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, where
she currently co-coordinates the working group Policredos (Religion, Gender and Society)
and the Observatory of Masculinities. She is co-founder of the international research group
SVAC-Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict. She is Reviews Editor on the International
Editorial Board of the European Journal of Women’s Studies. Júlia has participated in six
research projects in the areas of Gender Studies, Memory Studies, Cultural Studies,
Literature and Communication. Her main focus of research is narratives and the politics of
representing sexual violence in literature and the media.

MacKenzie Gerrard is a recent Master’s graduate in Criminology from Victoria University of

Wellington, New Zealand. Her Master’s research focused on the ethical concerns surrounding
transnational conglomerates in the digital era, with a particular focus on corporate
greenwashing. She has most recently worked as a research assistant, collaborating on
publications relating to the intersection of stigma, sexual harm on social media, and
government mismanagement of natural disaster victims. She has previously worked as a tutor
and marker on courses relating to women and crime, criminal psychology and research methods.

Ysabel Gerrard is Lecturer in Digital Media and Society at the University of Sheffield. Her
research on social media content moderation has been published in journals like New Media

xvii
 Contributors

and Society and Social Media + Society, and featured in venues like The Guardian and
WIRED. Ysabel is also the Chair of ECREA’s Digital Culture and Communication section
and has been a member of Meta’s Suicide and Self-Injury Advisory Board since March 2019.

Aisha K. Gill, PhD, CBE is Professor of Criminology at University of Bristol. Her main research
areas are health and criminal justice responses to violence against Black, minority ethnic and
refugee women in the UK, Afghanistan, Georgia, Jordan, Libya, Iraqi Kurdistan, India,
Pakistan and Yemen. She has been involved in grassroots work to address violence against
women and girls, “honour” crimes and forced marriage for 23 years. Recent publications focus
on femicide, “honour” killings, forced marriage, child sexual exploitation and sexual abuse in
Black and racially minoritised communities, FGM, sex selective abortions, and women who
kill. She is Co-Chair of End Violence Against Women Coalition.

Debbie Ging is Associate Professor of Digital Media and Gender at Dublin City University.
She teaches and researches on digital misogyny, anti-feminism, male supremacism online
and the incel community. Debbie is co-editor of Gender Hate Online: Understanding the New
Antifeminism (Palgrave, 2019). She is a member of the National Anti-Bullying Centre and of
the Institute for Future Media, Democracy and Society (FuJo).

Hannah Hamad is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Cardiff University,

School of Journalism, Media and Culture. She is the author of Postfeminism and Paternity
in Contemporary US Film: Framing Fatherhood (Routledge, 2014) and Film, Feminism and
Rape Culture in the Yorkshire Ripper Years (BFI/Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2023).

Emily Harmer is Senior Lecturer in Media and Co-Director of DigiPol: Centre for Digital
Politics, Media and Democracy at the University of Liverpool. Her work addresses the
relationship between gender, media and politics. Her recent work explores the online abuse,
harassment and everyday sexism aimed at women in the UK Parliament. She is the author
of Women, Media and Elections: Representation and Marginalisation in British Politics
(Bristol University Press, 2021) and co-editor of Online Othering: Exploring Digital Violence
and Discrimination on the Web (Palgrave, 2019).

Carol Harrington is Senior Lecturer in the School of Social and Cultural Studies, Victoria
University of Wellington, New Zealand. Her research concerns politics and policy on violence
against women, sexual violence and sex work. She has taught courses on the sociology of
violence, sexuality and comparative welfare regimes. She has published on the politics of
sexual violence, including anti-sex-trafficking policy in Bosnia and Kosovo, gender expertise
within peacekeeping operations and sex work knowledge politics in Timor Leste, Sweden, the
UK and New Zealand. Most recently, she has published the book Neoliberal Sexual Violence
Politics: Toxic Masculinity and #MeToo (Palgrave, 2022).

Guy Harrison is Assistant Professor of Journalism and Electronic Media at the University of
Tennessee, Knoxville. His research focuses on gender and race in U.S. sports media. In
2021, he published the book On the Sidelines: Gendered Neoliberalism and the American
Female Sportscaster.

xviii
 Contributors

Rebecca Harrison is Lecturer in Film and Media at The Open University and a freelance
film critic. As a survivor and from a working-class background, she is committed to
challenging the white, patriarchal, and elitist structures that have historically excluded
students and scholars from Higher Education. Her research tends to focus on histories of
media technologies and questions of identity and power. Her writing appears in MAI:
Feminism and Visual Culture and Sight & Sound, among many other venues, and her most
recent book is the BFI Film Classic title The Empire Strikes Back (2020).

Heather Hewett is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and an
affiliate of the English Department at SUNY New Paltz. She is a co-editor, with Mary
Holland, of #MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual
Violence and Rape Culture (Bloomsbury, 2021). Her work on contemporary women’s
writing and feminism has been published in scholarly journals and edited collections as well
as mainstream and literary publications. During 2022-2024, she will be working with the
American Council of Learned Societies on their higher education initiative.

Kathryn Claire Higgins is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Annenberg Center for Collaborative
Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her writing on language, culture and the
politics of vulnerability is published in Journalism, Visual Communication and Feminist
Media Studies, among others. Together with Sarah Banet-Weiser she is the co-author of
Believability: Sexual Violence, Media, and the Politics of Doubt (Polity, 2023).

Mary K. Holland is Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz, where she teaches
contemporary literature, women’s writing and theory. Her most recent book is #MeToo
and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape
Culture (co-edited with Heather Hewett, Bloomsbury, 2021). She is also the author of The
Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Succeeding Postmodernism
(Bloomsbury, 2013), and co-editor of Approaches to Teaching the Works of David Foster
Wallace (MLA, 2019). Currently, she’s working on a collection of narratives about
gendered abuse in academia.

Tanya Horeck is Professor of Film and Feminist Media Studies at Anglia Ruskin
University. She is the author of Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film
and Justice on Demand: True Crime in the Digital Streaming Era. Her current research
projects include an UKRI/AHRC funded study on online sexual risks and gendered harms
for young people during Covid-19 and a British Academy funded study on the rise of
consent culture and intimacy coordination.

Melody Huslage is a doctoral candidate in the College of Social Work at the University of
Tennessee, Knoxville. Her research utilises an intersectional framework to investigate issues
of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Rahat Imran holds a PhD in Cinema Studies from the School of Communication, Simon
Fraser University, Canada. Dr Imran held a 2-year MSCA Post-doctoral Research
Fellowship at the Department of Film and Screen Media, University College Cork
(UCC), Ireland (2020-2022). Prior to this, she served as Associate Professor at the School

xix
 Contributors

of Creative Arts, University of Lahore, Pakistan. She published the first academic book on
Pakistani documentary cinema: Activist Documentary Film in Pakistan: The Emergence of a
Cinema of Accountability (Routledge, 2016) and is currently writing the first monograph on
Afghan women filmmakers (forthcoming, Routledge, 2024).

Deena A. Isom is Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice
and the African American Studies Program at the University of South Carolina. She received
her PhD from Emory University in 2015. Her research aims to understand the causes and
consequences of disparities in criminal behaviours and contact with the justice system.

Emma A. Jane – formerly published as Emma Tom – is Associate Professor at UNSW

Sydney. She researches the social implications of emerging technologies using public interest
technology frameworks and co-design methods to interrogate the issues and consider
proposed interventions. She has presented her research findings to the Australian Human
Rights Commission, the Australian government’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency and
the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House. Prior to her academic career,
Dr Jane spent nearly 25 years working in print, broadcast and electronic media. Over the
course of her working life, she has received multiple awards and prizes for her scholarly
work, journalism and fiction. Her 11th book, Diagnosis Normal (Penguin Random House,
2022), is a hybrid memoir.

Euisol Jeong is an instructor in Women’s and Gender Studies at Chungnam National

University, South Korea. Her research interests include digital practices, feminist
movement, and the role of digitally mediated affect in social activism, specifically in the
recent feminist phenomena in East Asian societies. She is currently preparing a manuscript
on “trollish” digital feminist activism, based on her PhD Troll feminism: the rise of popular
feminism in South Korea (2020). She is also working on a research project that investigates
the impact of digital feminism on the gendered experiences of young women living in non-
metropolitan areas of South Korea.

Emmaleena Käkelä is Research Associate at the School of Social Work and Social Policy at
the University of Strathclyde. Her participatory doctoral research explored refugee women’s
changing vulnerabilities in relation to female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) and other
forms of gender-based violence from a migration perspective. Her research interests are in
the areas of forced migration and asylum, cultural and identity negotiation and the
relationship between gender-based and structural forms of violence and harm.

Jilly Boyce Kay is Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Leicester who
specialises in feminist media and cultural studies. She has published widely on gender, class,
feminism and popular and political culture. She is author of the monograph Gender, Media
and Voice: Communicative Injustice and Public Speech (Palgrave, 2020).

Rachel Kuo is Assistant Professor of Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests focus on race, feminism, social movements and
digital technology. She is a founding member and current affiliate of the Center for Critical
Race and Digital Studies and a co-leader of the Asian American Feminist Collective.

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 Contributors

Li Jun (AKA Li Sipan,
) has a PhD in political sociology. She is Chau Hoi Shuen
Scholar-in-Residence of Beatrice Bain Research Group at the University of California
Berkeley and Associate Professor at the Cheung Kong School of Journalism and
Communication, Shantou University in China. In 2004, she established the feminist
organisation Women Awakening Network (), focusing on gender equality in
journalism and communication. Li has coordinated many landmark advocacy projects on
anti-sexual harassment policy and anti-domestic violence legislation. Her research focuses
on the generational difference in media strategy within Chinese feminist activism.

Nancy Lombard is Professor in Sociology and Social Policy at Glasgow Caledonian

University. Her research, in the main, looks at violence, gender and young people. Her
findings have generated policy change and investment in gender equality programmes across
health, education and the voluntary sector. She is currently co-leading a Horizon
Innovation project across Europe examining innovative solutions to eliminate domestic
abuse. She is an Associate Director at the Centre for Research in Families and
Relationships and also leads GREeN: Gender Research and Equalities Network. She
provides consultation and training on gender equality. Dr Lombard is a disability advocate
and community activist.

Gabriela Loureiro is a researcher, lecturer and queer feminist mainly interested in feminism,
antiracism, decoloniality, migration, sexuality and emotions. She currently teaches
Sociology of Emotions at the University of Edinburgh. Gabriela’s doctoral thesis
examines the role of emotions in Brazilian online feminist activism and theorises hashtags
as digital consciousness-raising. She holds a master’s degree in Gender, Sexuality and the
Body by the University of Leeds and a BA in journalism by the Federal University of Santa
Maria (UFSM). Before academia, she worked as a journalist in newsrooms in Brazil and at
the BBC in London.

Sophie Maddocks is a doctoral candidate in the Annenberg School for Communication at

the University of Pennsylvania. Particularly concerned with cyber-sexual violence, she has
published research on image-based abuse (commonly misnamed “revenge porn”), deep
fakes and gender-based trolling. Sophie’s current work examines individual, organisational
and legislative responses to image-based sexual abuse.

Clare McGlynn is Professor of Law at Durham University and has over twenty years’
experience working with victim-survivors, policy-makers and violence against women
organisations to reform laws and policies on pornography, sexual violence and online abuse.
She is co-author of Cyberflashing: Recognising Harms, Reforming Laws (Bristol University
Press, 2021) and Image-based Sexual Abuse: A Study on the Causes and Consequences of Non-
consensual Nude or Sexual Imagery (Routledge, 2021).

Kaitlynn Mendes is Associate Professor of Sociology and Canada Research Chair in

Inequality and Gender at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. She is interested in
the relationship between digital technologies, feminist activism and sexual violence. More
recently, she has focused on translating her research into impactful resources for young
people, parents and educators. She is author of the award-winning SlutWalk: Feminism,

xxi
 Contributors

activism and media (Palgrave, 2015), Feminism in the News (Palgrave, 2011) and Digital
Feminist Activism: Girls and Women Fight Back Against Rape Culture (Oxford University
Press, 2019, with Jessica Ringrose and Jessalynn Keller).

Melanie A. Morrison is Full Professor in the Department of Psychology and Health Studies in
the College of Arts and Science, at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. Melanie is
passionate about promoting the health and safety of women and girls and, in so doing,
challenging and eradicating gender-based, cultural violence. As a social psychologist, Melanie
has spent much of her career conducting attitudinal and behavioural research and publishing
peer-reviewed works on the stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination that marginalise social
groups and serve to compromise the wellness of individuals in their communities.

Todd G. Morrison, PhD, is Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of

Saskatchewan. His interests include cultural representations of marginalised groups,
homonegativity, gay male pornography, masculinities and psychometrics. He has
published in peer-reviewed journals including Body Image, Porn Studies, Psychology of
Men and Masculinities, Sexuality & Culture, International Journal of Transgender Health,
Journal of Sex Research and Journal of Homosexuality. He is Co-editor of Psychology &
Sexuality and serves on editorial boards including the Journal of Social Psychology,
Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity and Journal of Sex Research. He is a
Fellow of the Canadian Psychological Association.

Jennifer Musial is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at New Jersey City
University and holds a PhD in Women’s Studies. She publishes in three fields; 1) reproductive
justice and gender-based violence; 2) critical yoga studies; and 3) Women’s and Gender
Studies field formation. Recent work has been published in Social and Legal Studies, Journal
of Feminist Scholarship and Feminist Formations. She has forthcoming chapters in Rethinking
Women’s and Gender Studies Volume II and Carcerality Locally and Globally: Feminist
Critiques of States of Violence. She is the managing editor for Race and Yoga.

Mthokozisi Phathisani Ndhlovu is a PhD student in the Department of Communication and

Media at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He is also a lecturer in the
Department of Journalism and Media Studies at the National University of Science and
Technology (NUST) in Zimbabwe. His research interests are in political communication
and media and sexuality.

Gary Needham is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media at The University of Liverpool. He is
the co-editor of Queer TV (Routledge, 2009) and United Artists (Routledge, 2020) and his
forthcoming book Sex, Guys, and Videotape (Edinburgh University Press) is a history of
American independent film during the AIDS crisis.

Gabriella Nilsson is Associate Professor in Ethnology at the Department of Arts and

Cultural Sciences, Lund University. Her research has long had a focus on how violence is
portrayed, explained, politicised and negotiated in various discursive contexts and historical
times. Most recently, she has been working on a project about the news media’s coverage of
rape in Sweden during 1990-2015.

xxii
 Contributors

Sonia Núñez Puente is Professor of Gender and Media at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
(Madrid, Spain). Her research focuses on the analysis of social media and the
transformation of cultural violence. She has led national and international research and
development projects on feminist digital activism and gender-based violence. She has been a
Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland) and a lecturer
at Vanderbilt University (USA). She has been a Visiting Scholar at The University of
Cambridge (United Kingdom), The University of Coimbra (Portugal), The University of
Milano-Bicocca (Italy) and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Germany), among others.

Onyinyechi Nancy Nwaolikpe is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mass Communication

at McPherson University, one of the private universities in Nigeria. She has a PhD in Mass
Communication, specialising in Development Communication, from Babcock University,
Nigeria and has just completed a postgraduate programmme on Gender Analysis in
International Development at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom. She has
published articles in local and international academic journals and books and won many
research travel grants to present her research papers at international conferences.

Jennifer O’Meara is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at Trinity College Dublin. She has
published widely on the topic of screen sound and gender, in publications including Feminist
Media Studies and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. Her latest book, Screening
Women’s Voices in the Digital Era: The Sonic Screen from Film to Memes, was published by
University of Texas Press in 2022.

Rafaela Orphanides obtained her PhD in 2020 from Loughborough University. Her current
interdisciplinary research explores the relationship of Reality and the Imaginary in popular
culture. Through this research she has explored mediations of authenticity, success and
gender-based violence in media, and the triple entanglement of feminism, postfeminism, and
neoliberalism in mediated representations. Dr Orphanides has experience from Universities
in the UK and Cyprus in teaching modules at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Lucia M. Palmer is Assistant Professor of Media and Communication at Middle Georgia

State University. She has published articles in journals such as Feminist Media Studies,
International Journal of Communication, Studies in Popular Culture, and Studies in Spanish
and Latin American Cinemas. Her interests primarily revolve around the intersections
between media, culture and constructions of nationality, gender, race and sexuality.
Currently, her research focuses on how cultural and political movements utilise media, in
particular alternative and independent formats, to struggle over meanings of the US/Mexico
border and immigration.

Kandice M. Parker is a PhD candidate in the Psychology of Culture, Health and Human
Development programme at the University of Saskatchewan. She has previously acquired a
B.Sc. in Biology (UVic), a B.A. in Psychology with Honours and M.A. in Applied Social
Psychology at the University of Saskatchewan. Her research interests include gender and
violence, men and allyship, woke performativity, gender equality and postfeminism.
Kandice has published in numerous outlets including Psychology & Sexuality, Porn
Studies and Journal of Bisexuality.

xxiii
 Contributors

Anastasia Powell is Professor of Family & Sexual Violence at RMIT University (Melbourne,
Australia). Her research examines the intersections of gender, violence, justice and
technology, and includes the books: Image-based Sexual Abuse (Routledge, 2020), Digital
Criminology (Routledge, 2018), Sexual Violence in a Digital Age (Palgrave, 2017), Domestic
Violence (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2011) and Sex, Power and Consent (Cambridge
University Press, 2010).

Michael Salter is a Scientia Fellow and Associate Professor of Criminology at the University
of New South Wales. His research is focused on complex trauma, gender-based violence and
child sexual abuse. His published work includes the books Organised Sexual Abuse
(Routledge, 2013) and Crime, Justice and Social Media (Routledge, 2017) and over fifty
papers in international journals and edited collections. He is the academic member of the
Advisory Group to inform the development and implementation of the Commonwealth ten
year National Plan To Prevent Violence Against Women and Their Children.

Sofia José Santos is Assistant Professor in International Relations at the Faculty of

Economics of the University of Coimbra and a Researcher at the Centre for Social
Studies of the same university where she leads as PI the Project DeCode/M. She holds a
PhD in International Relations (University of Coimbra) and a specialisation in
Communication (ISCTE-IUL). Since 2008, she has undertaken research on media and
international relations; media and masculinities; and internet and technopolitics. Sofia
has published in journals such as the European Journal of Women’s Studies and Contexto
Internacional.

Silvia Semenzin is a postdoctoral fellow in Digital Sociology at the Complutense University

of Madrid and a digital rights activist. She researches on data justice, technological
imaginaries and cyberviolence against women and girls. In 2019, she promoted the art.612-
ter included in the ‘Red Code’ bill to criminalize image-based sexual abuse in Italy and in
2021 she co-founded Virgin & Martyr, a non-profit association for gender and sex
education. Together with Lucia Bainotti, she published the book Donne Tutte Puttane
(Durango Edizioni, 2021) to discuss the widespread phenomenon of the non-consensual
dissemination of intimate images across Italian Telegram channels.

Paula Serafini is Lecturer in Creative and Cultural Industries at Queen Mary University of
London. Her research is situated in the field of cultural politics, and her interests include
extractivism, social movements, art activism, performance, cultural labour, cultural policy,
feminist politics and alternatives to development. She is author of Performance Action: The
Politics of Art Activism (Routledge, 2018) and Creating Worlds Otherwise: Art, Collective
Action, and (Post)Extractivism (Vanderbilt University Press, 2022).

Tanya Serisier is Reader in Feminist Theory in the Department of Criminology at Birkbeck

College University of London. She researches the cultural politics of sex, sexuality and
sexual violence with a particular interest in the effects of feminist activism and scholarship.
Her work on public survivors builds on her previous work on speaking out, including her
2018 monograph, Speaking Out: Feminism, Rape and Narrative Politics.

xxiv
 Contributors

Jennifer Silcox, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Child and Youth Studies
at King’s University College at Western University. Her main areas of research include
social inequality, youth crime and legislation in Canada, youth mental health, and media
representations of crime.

Chindu Sreedharan, PhD, is Associate Professor of Journalism at Bournemouth University

(UK). A former journalist, he has a particular interest in journalistic storytelling as a
means to improve human rights situations. His research focuses on “abnormal
journalisms”, reportage that extends the boundaries of conventional newswork––from
crisis and post-disaster reporting, to new forms of digital and long narratives. Chindu’s
publications include Sexual Violence and the News Media (co-authored), Impact of Covid-
19 on journalism in Sierra Leone (co-authored), Hold Your Story: Reflections on the News of
Sexual Violence in India (co-edited) and Disaster Journalism: Building Media Resilience in
Nepal (co-authored).

Jia Tan is Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
She is the author of Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China (NYU
Press, 2023).

Einar Thorsen, PhD, is Professor of Journalism and Communication and Executive Dean
of the Faculty of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University (UK). His
research covers journalism and social change, citizens’ voices, news reporting of crisis and
politics. He has co-authored and co-edited several reports, including a 2021 UNESCO
report on journalism and sexual violence in India and national survey reports on the
impact of Covid-19 on journalists in Nepal (2020) and Sierra Leone (2021). His recent
books include Media, Journalism and Disaster Communities (Palgrave, 2020, co-edited
with Jamie Matthews).

Angela Towers is a postgraduate researcher at Lancaster University UK within Feminist

Media and Cultural Studies. She is currently working on an oral history of viral feminism of
the last decade. She works as a graduate teaching assistant across the Sociology and Media
and Cultural Studies programmes at Lancaster.

Satu Venäläinen is a postdoctoral researcher in Social Psychology in the Faculty of Social

Sciences at the University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on discourses, identities and
affects linked specifically to the shifting gender relations both in online and offline contexts.
She has specifically done research on meanings linked to gendered violence and her current
research project explores affective and discursive meanings and dynamics of sexual
harassment among young people. She has published in journals such as Social Problems,
Men and Masculinities, The Sociological Review, Feminist Media Studies, European Journal
of Women’s Studies, and Feminism & Psychology.

Fiona Vera-Gray is the Deputy Director of the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit
(CWASU) at London Metropolitan University. She is the author of two books on public
sexual harassment and a forthcoming book on what porn means for women.

xxv
 Contributors

Karissa Wall completed her Masters in Applied Social Psychology at the University of
Saskatchewan. Karissa now works as the Manager of Institutional Research at Kwantlen
Polytechnic University in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Helen Wood is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Lancaster UK.
She has published widely on class and gender in the media including the books Reality
Television and Class and Reacting to Reality Television with Beverley Skeggs. She has edited
Television for Women: New Directions with Rachel Moseley and Helen Wheatley and the
book The Wedding Spectacle Across Media and Culture with Jilly Kay and Melanie
Kennedy. Her recent work on representations of the working-class girl can be found in
Feminist Media Studies and the Journal of British Cinema and Television.

xxvi
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This collection originated in a conversation with Alexandra McGregor at Routledge, at the

very beginning of the first lockdown in 2020. We would like to thank Alex for her
enthusiasm for the project, careful stewarding of the commissioning process and her
understanding and support as we adjusted to the new normal. Eleanor Catchpole Simmons
and Charlotte Taylor at Routledge have provided ongoing guidance, particularly in the final
stages of the project, and we are grateful for their care and attention.
To all our contributors who have juggled their chapters with the realities of pandemic life
and many other unforeseen circumstances: we are so grateful for your commitment to the
project, your good humour and patience in responding to our editorial comments and, most
of all, for continuing to work in an area which can be so challenging. We hope you are
pleased with the final collection and enjoy the opportunity to learn from each other over
these pages as we have enjoyed learning from you.
We have been incredibly lucky to work on this together, to be able to keep each other
going, spread the load and maintain intellectual engagement with a wider world,
particularly during periods of home schooling, lockdown and illness. And so we thank
each other for being the best other half of an editorial team we could have wished for.
Karen would like to thank Ian Garwood for his love, unwavering support and for taking
on way more than his fair share of everything else as the deadline approached; and Alec and
Carys Garwood for providing (usually welcome) distraction and motivation.
Susan would like to thank Vicky Wason, Duncan Robertson and Mike Rowling for their
unconditional love, support and encouragement; and Marshall and Emmett Robertson for
their wise words and for helping me keep things in perspective. Thanks also to Indiana
Bones for alleviating stress along the way.

xxvii
 INTRODUCTION
Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge

Thinking about gender, violence and the media in a pandemic

This is a pandemic collection. The Covid-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on how
communities globally engage with media and communications technologies, but also on
experiences and understandings of gender violence. As a core principle of feminist theorising
on gender violence is that it is inextricably linked with gender inequality, the historical
moment in which this collection is situated is clearly significant.
As is well-documented, the pandemic exacerbated inequalities and enhanced vulnerabilities.
In the first months of the pandemic, UN Women reported that violence against women had
intensified (UN Women, 2020a, p. 3), and that – across 13 countries – 45% of women reported
that they, or a woman they know, had experienced some form of violence since the beginning of
the pandemic (p. 4). Help-seeking behaviours were also impacted, with increasing reports of
domestic violence and/or increased demand for emergency shelter documented in Argentina,
Australia, Canada, Chile, Cyprus, Germany, Lebanon, Mexico, Spain, the UK and the US
(UN Women, 2020b, pp. 2–3). Unsurprisingly, online abuse increased, with implications for
workplaces as well as educational settings (see Ging, Chapter 32, this volume). The trajectory
of the pandemic also led to targeted racist attacks in a number of contexts, including the US
(see Bhaman and Kuo, Chapter 3, this volume).
From the early days of the pandemic, its broader gendered implications were also apparent.
For instance, a UN Women report noted that women in Asia and the Pacific had been dis-
proportionately impacted by income reductions and their formal employment opportunities
had been curtailed whilst unpaid caring responsibilities increased at a rate higher than men’s.
Whilst men were more likely to die from the virus itself, the emotional impact of the pandemic
fell disproportionately on women (UN Women, 2020b). This wider picture matters. Where
gendered inequalities increase, the prospects of ending gender violence diminish.
The pandemic has thus brought into sharp relief the persistence of violence against
women and the adaptability of patriarchy. Persistence and adaptability is a core theme of
this collection, one which contributors explore not only in relation to the pandemic but also
in terms of technological, economic and political shifts and the ways in which these have
given rise to specific gender-based abuses. Whilst such developments are often hailed as

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-1 1
 Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge

“new” or “unprecedented” by mainstream media inattentive to histories of feminist activism

and scholarship, in this collection we work to establish the connections, continuities and
changes across time, place and platform.
Like many of our contributors, we have started this introduction with evidence produced
by transnational bodies about the prevalence of violence against women. However, whilst
these accounts place women’s experiences – and vulnerabilities – centre stage, they often do
so in a way that renders men invisible as the primary perpetrators of this violence. In the
next section, we trace variations on this linguistic vanishing act and situate this collection in
relation to these debates.

What’s in a name?
Although the terms gender-based violence and (men’s) violence against women are often
used interchangeably in activist, research and policy contexts (Boyle, 2019a) it is important
to insist on the distinctions between them. This collection is centrally concerned with how
violence is understood in and through gender – and vice versa. But this does not mean it is
concerned only – or specifically – with gender-based violence.
UN Women give the following definition of gender-based violence:

Gender-based violence (GBV) refers to harmful acts directed at an individual or a

group of individuals based on their gender. It is rooted in gender inequality, the abuse
of power and harmful norms. The term is primarily used to underscore the fact that
structural, gender-based power differentials place women and girls at risk for multiple
forms of violence. While women and girls suffer disproportionately from GBV, men
and boys can also be targeted. The term is also sometimes used to describe targeted
violence against LGBTQI+ populations, when referencing violence related to norms
of masculinity/ femininity and/or gender norms.
(UN Women, n.d.)

As this makes clear, not all gender-based violence is violence against women. However, this
definition emphasises the greater risk to women and girls, without identifying who is most at
risk of perpetrating that violence. If gender-based violence is rooted in gender inequality and
involves an abuse of power, the people perpetrating that violence in a patriarchal society are
most likely to be men. This is not to say that gender-based violence is only perpetrated by
men. For instance, female genital mutilation and cutting can be understood as gender-based
violence not because it is always practised by men (it isn’t), but because it targets women
and is a violent expression of gendered inequalities. Likewise, whilst transphobic violence
may be perpetrated by people of all genders, that it functions to uphold gender-binary
norms makes it a form of violence that is based in gender. But these examples do not
undermine our point that just as women and girls “suffer disproportionately”, so men and
boys are disproportionately represented as perpetrators. Yet, men and boys are only
mentioned in this definition as potential victims.
Even in the UN’s definition of violence against women and girls – the most common
form of gender-based violence – it is gendered risk which is centred:

Violence against women and girls is defined as any act of gender-based violence that
results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or mental harm or suffering to

2
 Introduction

women and girls, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of
liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life. Violence against women and girls
encompasses, but is not limited to, physical, sexual and psychological violence oc-
curring in the family or within the general community, and perpetrated or condoned
by the state.
(UN Women, n.d.)

Reading these definitions you could be left wondering who on earth is doing all this violence.
In our editorial choices for this collection, we have emphasised men’s violence against
women, but to gain a fuller understanding of the ways that gender and violence are made
meaningful in and through representation we have also included chapters that focus on
other forms of gender-based violence, as well as on violence which is gendered (that is,
understood in relation to gender) but not gender-based (an abuse of power). For instance,
women’s violence is routinely framed in media reporting as a story about gender (and,
sometimes, about feminism) making it important to consider in a collection of this type. It
is not, however, gender-based violence according to the UN’s definition, as it is not –
typically – “rooted in gender inequality, the abuse of power and harmful norms”.
This discussion demonstrates that language matters and that applies not only when we
are looking at the media, but also at policy and activist practice. Of course, it is inevitable
that in any international collection which deals with such a wide variety of types of violence,
there is no one definition that unites all of the chapters. As editors, we have not tried to
impose one. But we have pushed contributors to be as precise as possible about who is doing
what to whom and to be cautious of umbrella terms which may obfuscate gendered
dynamics. This cautious approach to umbrella terms is one which is also advocated by Mia
Fischer in relation to transgender visibility. Fischer is critical of “the framework of trans-
gender visibility” which might “allow mainstream LGB(T) organizations to allege inclusion of
the T without actually addressing the urgent needs and issues of transgender people” (2019,
p. 13). In the context of gender and violence, we understand violence against trans people
because of their gender identity to be a form of gender-based violence. This includes violence
against trans women because they are women, and violence against trans women and men
because they are trans: in these cases, both misogynist and transphobic violence can be based
on perceived gender roles and gender (non)conformity. But to go back to the UN Women
definition above, it is not obvious that all violence against the wider LGBTQI+ population is,
or should be, understood as gender-based: homophobic violence, for instance, may not always
be related to “norms of masculinity/femininity and/or gender norms”.
A large part of what is at stake in these definitions, then, is the commonalities they
establish between different forms of violence and different social groups. This leads us to a
core concept which has informed our editorial selections and is adopted by many of our
contributors: continuum thinking (Boyle, 2019a).

Continuum thinking
Continuum thinking is a characteristic of feminist theorisations of gender and violence and
can be arrived at via the work of a range of different theorists. Our own use of the con-
tinuum is indebted to Liz Kelly who introduced the concept in her 1988 book Surviving
Sexual Violence as a means of understanding women’s experiences of sexual violence. For
Kelly, the continuum was a way of conceptualising how women made sense of individual

3
 Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge

actions in relation to a continuum of related experiences throughout their lives. The con-
tinuum was a means of identifying the “basic common character that underlies many dif-
ferent events” and/or “a continuous series of elements or events that pass into one another
and cannot be easily distinguished” (1988, p. 76). The value of the continuum, for Kelly,
was in allowing us to see how experiences accumulated and worked together – in a context
characterised by gender inequality – to shape women’s lives.
Whilst it was Kelly’s work on sexual violence which led her to develop the concept of the
continuum, subsequent feminist work adopted and adapted the continuum to trace how
different forms of (men’s) (gender-based) violence against women are connected (Boyle,
2019a). The brackets are intended to highlight that feminist work has expanded beyond the
continuum to consider a range of different continuums which allow us to make connections
not only in the lives of victim/survivors (Kelly’s original focus), but also, for instance, by
considering men’s behaviour, or the meaning and function of violence. In Surviving Sexual
Violence, Kelly foresaw some of these uses of the concept, noting that continuum thinking
could also help to establish the ways in which “typical” and “aberrant” male behaviour shades
into one another (Kelly, 1988, p. 75). As Karen Boyle notes “this demands that we pay
attention not only to women’s experiences of male behaviour, but also to that behaviour itself
and how it is rendered meaningful for men” (2019a, p. 29). Media representations are some of
the many ways in which that behaviour is rendered meaningful for men.
Here, it is useful to turn to Raewyn Connell’s work and her term “hegemonic mascu-
linity”. Hegemonic masculinity is the dominant/dominating form of masculinity in a given
historical and society-wide social setting that legitimates unequal and hierarchical gender
relations (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005). Reflecting on male violence specifically,
Connell writes:

most men do not attack or harass women; but those who do are unlikely to think
themselves deviant. On the contrary they usually feel they are entirely justified, that
they are exercising a right. They are authorized by an ideology of supremacy.
(Connell, 1995, p. 83)

We can connect this back to our discussion of the UN definitions above to note that one
way male dominance is maintained is by not noticing it exists. Hegemonic masculinity
means that much of men’s violence goes unrecognised as male violence, if, indeed, it is
recognised as violence at all and not, for instance, disguised as sex or romance, as a winning
mentality for business or sport, or as honour. When these linguistic disguises are adopted
the speaker accepts the perpetrator’s framing of his behaviour (Campbell, 2022).
In an article focusing on rape and sexual assault in the news, Boyle, Brenna Jessie and
Megan Strickland note:

To state that in certain conditions, and for certain types of men, rape and sexual
assault can be “normal” is to recognise that the social and cultural construction of
male sexuality and gender inequality legitimates and indeed celebrates sexual
aggression as part of what it means to be “a man.” As such, if a man’s sexually
assaultive behaviour is to be recognised as a problem, then he cannot simultaneously
be recognised as a man.
(2022, p. 116)

4
 Introduction

The “certain types of men” referred to here are those who are most closely aligned with
hegemonic masculinity in any given culture. To qualify Boyle, Jessie and Strickland’s argu-
ment slightly, then, he cannot simultaneously be recognised as that kind of man. As many of
the chapters in this collection demonstrate, if he is, or was, that kind of man (an award-
winning movie producer, say) then he must have been miscategorised – he isn’t actually one of
them at all, he’s a monster. At the same time, across many of the contexts discussed in this
book, there is an increasing sense that the ideology of male supremacy is under threat and that
at least some of the men who did not previously think themselves deviant are being forced to
think again. Feminist activism – including in media spaces – has had an important role to play
in these reckonings.
For an internationally-oriented collection, continuum thinking is a fundamentally
political intervention because it allows us to see connections across disparate contexts whilst
remaining alert to their specificities. Importantly, continuum thinking is about under-
standing the common character of differently-situated experiences, it is not about asserting
an equivalence or a hierarchy. In this, it echoes long-standing principles of feminist orga-
nising, as well as debates about sameness and difference in women’s experiences within and
across nations and the structural inequalities produced by race, religion, sexuality, gender
identity, class and dis/ability. A collection like this allows us to contribute to this broader
project of building a feminist community and theorising gender and violence by opening up
space for reflection on the assumptions underpinning not only media coverage but also
representation in theory and research.
As one practical example of this, we want to briefly reflect on what we have learned from
considering how “honour” structures justificatory accounts of men’s violence against
women across different contexts in this collection. “Honour” is directly referenced in a
number of chapters which deal with abuse in Islamic contexts such as Rahat Imran’s
(Chapter 30) and Munira Cheema’s (Chapter 51) chapters focusing on Pakistan and Eylem
Atakav’s (Chapter 55) discussion of child marriage in Turkey. But honour – and its cor-
relate, shame (Gill, 2014, p. 2) – also feature heavily in reports of familicide in white
communities in the UK and Australia discussed by Denise Buiten (Chapter 5); whilst ideas
about honour, pride and white nationalism circulate in Kathryn Claire Higgins’s examples
from Australia (Chapter 7) and Nicky Falkof’s from South Africa (Chapter 24). We are not
suggesting that these examples are the same. Indeed, there are clear and important differ-
ences. So-called “honour” crimes are, typically, attempts to maintain or restore (familial)
“honour” by ensuring women conform to cultural and religious expectations – or are
punished for their failure to do so (Siddiqui and Mahmod, 2021, p. 404). In the cases
discussed by Buiten, Higgins and Falkof, there are parallels in the positioning of men as the
arbiters of family or community honour, but it is men’s understanding of their own beha-
viour or position (and how that is threatened) that is more central. But running through all
these examples is the extent to which gender norms are underpinned by male entitlement
and gender inequality, and that the violent policing of those norms is most often at the
expense of women in families and communities.
Putting these chapters together allows us to see connections in men’s excuses for violence
(and so in women’s experiences of it), but at the same time raises questions about the very
different language typically used to refer to these acts, both in media and research contexts.
Activists are understandably dubious when debates over terminology become a means of
deflecting responsibility and delaying action, particularly on the part of governments
(Siddiqui and Mahmod, 2021). At the same time – and as other chapters in this collection

5
 Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge

explore in relation to phenomena including cyberflashing (McGlynn, Chapter 35) and child
abuse images (Salter, Chapter 37) – the terms we use can determine patterns of recognition
and restitution. This may be where those of us involved in media disciplines are able to
make useful interventions in wider debates.
So, to go back to our example of “honour”, what might we gain by thinking of certain
kinds of familicide or white vigilantism as honour-based violence? What would such a
framing allow (and deny), both in terms of our understandings of familicide and vigilantism
and of our understandings of how ideas about “honour” are mobilised in Western accounts
of “Islamic” practices and communities? To return to Siddiqui and Mahmod, might this
offer a means to challenge the exoticisation of minoritised communities which often ac-
companies discussions of “honour”-based violence in the West (p. 409) and, therefore, limits
minority women’s access to effective state protection? At the same time, might it also
challenge the normalisation and relative invisibility of some forms of white men’s violence
against white women which mean that their violence is likely to be understood in individ-
ualist rather than structural terms (Chantler and Gangoli, 2011)? Similar debates have taken
place in relation to the relationship between “honour” violence and coercive control (Patel
and Siddiqui, 2011; Gill, 2011) or “date” rape (Chantler and Gangoli, 2011). This work also
interrogates whose versions of honour, of community and of gender are prioritised and
naturalised – the troubling of “honour” often signalled (as we have done here) by the use of
scare quotes or by insisting on its disputed status: so-called honour (Chantler and Gangoli,
2011, p. 359). These debates may be semantic, but they are also material, impacting, among
other things, on how governments weaponise violence against minoritised women – and
violence by minoritised men – to serve anti-immigration agendas: something which emerges
in a range of contexts in this collection (e.g. Bhaman and Kuo, Chapter 3; Gill, Chapter 9;
Käkelä, Chapter 10).
It is important here to distinguish between continuum thinking – which has underpinned
the editorial selections and analysis in this book – and analogous thinking. By analogous
thinking, we are referring to attempts – in both media and some feminist work – to make
gender-based violence matter by establishing how it is “like” something else: torture, ter-
rorism, hostage-taking (Boyle, 2019a, p. 23). We have seen a lot of this, in various contexts,
since 2020, as gender-based violence – and men’s violence against women in particular – has
been described as a pandemic of its own. UN Women (2020c), for instance, described
violence against women during Covid-19 as the “shadow pandemic”. Given the extent to
which the Covid-19 pandemic has dominated every aspect of our lives since early 2020, this
is an understandable move as it aims to make visible the scale of the problem and the sheer
number of women impacted by it.
However, we are wary of analogous thinking because the analogies are so often not
themselves gendered and/or are phenomena for which individuals cannot be clearly
accountable. As such, we can end up in a situation where we are talking about gender-based
violence and even men’s violence against women in curiously ungendered terms and/or only
focusing on structure, evading questions of personal responsibility. We understand why
feminists have at times adopted this strategy as a way of getting the issue onto agendas
which might be resistant to explicitly feminist language and analysis: indeed, we have done
this ourselves (Boyle, 2019a, pp. 19–20). However, in the context of a collection about the
media, the problematic ways in which analogous thinking – along with any form of eu-
phemistic language – can work to constrain understanding and limit which kinds of vio-
lence, victims and perpetrators come into view are acutely felt.

6
 Introduction

Our primary focus in this collection is on inter-personal gender-based violence – pre-

dominately, but not exclusively, men’s violence against women – but as the discussion so far
should make clear, it is a core principle of feminist theorising that we cannot understand
that violence in individualistic terms. Rather it requires a structural analysis which extends
beyond the interpersonal to an analysis of kinship structures, as well as institutions in both
public and private sectors (and, of course, media span both). It is important to emphasise
that we are not suggesting that the media is a cause of men’s violence against women. This
would be to divorce media from the wider societies in which they sit, whilst simultaneously
denying the agency of media consumers, a group which, of course, includes victim/survi-
vors, perpetrators, bystanders and policymakers. At the same time, a focus on cause and
effect detracts attention from the abusive production practices within media organisations
which have, for instance, been brought into sharp relief by the Harvey Weinstein case. As
Meenakshi Gigi Durham (2021, p. 2) puts it, “[t]he media are in fact, quite literally, sites of
sexual violence”, an issue explored in some detail in Part 3.
Instead, we consider the media as part of the “conducive context” (Kelly, 2016) for
gender-based violence – as well as, on occasions, a means of disrupting that context. In
relation to the conducive context, Sam Keen’s description of “the hostile imagination” in
the context of war is illuminating: “We first kill people with our minds, before we kill them
with weapons” (Silver, 1991). We want to connect this comment to Connell’s understanding
of the role of violence in hegemonic masculinity. Engaging with the media can be one of the
ways in which violent behaviour can be imagined and understood as a normal – and in some
contexts desirable – expression of masculinity.
Militarised masculinities have a role to play in this process. Cynthia Cockburn (2004,
2012), whose work informs Lisa DiGiovanni’s analysis of militarised masculinity in Chile in
Chapter 29, writes, “the violence of militarization and war, profoundly gendered, spills back
into everyday life and increases the quotient of violence in it” (Cockburn, 2012, n.p.). Whilst
this collection focuses primarily on inter-personal violence, there are a number of contri-
butions which examine military or other forms of state-sanctioned violence and oppression,
including in relation to police brutality (Bhaman and Kuo, Chapter 3) and border control in
the US (Palmer, Chapter 28), restrictions to reproductive freedoms in Brazil (Loureiro,
Chapter 46), or state-control of media systems in China (Li, Chapter 15; Tan, Chapter 52).
These contributions are still characterised by continuum thinking but emerge from a range
of different disciplinary, political and geographically-located vantage points – as with
DiGiovanni’s centring of Cockburn’s version of the continuum, for instance; or Paula
Serafini’s use of the work of Verónica Gago (2019, p. 14) to establish a “political cartog-
raphy” of violence and so connect women’s experiences of male violence and their ex-
periences of/under state oppression in Latin America.
For us as editors, one of the challenges of adopting this expansive understanding of the
continuum of gendered violence is the extent to which this opens up the field significantly
beyond the parameters of one edited collection – even one with 57 chapters. Contemporary
events – including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the state-sanctioned killing and torture
of feminist protestors in Iran, and the extension of existing restrictions to reproductive
freedoms in a range of territories including the US – demonstrate the importance of this
model of thinking. Yet, mediated responses to war and state-sanctioned torture are not
foregrounded in this collection as centrally as they would be if we were to start the com-
missioning process today. Instead, commissioning during a pandemic led us to privilege
online spaces of violence and protest as we outline in the next section.

7
 Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge

Organisation of the collection

The book is organised into four sections: News, Representing Reality, Gender-based
Violence Online and Feminist Responses. This structure allows for the identification and
analysis of different forms of violence in specific media forms, platforms and national
contexts, as well as considering appropriate measures to change and challenge this occur-
rence, whether at the level of editorial policy, activism, production practices, platform
moderation, regulation, public education or legislation. Contributors come from a range of
disciplinary traditions and are writing from, and/or in relation to, different national con-
texts with distinct legal frameworks. These specificities sometimes lead to diverging prior-
ities and strategies for feminist work on and with the media: what may work in one context,
may not translate to another.
As outlined above, there is no one term we can comfortably use to collectively describe
the violence discussed across all the chapters in this collection. The unifying concern is not a
type of violence – or a type of victim/survivor or perpetrator – but, rather, an approach to
centring gender in examining how violence is made meaningful (particularly at the inter-
personal level) whilst remaining attentive to local, cultural and contextual specificities.
Many individual chapters explore more than one type of violence, highlighting the re-
lationships between various forms of abuse, the way in which one type of violence may be
experienced alongside another and/or the porous nature of online/offline boundaries. This
kind of continuum thinking also characterises our editorial introductions to each part.
The majority of chapters focus on contemporary examples. Whilst some explore media
representations in national contexts marked by traditional gender roles, many others discuss
examples from contexts where equality discourses are assumed. However, contributors
highlight the complex ways in which equality discourses can at times be mobilised to
reinforce right-wing views in order to justify surveillance of, and/or violence against, women
and minoritised communities. There are parallels here with Sarah Banet-Weiser’s (2018)
understanding of the deep entanglement of “popular feminism” and “popular misogyny”. It
is important to recognise that this backlash to feminism is figured in ideological terms.
Individual examples are used to make general critiques of feminism and women’s position in
the public sphere more broadly. The personal and political are, therefore, at stake in both
feminist and anti-feminist responses.
The chapters in Part 1 focus on print, online and televised news, recognising that a great
deal of feminist scholarship is concerned with the gendered and racialised nature of news
reporting. However, subsequent sections look across a range of media. Part 2 includes
chapters on gender violence in comedy, vlogs, podcasts, documentaries, dramatised versions
of real crime, magazines, pornography, survivor memoirs, official state media and social
media. Parts 3 and 4 mainly look at online platforms and social media, though Part 4
extends this scope to include considerations of performance, physical protests, campaign
materials, literature, film and television. Although there is only one chapter that includes
pornography in the title, there are others that discuss pornography in relation to image-
based abuse and other forms of gender-based violence online. Public education and strategic
communication are considered, but in chapters with a broader focus and there are no
chapters that focus solely on these forms. A more notable gap, perhaps, is the lack of
attention to advertising, radio, reality television and photography, as well as to sports and
entertainment journalism. However, we aimed first for geographical range and whilst there
are – inevitably – patterns of dominance, and some notable gaps (particularly in relation to

8
 Introduction

the Middle East and Eastern Europe), we include case studies from 21 different countries,
including Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Finland, Greece, India, Italy,
Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Portugal, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, the UK,
US and Zimbabwe. Several chapters offer more theoretical and/or less geographically-
bounded case studies, bringing in examples from a range of different contexts. Our hope is
that the collection will prompt readers to consider the relationship between the examples
illuminated here and other local, national or regional contexts in their own research.
Before moving into the individual chapters, however, there are ethical considerations for
a collection like this which are important to address.

Coda: Representing violence ethically in academic work

Ethical questions and considerations permeate this collection due to the nature of the subject
matter and commitment to ethics in feminist research praxis more widely. As would be ex-
pected in a book titled Gender, Media and Violence, each chapter explores examples of vio-
lence, some of which are described in detailed ways. We have not included content warnings,
though each section has an editorial introduction that maps out some of the different forms of
violence discussed. Authors take different approaches to how to handle explicitness and this is
by no means resolved within the wider academic field. Some authors choose not to include
explicit accounts of violence as a way of mitigating the reproduction of the (often exploitative)
representational patterns they are critiquing. Whilst the book contains no violent or sexually
explicit images, there are chapters that contain explicit examples of racist and sexist hate
speech as well as graphic descriptions of violence. For some authors, it is important to capture
this detail explicitly in order to render visible the existence and severity of abuse and highlight
the violent aspects of practices that are not always seen in this way.
We recognise that there is a wealth of often polemical debates around trigger warnings.
However, the nature of trauma means that it is impossible to determine what an individual’s
trigger might be. As Jack Halberstam (2017, p. 539) asserts, there is a potential danger of
prioritising some forms of gender-based violence over others, which works against the
notion of continuum thinking and risks flattening out the complex differences that race and
class might make to responses to certain material. Nevertheless, we do not dispute “the
demand for new accountability around reception” (Halberstam, 2017, p. 539) and discus-
sions of this accountability for consumers, researchers and educators recur in several
chapters. Yet, as Halberstam (ibid) notes, many of the arguments around the use of trigger
warnings rely on the idea of passive consumers. We trust in your agency as readers to use
the editorial introductions to each part, along with the chapter titles, to make your own
decisions about how to prepare mentally to engage with, or even avoid, particular content.
There are also complex ethical questions and considerations raised in relation to the
representation of victim/survivors in academic writing, particularly when dealing with
survivor testimony. Different media forms and platforms enable different terms of agency
for victim/survivors which contributors are attentive to. The extent to which victim/survi-
vors, and their loved ones, can retain control over their experiences – particularly in relation
to commercially-oriented media – and the potential harm caused when they lose this con-
trol, is a recurring question throughout this book, as are the ethics of our own affective
responses as media consumers, researchers and educators.
Many chapters engage with forms of media – vlogs, social media posts – where victim/
survivors can retain some form of editorial control over their disclosures and, therefore,

9
 Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge

may choose to retract or restrict previously publicly-available posts or videos at a later date.
For this reason, our editorial stance has been to ask contributors to omit identifying details
(such as usernames) for private or (on Twitter) unverified1 individuals unless a professional
role is associated with their accounts or their online identities are well known. Still, even
when users have large followings and might expect their videos and posts to be widely
viewed, there remain ethical questions to consider about our role as researchers in handling
that material. There is a recognition that whilst it is important for victim/survivors to be
acknowledged in these debates, it is also important that they are not permanently linked to
that identity.
Chapters in Part 1 also explore questions of ethics in relation to decisions on how to
report gender-based violence, considering how journalists can help change public under-
standings and attitudes. However, we need to remain attentive to local restrictions – legal or
otherwise – which may shape what journalists are allowed to say about victim/survivors,
perpetrators and specific actions or patterns of behaviour. For example, there may be
restrictions around revealing victim/survivors’ identities – most often in sexual assault cases,
and when the victim/survivor is a child. Whilst such restrictions are often to protect victim/
survivors, this can mean that perpetrators’ perspectives and lives are allowed to dominate
media narratives (Miller, 2019; Boyle, Jessie and Strickland, 2022) encouraging a “himpa-
thetic” response (Manne, 2018). There are further considerations around defamation, and –
as Li Jun demonstrates in Chapter 15 – uneven access to legal instruments can leave public
survivors vulnerable to prosecution. This is also an issue for those of us writing about these
issues, meaning we often have to be less definitive in our language than we might like (Boyle,
2019b, pp. 13–14). As we move throughout the book, contributors also consider ethics in
relation to our own engagement with representations of gender-based violence and/or with
media produced in abusive contexts – as audiences, filmmakers, teachers and researchers.
Finally, a note on the language used to refer to those experiencing, and those perpe-
trating, violence. We have not insisted contributors take a uniform approach to this, re-
cognising that different terms can have utility and power in different contexts. In our
editorial work, we have used the term victim/survivor. Whilst the term “victim” has been
rejected by some as stigmatising, other feminists have insisted that there is no stigma in
victimisation and cautioned that the refusal of the term can be a means of minimising harm
(Jordan, 2004, p. 12). At the same time, “survivor” is often preferred in activist contexts as it
offers a more agentic identity and the possibility of recognising women’s active resistance
(Kelly, 1988). We see value in both terms and use the compound victim/survivor to
acknowledge that neither victimisation nor survival are discrete experiences but are them-
selves moving points on a continuum rather than definitive identity markers (Kelly, Burton
and Regan, 1996). This makes sense, for instance, of the oft-repeated claims that media
coverage can itself be revictimising (Boyle, 2019b, p. 15). More recently, the term “perpe-
trator” has also been the focus of critique for similarly suggesting “a kind of person rather
than an act or experience” (Khan et al., 2018, p.453). Whilst acknowledging these limita-
tions, we have continued to use “perpetrator” in this collection in the absence of a widely
recognised alternative.

Note
1 All of the research presented in this book was conducted before Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter
in October 2022.

10
 Introduction

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Attachments/Sections/Library/Publications/2020/Policy-brief-COVID-19-and-violence-against-
women-and-girls-en.pdf (Accessed: 18 December 2022).
UN Women (2020c) The shadow pandemic: Violence against women during Covid-19. [Campaign
materials] Available at: https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/in-focus-gender-equality-
in-covid-19-response/violence-against-women-during-covid-19 (Accessed: 16 December 2022).
UN Women (n.d.) ‘Frequently asked questions: Types of violence against women and girls’. Available
at: https://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/ending-violence-against-women/faqs/types-of-
violence (Accessed: 18 December 2022).

12
PART 1

News
 NEWS
Introduction to Part 1
Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge

In Part 1, we focus on news media. The news has been a site of concern for feminist scholars
working on gender and violence in a range of disciplinary contexts. This is evidenced in our
choice of contributors for Part 1, a number of whom arrive at media analysis in a round-
about way, for instance, as a side-effect of empirical work with/for victim/survivors. They,
and we, understand the analysis of the media as part of the broader feminist project to
challenge and change gendered inequalities in the social world and see the news as one of the
most visible sites of struggle.
Research on gender and news globally has consistently pointed to the marginalisation of
women as journalists, sources and subjects. The 2020 Global Media Monitoring Project – the
largest international, collaborative, longitudinal study of women and news – showed that
women made up around four in ten journalists and presenters for the leading news stories
globally (Macharia, 2021, p.4) and 25% of news subjects and sources (ibid, p.17). Reflecting
on where and in what roles women appear in the news, the GMMP 2020 report notes,
“Women’s points of view were less frequently heard in the topics that dominated the news
agenda; even in stories that affected women profoundly, such as gender-based violence, the
male voice prevailed” (ibid, p.1). Having identified gender-based violence as a topic in around
6% of the stories in the global GMMP data, the report continues, “The near absence of
coverage of gender-based atrocities committed against girls and women further supports the
observation that such acts have been normalized in and through media coverage” (ibid, p.13).
For gender-based violence to be at stake in 6% of the most prominent news stories globally
does not seem to us to be a “near absence”. However, this interpretation points to a concern
that characterises much work in this area: namely, that the everyday nature of gender-based
violence – particularly men’s violence against women and girls – is not proportionately rep-
resented in news media. That the mundane nature of certain forms of gender-based violence
defies newsworthiness is a recurring theme in the chapters which follow. This matters because
making the problem visible is part of how we can make it actionable.
Yet, at the same time, for the media to play a role in normalising gender-based violence,
as also suggested in the GMMP quote, suggests a contradictory concern: namely that
gender-based violence is a routine and unexceptional element of news coverage. This sug-
gests that it is not the “near absence” of gender-based violence which is the problem, but

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-3 15
 Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge

rather the lack of feminist analysis in this coverage. Underpinning the contradictions in the
GMMP report, then, is a broader tension in feminist research and activism around gender-
based violence which sees the media as both a tool for change and as part of the problem.
Sometimes simultaneously.
Quantitively oriented projects like GMMP have been persuasive in policy contexts, but
are less effective in helping us to unpack the ideological work of news media and this is
where qualitative methodologies have prevailed.1 There is now a rich tradition of this work,
spanning nations, regions and news genres, different kinds of violence and differently po-
sitioned perpetrators and victim/survivors. The chapters in Part 1 are in conversation with
this tradition and demonstrate depressing consistencies in news coverage, particularly in
relation to victim-blaming and a lack of willingness to engage critically with men’s violence
in relation to gender norms. It is notable, for instance, how rarely the term men’s violence is
used: the maleness of violence is both assumed and, yet, invisible as such. At the same time,
stories about men’s violence against women – and gender-based violence more broadly – are
mobilised in different ways to serve specific local and national agendas at different times.
We will see, for instance, a recurring concern with how these stories can be mobilised for
regressive political ends in relation to race, ethnicity and immigration. Collectively, then, the
chapters in Part 1 demonstrate the resilience of certain long-standing feminist critiques of
news coverage, whilst highlighting the importance of being attentive to context.
We open with a chapter from Nancy Lombard focusing on news coverage of domestic
abuse in the UK. Lombard situates her interest in the media in relation to concerns about
how sociological research can be distorted in news stories. She demonstrates this by con-
sidering how sociological concern with correlations between domestic abuse and football or
Covid-19 can become news stories which imply causality and, therefore, suggest easy ways
to “fix” the problem of domestic abuse. These stories – and the fixes they imagine – ignore
the gendered dimensions of the abuse, render victim/survivors less visible and fail to hold
perpetrators to account.
This provides an essential context for Stephen R. Burrell and Alishya Dhir’s research on
male victims of domestic abuse, which similarly draws on research undertaken in the UK.
Burrell and Dhir argue that misrepresentations of men’s violence against women – like those
detailed by Lombard – also harm male victim/survivors. Whilst focusing on a statistically
rarer form of domestic abuse (against men) this chapter highlights the newsworthiness of
the exceptional and asks how these exceptional cases work to redefine the norm. Using
social research with victim/survivors to make recommendations about representation,
Burrell and Dhir note that many of the men in their study struggled to name their ex-
periences and have them recognised by others. Burrell and Dhir’s argument isn’t that this is
the fault of the media (although the gender stereotypes their respondents came up against
are familiar from media representations), but rather that news media have an important role
to play in shaping how the problem is understood.
Following this, in Chapter 3, Salonee Bhaman and Rachel Kuo weave media examples
together with broader debates about policing, justice and immigration in their reflections on
the heightened visibility accorded to “Asian hate” in the US in 2022. Bhaman and Kuo
demonstrate how violence against Asian American women is most visible and most legible
as violence, when it can be slotted into a narrative of classed and racialised conflict where
professional Asian American women are the helpless victims of Black men.2 This distorts
the realities of racist, misogynist violence most routinely experienced by Asian American
women and, importantly, prevents a wholesale analysis of American racism which would

16
 News

recognise what racially minoritised women share in the context of white supremacy. Instead,
Bhaman and Kuo note that Asian-hate – at its most spectacular – has been re-presented as a
Black phenomenon, and they contrast this with longer histories in which Asian women have
been constructed as themselves (sexually) dangerous. For Bhaman and Kuo, questions
about justice are therefore inextricable from questions about representation.
Approaching the issue of the murder of Indigenous women in Canada, for Kandice
Parker, Melanie A. Morrison, Todd G. Morrison, Senator Lillian Eva Quan Dyck and
Karissa Wall, the media is firstly a resource they mine for data about murders in Canada.
Their approach is a further demonstration of how central the media are to the ways in
which we understand and recognise (or fail to recognise) men’s violence against women.
One fascinating aspect of their analysis is the disconnect they identify between myths about
violence within Indigenous populations which have been clearly identified in existing media-
focused research and the patterns of victim-offender relationships which a quantitative
approach to a dataset built largely from media texts can reveal.
Importantly, Burrell and Dhir, Bhaman and Kuo, and Parker et al all balance consid-
eration of the “newsworthiness” of more exceptional cases (domestic abuse against men and
femicide) with a discussion of the more “common” or recognisable forms of gender-based
violence such as those discussed by Lombard. As outlined in the Introduction, Liz Kelly’s
(1988) model of the continuum of women’s experiences of sexual violence has been an
important touchstone throughout this collection. A central aspect of Kelly’s work was to
insist that the continuum did not imply a hierarchy of seriousness. The exception she makes
is sexual murder. Unsurprisingly, murder remains among the most newsworthy forms of
violence. In adopting gendered terms to more accurately name the murder of women
because they are women, feminists have sought to preserve the distinction Kelly makes about
the severity of sexual murder whilst retaining the value of the continuum as a means of
understanding these crimes as men’s violence against women. In Chapters 5 and 6, Denise
Buiten and Federica Formato demonstrate the ongoing relevance of debates about naming
and the im/precision of language.
Denise Buiten focuses on familicide: the annihilation of family members, often accom-
panied by suicide. Whilst the term familicide is not, itself, gendered, Buiten demonstrates
that the relationship between familicide and men’s domestic abuse of women has become a
central – but contested – aspect of news reporting. Although this recognition is in some
ways indebted to feminism, it can also be deployed in problematic ways to monsterise
perpetrators. In cases of familicide, there seem to be two opposing explanations, either that
perpetrators are “evil” or “monstrous” domestic abusers, or that they are in psychological
distress. In effect, this is an updated version of the “mad or bad” framing of perpetrators of
which feminists have long been critical, as it works against the kind of continuum thinking
at the heart of Kelly’s analysis which allows us to see perpetrators as “normal” men. Like
Bhaman and Kuo – and anticipating arguments by Emmaleena Käkelä (Chapter 10) and
Satu Venäläinen (Chapter 40) – Buiten thus points to the ways in which feminist arguments
can be mobilised to potentially anti-feminist ends. Buiten builds from this discussion of
media framing to reflect more broadly on feminist theorisations of familicide, highlighting
the extent to which questions of language and representation are at stake not only in our
engagements with media but in our theoretical and activist interventions.
Federica Formato’s emphasis, in Chapter 6, is on femminicidio in Italy – specifically, the
murder of women by (former) intimate partners. Formato highlights a mainstream resis-
tance to naming these crimes in gendered ways, which maps across policy and media. Her

17
 Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge

chapter focuses on selected news reports of femminicidio on the afternoon infotainment

television programme La Vita in Diretta. Like Buiten, she finds inconsistency in reporting
that both seeks to establish intimacy and familiarity with victims and, at the same time,
draws on the perpetrator’s framing of their actions and motivations, for example, in relation
to jealousy.
In Chapter 7, Kathryn Claire Higgins considers how news reporting of white male vigi-
lantism has been weaponised in Australian news and current affairs to justify the crim-
inalisation of Black African communities. Whilst male-on-male violence is too rarely
considered in discussions of gender-based violence, Higgins reminds us of the centrality of
violence to masculinity and demonstrates how the legibility of that violence is highly racia-
lised. She contrasts the contextualisation and explanation of white male vigilantism in
Australian reporting, with the portrayal of the “Black African youth” targeted by victims of
vigilante violence as an ungendered, dehistoricised and displaced mass. This, she argues, is
part of a process whereby vulnerability is reconstructed to centre not the actually violated
Black male, but the “threatened” communities the murderous white male vigilante claims to
protect. Horribly, grieving Black women can be mobilised as part of that narrative, as symbols
of the vulnerability caused not by white male vigilantism but, rather, by the Black male
“criminality” the vigilantes are allegedly responding to. The threat white men have posed and
continue to pose to women of all races is thus displaced. There are resonances here with
Bhaman and Kuo’s chapter in that both highlight the ways in which stories about violence
against racially minoritised communities are most newsworthy when they can be interpreted
through the lens of Black male criminality. Whilst in the cases of anti-Asian hate crime that
Bhaman and Kuo discuss this is through pitting one (model, feminised) minority against
another (criminalised, Black, masculinised), in the stories Higgins considers this is achieved
even when Black men are indisputably the victims of white, male violence.
In the next three chapters, the authors are similarly concerned with how stories about
gender and violence stand in for other social concerns and all three use the lens of moral
panic to explore what is at stake in these representations.
In Chapter 8, Tia S. Andersen, Jennifer Silcox and Deena A. Isom trace the origins of the
moral panic around girls’ violence in their study of US media reporting from the 1980s and
1990s. In these reports, girls’ violence is generative of moral panic precisely because it
challenges gender norms and so gender is consistently kept in view in a way it is not in
routine reporting on boys’ and men’s violence. Their study highlights the different condi-
tions of visibility for minoritised girls, pointing, in particular, to the ways in which the
appearance of girls of colour is endlessly revisited, and policed, in these reports. This
chapter also highlights the way that girls’ violence is presented as a result of feminist gains –
a kind of equality gone wrong. Later in the collection, Satu Venäläinen (Chapter 40) and
Guy Harrison and Melody Huslage (Chapter 41) similarly discuss the ways in which
equality discourses are mobilised online to undermine experiences of abuse. The feeling that
the more things change the more they stay the same is a recurring one when engaging with
the media’s treatment of gender violence.
The racialised dynamic of visibility is also at stake in Aisha K. Gill’s chapter, focusing on
news coverage of so-called “grooming gangs” in the UK in the early 2010s. Gill’s chapter
reminds us that the sexual abuse of girl children is not always seen as a social problem. In
the cases she discusses, it is the ethnicity of the perpetrators and the ease with which they are
therefore marked as monstrous in media discourses, which makes the abuse of these pre-
dominately white, working-class girls a problem. In other contexts, these girls are not

18
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necessarily visible as victims given dominant media narratives associated with this group
(see also Wood, Chapter 23). The disproportionate attention devoted to Asian grooming
gangs in the cases Gill discusses also meant that the more-common reality of child sexual
exploitation by white male perpetrators was hidden from view, along with the targeting of
minoritised girls.
Similarly, Emmaleena Käkelä is concerned with the conditions and costs of visibility for
ethnic minority communities in the UK. She traces the moral panic around female genital
mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) across policy, campaigning and media contexts, to demonstrate
how the victimised bodies of women and girls of colour function in broader debates about
immigration and border control. Interestingly, Käkelä argues that moral panic permeates
representations on both the right and left of the political spectrum, being mobilised to slightly
different political ends but with equally dehumanising results for women and girls of colour.
She also notes key differences in the representations of women and girls, with adults more
likely to be sexualised as victims (with a visual emphasis on their genitals) and blamed as
perpetrators responsible for practising FGM/C on sad, vulnerable and voiceless girls.
Käkelä and Gill are therefore concerned with the ways in which putatively feminist
discourse can be co-opted in media and policy contexts in the UK to be used against
communities of colour, in ways that consistently marginalise the expertise and lived
knowledge of feminists of colour. In this, they echo Bhaman and Kuo’s concern that vio-
lence against minoritised women matters most when it can be mobilised against other
minority communities. In all three cases, this means that the structural violence of both
sexism and racism is rendered invisible in the contexts they focus on. This is consistent with
the arguments of other chapters in Part 1 which point to the ways in which perpetrators
from majority communities are understood as aberrant individuals meaning the gendered
dimension of the violence is consistently marginalised, a theme that is taken up in the next
chapters which focus on sexual abuse.
Mthokozisi Phathisani Ndhlovu focuses on male victims of sexual violence and considers
how Zimbabwean news stories discredit male victims, take an ambiguous position in relation
to female perpetrators and sensationalise these unusual crimes, not least by representing
women’s violence through the lens of moral panic as a sign of the downfall of existing social
arrangements. In Chapter 12, Gabriela Nilsson is similarly interested in how stories about
sexual violence can be reconfigured as expressions of related but distinct fears. Her particular
focus is on how the significance of rape was subordinated to “greater dangers” – HIV and the
internet – in Swedish reporting, starting in the late 1990s. As with Lombard’s discussion of
reporting on domestic abuse, Nilsson argues that these rape stories are not really about rape at
all – or certainly not about rape as a gendered crime. Instead, the reports Nilsson analyses are
fundamentally moral in character, aligning rape to disease (and dis-ease), replacing the gen-
dered threat of violence with an embodied threat of contagion that gains particular potency
because of the serialised nature of the crimes discussed. These stories express contemporary
fears but do so in a way which marginalises and distorts the gendered inequalities and violence
at their heart. Understanding them requires, as Nilsson demonstrates, an attentiveness to the
broader socio-historical and political context in which they circulate – her approach echoing
that taken by Gill (Chapter 9) and Käkelä (Chapter 10).
Following Nilsson, and also focusing on sexual abuse, Júlia Garraio, Inês Amaral, Rita
Basílio Simões and Sofia José Santos turn their attention to Portuguese news media in a
chapter that draws on both text-based analysis and interviews with journalists. They
acknowledge that the contemporary moment is a contradictory one which has seen legal

19
 Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge

and social advances in challenging sexual violence on paper which have not always been
evidenced in practice. They show that newsrooms and journalism education programmes
remain relatively impervious to feminist critique, resulting in the uncritical reproduction of
rape myths. Yet, there are dedicated journalists whose work has shifted the script. This
contradictory picture of progress and restraint is brought into focus in their discussion of
four of the most high-profile cases of sexual violence in Portuguese news media in the 2000s.
Collectively they demonstrate that the meaning of allegations of sexual violence is always
negotiated with reference to broader debates about gender and power, with national (and
nationalist) inflections. Victim-blaming myths are most readily deployed in defence of men –
like the footballer Cristiano Ronaldo – whose cultural and social position is most assured.
In other cases, aspects of feminist analysis can make it into mainstream discourse, albeit in
limited and contested terms. But Ronaldo’s cultural value is simply too great for the alle-
gations against him to be interpreted as credible.
That a feminist analysis of news reporting throws up contradictions is also evident in
Onyinyechi Nancy Nwaolikpe’s chapter on the reporting of child abuse in Nigeria. Whilst
Nwaolikpe argues that child abuse is massively underrepresented, with a very selective focus
on sexual crimes and bullying external to the family, in her study of The Punch and The
Guardian she also finds many examples of what feminists in other contexts have identified as
best practice in reporting (see Zero Tolerance, n.d.; Femifesto, 2016; Impe, 2019;
Sreedharan and Thorsen, 2021). These include: situating individual stories in relation to
general patterns; drawing on expertise from those working to support victim/survivors;
including a call to action for readers; and (in contrast to Käkelä’s discussion of FGM/C in
the UK), linking gender-based abuse of adult women and girl children. At the same time,
problems identified with reporting in other national contexts are present here too: the
marginalisation of survivor speech (difficult to achieve in relation to children, of course), a
tendency towards victim-blaming language and a focus on “innocence” to construct hier-
archies of victims, for instance.
The final two chapters in Part 1 extend Garraio et al.’s interest in journalistic practice,
centring production and regulatory contexts. Li Jun focuses on high-profile civil cases
linked to China’s #MeToo hashtag – #RiceBunny – and, like Garraio et al, is centrally
concerned with the intersections of gender, power and celebrity. Rice Bunny (
) is
pronounced metoo, and this localised version of #MeToo was adopted by Chinese feminists
to evade censorship. Inherent in the hashtag, then, is a reminder of the potential limits
placed on speaking out and on using media platforms to do so. Indeed, this is a central
theme of Li’s chapter, which focuses on civil cases taken against alleged victim/survivors by
the powerful, high-profile men they have accused. These #RiceBunny cases pre-date the
2022 Johnny Depp and Amber Heard defamation trial and are a potent example of how
power and money shape the possibilities and realities of public testimonials. Whilst this is
not unique to China – both Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey (2019) and Ronan Farrow
(2019) have documented the intense pressure they were placed under during their investi-
gations into Harvey Weinstein, for instance – Li’s chapter documents the specific ways in
which news and social media interact in the Chinese context, shaping what stories about
sexual harassment by the powerful can be told and where they can be told. Her chapter
testifies both to the groundswell of support for women speaking out and to the costs
inherent in doing so. She maps the effective spread of misinformation about these cases to
serve the interests of powerful accused men and draws on interviews with media profes-
sionals to demonstrate the constraints placed on news organisations in reporting.

20
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Einar Thorsen and Chindu Sreedharan’s chapter, with which we close Part 1, also
considers the experiences of reporters, this time in India. Their chapter draws on interviews
with 257 journalists working across print, online and broadcast news, in which they ex-
plored their attitudes towards, and experiences of, sexual assault reporting. Although the
journalists largely expressed good intentions, Thorsen and Sreedharan note that they are
guided primarily by legal frameworks which significantly limit the potential for engaging
with survivor discourse. At the same time, both the broader journalistic cultures in which
they are embedded and the external actors (including police) they rely on in reporting these
issues, reflect broader patriarchal attitudes around rape and sexual assault, resulting in a
certain fatalism and frustrating any good intentions. Thorsen and Sreedharan thus point to
the need to situate work with journalists in a broader context, moving beyond good practice
guidelines to more fully consider the practicalities of journalistic practice and habitus.
It may seem like a stretch to suggest that this allows us to end Part 1 on a hopeful note,
but by highlighting the good intentions of reporters – however constrained these are –
Thorsen and Sreedharan remind us that the change that other contributors to Part 1
demonstrate is so needed is not always a change that journalists are resistant to. This is not
to be naïve about the challenges ahead. Indeed, Thorsen and Sreedharan situate their work
with journalists against the backdrop of studies of Indian news media which point to
continued victim-blaming attitudes, marginalisation of survivor voices and an emphasis on
a limited range of victims and types of assault. Across Part 1 as a whole, we see that many of
the problems with news reporting identified by scholars like Helen Benedict (1992) more
than 30 years ago persist not only across time but also across a variety of national news
contexts (UK, US, Australia, Italy, Nigeria, Sweden, Zimbabwe, Portugal, China and
India). There are, of course, specificities which it is vital to study and understand: Gill’s
analysis, for instance, situates the news coverage of so-called “grooming gangs” in relation
to wider discourses around ethnicity, gender and crime in the UK; Ndhlovu’s chapter
introduces forms of gender-based violence – specifically “sperm harvesting” – which have
not (yet) been the focus of sustained attention either in media or scholarship outside of
Zimbabwe; Nwaolikpe’s discussion allows us to see that the monsterisation of the paedo-
phile is by no means a universal phenomenon; whilst Li’s contribution highlights the
importance of understanding how national media systems work and in whose interests. This
knowledge is essential in enabling activists and scholars to push for change – not just in
representation, but also in media workplaces and practices – as part of the broader
movement to challenge, and ultimately end, gender-based violence.

Notes
1 However, developments in using corpus linguistics in large news samples offer potential here (e.g.
Tranchese, 2023).
2 Where Black is capitalised, it is typically to signal that the term is used as a (politicised) identity
marker (particularly in Euro-American contexts). White is also sometimes capitalised in this way,
although this is a newer trend. In our editorial introductions, we have tried to present the terms in
the way they are used by authors, recognising that this varies across contexts.

References
Benedict, H. (1992) Virgin or vamp: How the press covers sex crimes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Farrow, R. (2019) Catch and kill: Lies, spies and a conspiracy to protect predators. London: Fleet.

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Femifesto (2016) Use the right words: Media reporting on sexual violence in Canada. Available at:
http://www.femifesto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/UseTheRightWords-Single-May16.pdf
(Accessed: 17 December 2022).
Impe, A. (2019) Reporting on violence against women and girls: A handbook for journalists. UNESCO.
Available at: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000371524 (Accessed: 17 December 2022).
Kantor, J. and Twohey, M. (2019) She said: Breaking the sexual harassment story that helped ignite a
movement. London: Bloomsbury.
Kelly, L. (1988) Surviving sexual violence. Cambridge: Polity.
Macharia, S. (ed) (2021) Who makes the news? 6th Global Media Monitoring Project. Available at: https://
whomakesthenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/GMMP2020.ENG_.FINAL20210713.pdf
(Accessed: 28 November 2022).
Sreedharan, C. and Thorsen, E. (2021) Sexual violence and the news media: Issues, challenges, and
guidelines for journalists in India. New Delhi: UNESCO. Available at: https://unesdoc.unesco.
org/ark:/48223/pf0000378325.locale=en (Accessed: 17 December 2022).
Tranchese, A. (2023) From Fritzl to #MeToo: Twelve years of rape coverage in the British press. Cham:
Palgrave.
Zero Tolerance (n.d.) Media guidelines on violence against women. Available at: https://www.
zerotolerance.org.uk/resources/Media-Guidelines-on-Violence-Against-Women.pdf (Accessed:
17 December 2022).

22
 1
“SENSATIONAL SPIKES” AND
“ISOLATED INCIDENTS”
Examining the misrepresentation of domestic
abuse by the media using the case studies
of football and Covid-19
Nancy Lombard

Introduction
Domestic violence and abuse (DVA) is a complex, multifactoral, international and
increasingly politicised social problem. Efforts to tackle DVA have been bolstered by
research that has highlighted its nature, extent and detrimental impact. One of the conse-
quences of the increased public and academic attention given to DVA, within the landscape
of this ongoing debate, is that research which suggests potential links between DVA and
certain factors (such as football, alcohol, mental health or Covid-19 for example) has
proliferated and these links may be misinterpreted, misrepresented and misunderstood
especially within the news media that are looking for “quick fix” stories.
This chapter examines how the media (mis)represents DVA and perpetuates mis-
understandings using two case studies that originally looked at the context of media reports in
terms of football and Covid-19. Using Kitzinger’s (2000) template model, it argues that the
media has used a fixed method of reporting DVA that prioritises certain types of abuse,
involving a particular kind of victim and/or perpetrator. Although advances have been made
here, encouraged by the proliferation of reporting guidelines (see for example, Easteal et al.,
2021; Zero Tolerance, 2019) in the main these have focused on improved reporting on victim/
survivors and perpetrators. It is argued here that by framing cases as singular “incidents” or as
a set of “spikes” the media continues to perpetuate a misrepresentation of the phenomenon of
DVA as one-off episodes of physical violence. In doing so a more nuanced understanding of
DVA as coercive control and as a course of conduct is disregarded.
The chapter concludes with recommendations to prioritise the social context of DVA and
the need to understand the dynamics of domestic violence as a pattern of abusive beha-
viours and gender inequalities, rather than viewing it as a reaction to a specific event.

Background
In 2000, in a ground-breaking move, the Scottish Executive (now Government) adopted a
gender-based definition of domestic abuse recognising that unequal gender power relations

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-4 23
 Nancy Lombard

and socially constructed gender norms around gender roles provide the context within
which domestic abuse occurs. Scotland is the only country within the UK to frame domestic
abuse in this way. Furthermore, the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018 came into effect
on 1 April 2019. The law criminalises an abusive course of conduct regardless of the
presence of physical violence perpetrated by an individual toward a partner or ex-partner, in
line with Stark’s (2007) concept of coercive control. In its first year, 1,681 crimes were
recorded under the legislation. Of those, 94% (or 1,577) involved a female victim and 6%
(or 104) had a male victim (Scottish Government, 2020a). Whilst this chapter is written
within the DVA context of Scotland it incorporates some analysis of non-UK news media.

Media and domestic abuse

The media according to Ferrell and Websdale (1999) is a sphere through which meanings of
crimes are constructed, attributed and enforced. It provides a framework for the public to
interpret and understand DVA. DVA as a form of men’s violence has been traditionally and
theoretically positioned within the private space of the home because of the nature of the
relationship of those involved. Media focus on DVA is therefore somewhat of an anomaly
because of its connection with the home and private space. Indeed, Hawley, Clifford and
Konkes (2018, p. 2306) debate this contradiction, arguing for the media to;

reframe family violence as a national problem rather than simply a private matter that
happens behind closed doors to nameless, mostly female, victims.

Stanko’s analysis reflects this dilemma of covering the issue within the media well, arguing
(2006, p. 546) that familiarity between perpetrator and victim “disables a language of
criminal harm”. As such it becomes necessary to locate space as a socio-cultural con-
struction rather than simply the physical location of the home (Lombard, 2015). Doing so
highlights the pervasive nature of such violence and identifies the “domestic” in terms of the
intimate relationship thereby illustrating the extensive nature of men’s violence and the
different types of abusive behaviours (Radford and Kelly, 1996). It is this contradiction that
underlies news reporting on domestic abuse cases.
Much has been written on the media coverage and representation of men’s violence
against women, be it from the “stranger danger” phenomenon (Kitzinger, 2001; Scott,
2003), the glorification and sexualisation of certain forms of violence (Lees, 1997;
DiBennardo, 2018) or the media’s role in perpetuating fear through the social control of
women (Heidensohn, 2000; Easteal, Holland and Judd, 2015; Honkatukia and Keskinen,
2018). In relation to DVA, the media tends to report examples when the perpetrator, or the
victim, is a celebrity (or in the public eye), when it involves the death of a child, or when the
media can create an “explanation” for the behaviour of the perpetrator – typically based
around victim blaming (affairs, leaving the relationship) and usually only then when the DVA
results in death (Geertsema-Sligh and Worthington, 2020). Even in these cases, it is particular
victims that make the news whilst others do not (Ingala-Smith, 2017). If there is nothing that
draws this “private experience” into the public interest domain, then it is in effect a “non-
story” (Lyons and Henderson, 1997).
Easteal, Holland and Judd (2015) in their comprehensive review found that the media
still focused on the “mutuality” of the violence making a case that both the man and the
women were equally culpable. An Australian review of media practices the following year

24
 “Sensational spikes” and “isolated incidents”

(Sutherland et al., 2016a), also found that articles about domestic abuse were more likely to
be published if the perpetrator was female, distorting the comprehensive view of violence
against women as a recognised global phenomenon. They also found that when reports
covered domestic murders, the focus was on the method of the murder and not the history
of violence that preceded it, sensationalising the event and not reporting the facts (ibid.).
Sutherland conducted a systematic review of representations of violence against women
within the mainstream media (digital and social media) in 16 countries concluding that the
majority misrepresented the reality of violence perpetrated against women:

Some of the most common ways this occurs are considered with reference to the
interrelated key themes: misrepresentations and rape myths, blame and responsibility,
social context, sensationalism, and voices of authority and opinion.
(Sutherland et al., 2016a, p. 6)

The increasing public disdain and tolerance for sensationalised news stories especially those
glorifying violence or focusing upon the behaviour of the victim (Sutherland et al., 2016b)
has meant that journalists are encouraged to use less sensationalist language and not victim
blame. Easteal et al. (2021, p. 1) in their case study of best practices for reporting violence
against women in the media, emphasised the significant role the media has to improve a
“community’s understanding and response”. They found that including personal informa-
tion about victim/survivors increases empathy and focuses on perpetrator responsibility.
Whilst by no means has this been achieved, there is a conscious move by (some) journalists
away from victim blaming, perpetrator exoneration and reinforcement of myths. According
to Chesney-Lind and Chagnon (2017) although there have been encouraging moves within
the media to acknowledge DVA as a serious problem, it is still:

often reported in a routine manner that focuses on minutiae instead of context, in-
forming audiences minimally about the nature, extent, and causes of domestic violence.
(2017, n.p.)

So instead of the focus on the victim or the perpetrator, the media has begun to frame DVA
in a particular way. It is now acknowledged as a social problem but rather than an ap-
preciation of the gendered social and cultural dynamics underpinning DVA it seeks to
attribute causal explanations to its occurrence.

Media frames and narratives

In her work on childhood sexual abuse Kitzinger (1999, 2000) adapts Goffman’s notion of
framing to create an explanation as to how the media reports upon specific stories. In this
chapter, her theory is adapted to illustrate how media cover stories of domestic abuse. She
maintains that “‘templates’ are defined by their lack of innovation, their status as received
wisdom and by their closure […] they reify a kind of historical determination which can filter
out dissenting accounts, camouflage conflicting facts and promote one kind of narrative”
(pp. 75–77).
Kitzinger’s concept of media templates – used to highlight patterns in particular issues or
social problems – can be applied here to how the media reports domestic abuse. It differs
from her original theoretical framework in that it is not one event that provides the template

25
 Nancy Lombard

for others to be replicated from, rather it is the social “problem” of domestic abuse/domestic
abuse homicides that is used as a template overlaid with cumulative “facts” that all point to
the same “causal” links and outcomes. Repetition here is important. In Kitzinger’s work, it
is one dominant template that imports the knowledge through which subsequent stories will
be viewed. In domestic abuse coverage we can illuminate the tried and tested templates of:

Poor perpetrator – he lost his job/wife/he was a lovely family man

Victim blaming – what she did to deserve his actions
Causal factors – football/affairs/feminism/alcohol/more recently with Covid-19

The following two case studies highlight how the media presents DVA in terms of these
“templates”: isolated incidents (that can be blamed on individual circumstances) or sensa-
tional spikes blaming external factors for increased occurrence.

Case study 1: Domestic abuse and football

In the UK, the narrative surrounding the apparent link between football and domestic
abuse is perpetuated by local and national media (Café, 2012; Duell, 2014; Cambridge,
2016) based on quantitative data showing a correlation between football matches and DVA,
which led to suggestions that football was a cause of it. Considering this, the Scottish
Government commissioned a review of national and international literature to examine the
links between football and domestic abuse (Crowley, Brooks and Lombard, 2014).
There are few UK studies that specifically address the relationship of football to DVA.
Those that exist primarily compare prevalence (as recorded either by police, other emer-
gency services, or hospital accident and emergency departments) on the days that football
games take place with various comparators. All these studies consistently show a link
between DVA and football though, as identified by Crowley, Brooks and Lombard (2014),
there are notable limitations of these studies. Yet messages from these studies informed
media coverage around the UK, particularly in the run-up to large football tournaments or
“crucial” matches providing what Kitzinger (1999) would call a “template”.
Existing academic studies within the Scottish context are all quantitative analyses, based on
incidents reported to the police (Scottish Government Analytical Services, 2011; Strathclyde
Police, 2011; Dickson, Jennings and Koop, 2012; Williams et al., 2013). These studies have a
predominant focus on “Old Firm” matches (fixtures between Celtic and Rangers)1 and their
findings indicate that relative to various comparators, there was an increase in recorded
domestic abuse incidents on the day that “Old Firm” fixtures were played. This was reported
as being between 13% and 138.8%, depending on several variables: the day of the week the
match took place; the comparator day/event; and the salience/outcome of a match. Studies
that used other (non-Old Firm) football matches as a comparator found examples of apparent
relationships between recorded domestic abuse incidents and the existence of the football
match. However, these were less pronounced patterns and smaller increases (Crowley, Brooks
and Lombard, 2014). Crowley, Brooks and Lombard (2014) identified limitations of these
studies on the basis that the nature and characteristics of DVA offences recorded or how they
came to the attention of the police were not known. Moreover, the potential impact of dif-
ferent recording practices between police forces, or different policing practices on the days of
football matches, was not considered; this is a significant issue given the likelihood of
increased policing around certain football matches and the growing prioritisation of DVA

26
 “Sensational spikes” and “isolated incidents”

within Police Scotland. Studies conducted in England have broadly similar findings and
limitations (Brimicombe and Café, 2012; Kirby, Francis and O’Flaherty, 2013).
In addition to this body of research, anecdotal evidence and reports from the police and
specialist DVA services across the UK (Williamson, Brooks and Lombard, 2015) raised the
question of whether DVA increases, or is triggered by, major football tournaments and
what that means for both local and national policy and practice. Williamson, Brooks and
Lombard (2015) concluded that the absence of qualitative research exploring the perspec-
tives of victims, perpetrators or practitioners was a “significant omission” in existing
research evidence and consequently in national media coverage. They sought to establish
how the potential links between football and DVA could be understood and addressed by
gathering the views of key stakeholders across England and Scotland. In highlighting the
complex and contested nature of the relationship between football and DVA, a diverse
range of contributory and confounding factors were identified in the form of alcohol, the
weather, match expectations, team affiliations, gendered norms, class, ethnicity, mascu-
linity, entitlement and permissions. Specialist DVA service providers were concerned that
focusing on football masks the underlying gendered causes of DVA and potentially offers
perpetrators excuses for their abusive behaviour.
The blurring of causes and excuses within the media frame looking at domestic violence
is not new. Such data is reported without recognition of the complexities of an abusive
relationship in national media with a cause-and-effect simplicity that forms part of the
media’s DVA template, as the following headlines demonstrate:

Euro 2020: Warning over spikes in domestic abuse during England matches
(Oppenheim, 2021)
Euro 2012: Tournament football and domestic violence
(Café, 2012)
Domestic violence almost doubles during old firm matches
(Johnson and Johnson, 2013)

When the media focuses upon these “triggers” it risks over-simplifying and “re-
incidentalising” DVA; replicating a process described by Hearn (1998) whereby DVA is
reduced to an incident or set of discreet incidents through conventional agency or police
responses. Examining the wider social factors that lead to the apparent increase in reporting
figures – more police, the preemptive arrest of offenders, women having the space to make
phone calls and violence and abuse within existing abusive relationships – helps to facilitate
a more nuanced understanding of DVA as a form of “coercive control” (Stark, 2007)
embedded within an ongoing pattern of behaviour.
The argument made here is that in its reporting of Covid-19 and domestic abuse, the media
replicated familiar “templates” (Kitzinger, 2000) yet again, focusing upon “triggers” – in
particular, isolation, pressure, boredom, frustrations and anger – again oversimplifying and
“re-incidentalising” DVA.

Domestic abuse, femicides and Covid-19

In January 2020, there were reports from China that a virus was circulating, originating
from a city named Wuhan. Gradually over the course of the next few months, countries

27
 Nancy Lombard

around the world went into “lockdown” due to Covid-19: the streets were empty and leg-
islation was drafted that meant by law, people had to remain in their homes. On Monday 23
March 2020, the Governments in the UK followed suit. The UK media started to report a
“surge” or “spike” in the number of DVA cases (e.g. Mohan, 2020; Grierson, 2021; Sales,
2021). Spiking and surging make us think in terms of more one-off incidents – but the
pattern of abuse that is already there is increasing in terms of frequency and type because
both parties always remain together. It is critical to contextualise these reports: more men
were not starting to be abusive or violent, the patterns of abuse were becoming more fre-
quent and, in some cases, being reported more readily.
Early data from those countries that went into lockdown earlier than the UK suggested
that during self-isolation, reports of DVA increased. In China for example, a report suggests
that the number of reports of abuse increased threefold when comparing figures from
February 2019 to February 2020 (cited in Williamson, Lombard and Brooks-Hay, 2020).
Similarly, in France, reports of abuse increased by over 30% (ibid.), whilst there was a 33%
rise in helpline calls in Singapore (ibid.). Spain reported 18% more calls to emergency
helplines in the first two weeks of lockdown compared to the month before (ibid.), and
reports from India suggest domestic violence has doubled (ibid.). Australia reported a 75%
increase in internet searches relating to support for domestic violence victims (ibid.). Some
communities, who are subject to distinct types of social inequalities, are disproportionately
impacted by Covid-19 and therefore Covid-19 and DVA (see Sundari, 2010). For example,
women with no resource to public funds, BME workers in frontline key services, those with
underlying health conditions and disabilities and those living in poverty.
From the outset, specialist DVA services (already dealing with precarious funding
following austerity cuts) were preparing for a potential increase in both the occurrence
and reporting of abuse, calling on the respective UK governments to issue clear guidance
to potential victims and perpetrators during this time. UK (Westminster) (2020) and
Scottish government (2020b) guidance stated that the police would come to assist in
cases of domestic violence and that fleeing an abusive home was classified as essential
travel.
In non-virus times, on average, two women a week are murdered by their partners, and
these crimes rarely make the news (ONS, 2019). In the three weeks following lockdown,
there were 16 domestic abuse murders in England and Wales. This number was higher
than the normal rates reported by Counting Dead Women and the Femicide Census
(Allen et al., 2020). Describing domestic abuse killings as “Covid-19 murders” is dan-
gerous as, like linking it to football, it masks the reality that the perpetrator is to blame
for the violence:

UK’s first coronavirus murder as husband is arrested over death of wife

(Courtney-Guy, 2020)

LOCKDOWN KILLER Pensioner, 70, who strangled wife is cleared of murder after
court told first UK lockdown made him ‘snap’
(Little, 2021)

The media framing of perpetrators is important. These men are constructed as family men,
boyfriends, husbands and fathers who have murdered the women (and/or children) in their
lives. This frames the violence in terms of love and passion, not power and control:

28
 “Sensational spikes” and “isolated incidents”

The pilot admitted to the killing but maintains that it was a “crime of passion” after
she threatened to divorce him.
(Fahey, 2022)

LOVE TRIANGLE MURDER Jealous husband ‘stabbed wife of almost 20 years to

death after “losing it” when her affair with local joiner was outed’
(Christie, 2017)

FAMILY HORROR Dad murders his two kids before killing himself over wife’s
affair after telling brother ‘I’ll take them with me’
(Hill, 2020)

The perpetrators are then assumed a veneer of respectability and normality associated with
“the mate down the pub”, “the devoted dad” or the “family man next door”. This further
cements the narrative that the virus (or other such context) is to blame and that, ordinarily
murders such as these, would not otherwise be happening.
More recent research by Bates et al. (2021) examining domestic abuse murders during
Covid-19 has since shown that overall numbers did not actually increase. In their report,
Bates et al. (2021, p. 17) found that:

“Covid-blaming” as an excuse or justification by perpetrators for domestic abuse

or coercive and controlling behaviour. […] This analysis shows how important it is for
police, other agencies, the courts, and the public to understand that Covid might be
used by perpetrators variously as a weapon of control and as an excuse for abuse or
even murder.

Much of the context of the lockdown magnifies existing abusive behaviours: isolation from
friends, family and employment; the opportunity for constant surveillance; restrictions on
access to the outside world and limitations on food. A further problem which comes from
the media focus on domestic abuse as individual incidents is that it implies that we are in a
situation that will dissipate after Covid-19 when DVA was there before Covid-19 and will be
there after it. Whilst there may be increases in abuse and reporting, many victim/survivors
will have used their many coping strategies to survive in social isolation and not report, this
explains why in some countries reporting has decreased. Specialist services know from
increases in reporting after school holidays and other times when families are in closer
proximity, that reports are likely to increase for a period after the lockdown has ended. For
many, it will be the time when they can leave the house, re-charge and get support that they
will find the strength to report and leave an abusive situation.

Conclusions
The key conclusion from these case studies is that focusing on “a cause” – or any other
specific factors or events, in this case, football or Covid-19 – risks over-simplifying domestic
violence. The media’s approach was to look at cases as one incident or set of separate
incidents, rather than attempt a more nuanced understanding of domestic violence and
abuse as a form of coercive control embedded within a regular pattern of behaviour. There
are theoretical and methodological difficulties in identifying causal links between specific

29
 Nancy Lombard

factors or events; even where correlations are found to exist there is little evidence of why
these correlations exist, or indeed which direction they operate in.
When the media focuses on external events – be it a health crisis, political instability, or a
football match – it masks the underlying gendered causes of DVA and potentially offers
perpetrators excuses for their abusive behaviour. Amidst the media reports it is imperative
that we continue to see the dynamics of DVA as both a pattern of abusive behaviours and a
product of gendered social and cultural norms rather than a reaction to a specific factor or
event such as Covid-19. If, as a society, we continue to offer excuses to perpetrators we
make it more difficult for victim/survivors to get help, pandemic or not.
The “virus” element and lockdown make DVA more newsworthy. The importance of a
football match or tournament does the same. This creates a media loop in which the mis-
reporting of these crimes perpetuates the incident-based perception of abuse which subse-
quently leads to further misreporting and misunderstanding. This is a problem because
many statutory and other agencies – whether that is the police, courts, or health practi-
tioners – also continue to perceive this type of abuse in terms of incidents, when the reality
for victim/survivors is that this is an underlying, ongoing, fluctuating pattern of abuse. This
means that the reality of abuse becomes hidden and domestic abuse becomes invisible. It
is crucial that we continue to see the dynamics of domestic violence as both a pattern of
abusive behaviours and a product of the unequal world we live in, rather than viewing it as a
reaction to a specific event. All that does is make it harder for victims to be seen and to get
the proper help and support they need. Worse, it shifts the blame from those who should be
held accountable for the violent abuse of their partners.

Acknowledgements
This chapter is based on previously conducted and published research with Dr. Oona
Brooks-Hay and Dr. Emma Williamson. I would like to thank them for allowing me to use
our shared labour to write this chapter. I would also like to thank Dr. Katy Proctor for
commenting on an early draft of this chapter.

Note
1 The Old Firm is a collective term for the Glasgow football teams Rangers and Celtic, who have a
fierce rivalry linked to the religions of Protestantism and Catholicism.

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4(3) pp. 203–214.
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Strathclyde Police (2011) Old Firm fixtures: Impact on violence, disorder, domestic abuse and policing,
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 2
THE MEDIA AND MALE
VICTIM-SURVIVORS OF
DOMESTIC ABUSE
Stephen R. Burrell and Alishya Dhir

Introduction
The ways in which the media constructs discourses around domestic abuse have significant
implications for societal perceptions and responses to the problem. This is certainly true in
relation to the experiences of men who are victim-survivors of domestic abuse. This is a
highly contentious and polarising topic, about which there are many misconceptions and
disagreements, both within academic scholarship and society more broadly. Indeed, men’s
experiences of victimisation can sometimes be exploited for political ends; for example, as
an attempt to delegitimise feminist analyses or campaigns to end men’s violence against
women (also Venäläinen, this volume).
This chapter is built upon a feminist, critical masculinities approach, on the basis that
feminist theory and research have contributed more than any other school of thought to our
understandings of violence, abuse and victimisation. We see no contradiction in recognising
that intimate forms of violence such as domestic and sexual abuse have a substantially dis-
proportionate impact on women and girls, but that men can be subjected to them too and that
their experiences need to be recognised and understood as part of what is a complex picture.
The chapter is informed by research conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic (see
Westmarland et al., 2021). The project involved observing calls to the Respect UK Men’s
Advice Line for male victim-survivors of domestic abuse between June-September 2020.
Members of the research team listened to 221 phone calls and read 113 e-mails to the helpline
(a fraction of the overall contacts made). This enabled us to gain in-depth insights into the
experiences of a large number of men, in an anonymous and relatively “natural” format.
The data consisted of notes taken during calls and e-mail content, which was anonymised
before being coded and thematically analysed. We excluded calls from people who did not
appear to be male victim-survivors (e.g. professionals, family members, men who described
situations which aligned more with them being the primary perpetrator of abuse). The
research was conducted principally to learn more about the impact of the Covid-19 pan-
demic on male victim-survivors, and how interventions can serve their needs. However, it
also provided broader insights into men’s experiences of domestic abuse, which can help us
to move beyond some of the public misconceptions which remain influential.

34 DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-5
 The media and male victim-survivors of domestic abuse

Our argument here is not that the media are uniquely powerful or that their stories are
passively absorbed, but rather that the experiences of victim-survivors demonstrate the
importance of thinking critically about representation as part of any social research. When
that research focuses on experiences which are – in many ways – outliers (and hence more
newsworthy) this presents particular challenges (see also Ndhlovu; Gill; and Andersen et al,
this volume). We draw on our research to highlight key factors which journalists should
take into account when reporting on these issues, structuring the chapter around common
“myths” about male victim-survivors of domestic abuse.

“Male victim-survivors don’t exist”

Perhaps the most rudimentary myth is the notion that male victim-survivors of domestic
abuse simply don’t exist – that this is something which only affects women. This connects to
dominant ways in which masculinity is constructed in society, which associate manhood
with strength, power, unemotionality and never showing weakness. This can make it dif-
ficult to come to terms with the idea of a man being a victim, of being vulnerable, of needing
help (Huntley et al., 2019). Men are assumed to be active rather than passive, to be the
subject rather than the object, to dominate rather than be dominated and any scenario
which doesn’t fit this picture can be hard to recognise. This is magnified further in the
intimate setting of the home and relationships, which men are rarely encouraged to focus on
or communicate about. Men continue to be associated primarily with the public sphere,
whilst their practices and experiences in the private sphere are less often explored, amongst
one another or in wider culture.
Our research clearly demonstrates that male victim-survivors of domestic abuse exist,
with many of the men calling the Men’s Advice Line describing significant experiences of
harm. One caller, Brian, said “I don’t know how much longer I can take this situation …
mentally”. This was typically at the hands of current or former (female) partners in het-
erosexual relationships, though this is likely to be in part because specialist services such as
the Galop Helpline exist for LGBTQ+ people in the UK. A minority described abuse by
other family members (such as parents or siblings of any gender).
Despite this, our difficulties in accepting men’s vulnerabilities provide obstacles to society
recognising them as victims of domestic abuse. As a result, practitioners, friends and family
members may find it hard to believe or take seriously when a man comes forward to disclose
abuse. Indeed, male victim-survivors themselves may struggle to understand or accept what
is happening to them (which can be difficult for any victim). Fears about showing
“weakness” also obstruct men from opening up or seeking help if they are being victimised;
something which is again challenging for any victim of domestic abuse, but with particular
dynamics for men (Huntley et al., 2019).
It is therefore valuable for the media to tell the stories of male victim-survivors in
ways which take the issue seriously and do not demean the victim as if he has somehow
“failed” to live up to masculine expectations. This will help to improve public awareness
that male victim-survivors do exist – and to show that it can happen to any “type” of
man, including those who appear to fit hegemonic standards of masculinity. In the
process, it is important not to present male victim-survivors as exceptional or highly
unusual, to avoid increasing a sense of isolation among men in similar situations
(Scarduzio et al., 2017).

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 Stephen R. Burrell and Alishya Dhir

“Domestic abuse is not harmful to men”

Others might perceive that whilst men can be victims of domestic abuse, it is not as harmful for
them as it is for women. Again, this can be linked back to gender norms, in which men are
often expected to be tough, to never show fear or emotional fragility and be in control rather
than subordinate or submissive. There is arguably a sexist element to this assumption; if
domestic abuse is harmful to women, then why wouldn’t it be harmful to men as well?
Our research demonstrated the real and substantial harms many of the callers were ex-
periencing to their mental and physical health, and to their lives and freedom more broadly,
with a sense of fear and anxiety often described. Alex remarked that “It got to the point where
I was scared to do anything”. Men discussed experiencing physical, psychological, economic
and, in a few cases, sexual abuse, with coercive and controlling behaviours often appearing to
play a significant role. Covid-19, and measures to prevent it, were frequently exploited to
further the control, as were vulnerabilities around immigration status. In some cases, differ-
ences in size and strength meant the caller did not feel at serious risk from the violence, but this
could still contribute to a sense of bullying and humiliation. Sometimes perpetrators also
involved other family members such as brothers in the abuse, or threatened to do so, for
example in cases of “honour-related” violence, increasing the sense of danger. Often the
psychological abuse took a gendered form, with several men discussing being called “weak”,
“pathetic” and not “manly” enough. For example, Trevor remarked, “She says things like
‘You’re not a man, grow a pair, you can’t get it up’”.
Some of the men described how either the perpetrators, or people they had confided in,
were dismissive of their experiences. This points to the wider societal discomfort with the idea
of men being vulnerable. It is therefore vital for the media to challenge such stereotypes about
masculinity rather than feeding into them, by avoiding downplaying or making light of men’s
experiences of domestic abuse (Scarduzio et al., 2017). It also suggests that discussing
domestic violence in “gender-neutral” terms does little to help male victim-survivors. The
abuse men are subjected to takes gendered forms and masculine norms can prevent men from
getting the help they need, so it is vital to take the specificities of these complex gender
dynamics into account for male and female victim-survivors alike.

“Domestic abuse is worse for men”

Counterposed to this, the opposite is also claimed; that domestic abuse is more harmful
for men than it is for women. This feeds into unhelpful “hierarchies” of victims when
clearly domestic abuse is harmful for anyone. It also fails to take account of the multitude
of struggles and obstacles which female victim-survivors face – frequently interlinked
with wider gender inequalities and sexist stereotypes. For instance, it is often pointed out
that few support services such as refuges exist for male victim-survivors. However, this
can create an inaccurate perception that no such support is available (indeed, one valu-
able thing the media can do is signpost to such services), as well as ignoring the different
needs men may have (for example, some may have less desire to make use of refuges).
It also ignores the fact that support services for women are still significantly under-
resourced.
It is therefore important to consider the similarities and differences in men’s and women’s
needs and experiences. For example, it is possible to identify points of unity – that domestic
abuse as a whole is not taken seriously enough, that the entire sector remains underfunded

36
 The media and male victim-survivors of domestic abuse

and more support for all victim-survivors is needed – whilst recognising that different
groups benefit from specialist forms of support.
There are also complexities relating to differences in experiences. For instance, many of the
callers did not describe feeling substantially afraid or threatened by their partners to the same
extent that female victim-survivors often report. Monty commented, “I am six foot three, and
it’s hard to realise that abuse is occurring, because of the knowledge that physically I am
‘safe’”. So the fact that men do tend to have more physical strength and greater socialisation in
the use of violence than women, is likely to impact upon the nature of domestic abuse in
different contexts and may mean that, on average, the severity of impacts and risks faced by
female victims is greater. In addition, living in a gender-unequal society creates multiple issues
which can compound women’s experiences of abuse and be exploited by perpetrators. This
includes women typically having fewer economic resources, being more restricted by car-
egiving responsibilities and having to overcome widespread misogynistic stereotypes, such as
the notion that women lie and manipulate to get what they want. None of this is to suggest
that male victims are not substantially harmed by domestic abuse, however, it shows that their
experiences are likely to be different (Scott-Storey et al., 2022).
The point is that whilst domestic abuse can have different forms and impacts, it is always
highly damaging. This also shows that painting an accurate picture of the problem requires
taking account of the context in which domestic abuse is being perpetrated and how this
varies in relation to multiple intersecting systems of power and inequality.

“Women are not capable of violence and abuse”

There is also a deep-rooted myth that women cannot perpetrate abuse, perhaps especially in
relation to those close to them. This is influenced by stereotypes around femininity sug-
gesting that women should be passive, compliant, caring and selfless. In reality, there is of
course no reason why women cannot use violence; nothing which makes this innately or
solely a problem to do with men.
Yet when women are violent it can be fixated on and seen as particularly shocking
precisely because it goes against dominant norms of femininity (also Andersen et al., this
volume). Sometimes such expectations result in benevolent sexism, in which women are
patronisingly perceived as not having the capacity to cause genuine mental or physical harm
to others, especially men. In other cases, they underpin hostile sexism, in which female
perpetrators are judged particularly harshly (treated as “evil” “witches” for example) when
perceived to defy feminine norms.
Yet as discussed earlier, society does not generally teach women and girls to use violence
in the ways that it does to men and boys, nor is violence by women legitimised or con-
structed as desirable in the ways that men’s violence often is. It is these constructions of
gender that are central to why most violence in society is committed by men. But this does
not mean that women can’t perpetrate violence and abuse. Our research suggested that
domestic abuse by women does look different in some ways. It may still be based on ex-
erting power and control, but not necessarily “female domination” as such. The abuse
frequently appeared gendered, but primarily in belittling the victim’s failure to live up to
masculine standards, such as being a successful breadwinner. So rather than inverting
patriarchal power dynamics, female perpetrators often seemed to actually reproduce them,
but in a form where they were in charge, because of their partner’s supposed inability to
fulfil that role.

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 Stephen R. Burrell and Alishya Dhir

There are important lessons here for media coverage. Reporting should avoid perpetu-
ating stereotypes about femininity in covering violence by women. This means recognising
that women are capable of perpetrating violence and abuse, whilst refraining from overly
fixating on or demonising them in sexist ways in the process. One helpline caller, Joel, said
“When I tell certain guys they brush it off in quite a sexist way and say ‘that’s just women
for you’”. Increased understandings of emotional and psychological abuse have helped us to
recognise that women can engage in such behaviour too, but they are certainly not unique to
women; it is clear that male perpetrators of domestic abuse can also be highly manipulative
for example.

“There are equal numbers of male victim-survivors to women”

Recognising that women are capable of violence does not mean equating that with the scale
of men’s violence. Despite this, some have spuriously claimed that there is “gender sym-
metry” in the prevalence of domestic abuse (Scott-Storey et al., 2022). Domestic abuse in
general is very difficult to measure because many victim-survivors do not recognise their
experiences or wish to share them. Nonetheless, it is clear that this is a phenomenon which
has a significantly disproportionate impact on women, both in terms of scale and conse-
quences, and that male victim-survivors are in the minority. Acknowledging this does not
mean that men cannot be subjected to domestic abuse or that their experiences should not
be taken into account.
So what do existing statistics tell us? During the year ending March 2019, the Crime
Survey for England and Wales estimated that 7.5% of women (1.6 million) and 3.8% of men
(786,000) had experienced domestic abuse (Office for National Statistics – ONS, 2019).
However, the Crime Survey is limited in that it counts domestic abuse “incidents”, rather
than being able to detect their impact and context (for example, whether they are acts of
self-defence) or identify a course of abusive conduct. Further analysis of Crime Survey data
by Walby and Towers (2018) found that 83% of “high frequency” victims (where more than
10 crimes were recorded) were women.
The ONS (2021) notes that between the years ending March 2018–March 2020, 76% of
victims of domestic homicide were women. ONS (2020a) data between March 2017–March
2019 shows that of 83 male victims of domestic homicide, the suspect was female in 39 cases
and male in 44 cases (of the 274 female victims, the suspect was male in 96% of cases), and
some of these are likely to have been committed in self-defence. Meanwhile, data about
domestic abuse-related prosecutions (ONS, 2020b) shows that 92% of defendants were
recorded as male, with 77% of victims recorded as female and 16% recorded as male (the
victim’s sex was not recorded in 7% of cases).
Whilst none of these statistics are perfect, they support the assessment that a substantial
majority of victim-survivors are women, but that there is also a not-insignificant minority of
male victims and that in some cases this will be within LGBTQ+ relationships. The media
should therefore ensure that it is reporting accurately on the problem, by avoiding hyper-
bolic statements about the extent of male victimisation, whilst also recognising that male
victim-survivors do exist and need support. This underscores that researchers should be
sensitive to how their research is disseminated, to ensure studies about male victim-
survivors are not misrepresented or exaggerated by the media. Another factor to consider is
that, by virtue of being rarer, cases of male victimisation may sometimes receive more media
interest, whilst domestic abuse against women may be treated as more “par for the course”.

38
 The media and male victim-survivors of domestic abuse

“All male victims are abused by women”

This highlights another important issue – that a proportion of male victim-survivors are gay,
bisexual or trans men, abused by other men. This is a group which remains somewhat mar-
ginalised within discourses about male victimisation. However, such men are likely to be in
particular need of support, given that issues facing male victim-survivors in general will be
compounded by systemic homophobia, biphobia and transphobia. Anxieties victims may have
about their sexuality and gender identity (which they may wish to keep private) can also
provide barriers to seeking help and be exploited by perpetrators (Donovan and Barnes, 2020).
The existence of domestic abuse in LGBTQ+ people’s relationships is sometimes
assumed to “invalidate” feminist analyses of the problem, yet feminist theories of a patri-
archal gender order and the complex ways in which this manifests itself within individual-
level gender relations have much relevance to abusive contexts beyond men’s violence
against women (Connell, 2021; Scott-Storey et al., 2022). For instance, the patriarchal
model of one person being “in charge”, having more agency and control and making most
decisions is likely to play a substantial role in shaping most intimate relationships, even if it
isn’t always manifested as a man having power over a woman. Meanwhile, research illus-
trating that men who are more attached to restrictive masculine expectations are more likely
to use violence is likely to have some relevance to abuse perpetrated by gay, bi and trans
men too (Oringher and Samuelson, 2011). Not all gay, bi and trans men necessarily chal-
lenge hegemonic masculinity; some are invested in it and seek to accomplish it in their own
lives (Kay and Jeffries, 2010).
It is therefore important for the media not to ignore the different contexts in which
domestic abuse can take place, and to tell more stories about LGBTQ+ people’s lives in all
their positive and negative hues. When covering domestic abuse in LGBTQ+ relationships,
however, it should avoid sensationalising or “Othering” them in the process, as if there is
something “uniquely” “deviant” about LGBTQ+ people.

The role of the media

Considerable research demonstrates the multitude of problems with media coverage of
gender-based violence. This is frequently rooted in, and in turn helps to amplify, sexist and
misogynistic attitudes towards women and myths and misconceptions about different forms
of violence and abuse (Gill and Toms, 2019). However, there is little research on how this
relates to male victim-survivors – though it seems likely that some, if not all, of the myths
described above continue to have some influence in media reporting.
Lloyd and Ramon (2016) analysed reports about domestic abuse (including a minority
about male victim-survivors) in two UK newspapers over ten years. Common themes iden-
tified in the reporting included a recurrence of victim-blaming, constructions of victims as
being either “deserving” or “undeserving”, and a sexualisation of domestic violence (Lloyd
and Ramon, 2016). Similar themes arose in one of the only studies exploring media portrayals
of male victims, which focused on intimate partner homicide. Hanson and Lysova (2021)
noted that amongst 64% of the 203 news articles they analysed, male victims were doubted or
blamed and represented as non-ideal and illegitimate victims, typically through questioning
their character or exhibiting sympathy towards the perpetrator. They also found that in 56%
of the articles male victims were humanised, through victim personification and recognition of
the perpetrator, though this was most likely to be when they fulfilled masculine stereotypes

39
 Stephen R. Burrell and Alishya Dhir

about being a “family man”, suggesting that gendered expectations also influence media
treatment of male victim-survivors. Next, we explore further examples of common issues in
media reporting of men’s victimisation connected to the myths we have discussed.

Sympathy and sexualisation in portrayals of perpetrators

Alongside evidence that victim-survivors are often responsibilised or disregarded in
domestic violence coverage, the media has a tendency to create sympathetic (mis)repre-
sentations of perpetrators. This is widely evidenced in cases where men are the perpetrators,
which Manne (2017) has described as “himpathy”. However, it can also be observed in
media reports of male victimisation. In a Sun newspaper article (Baker, Crick and Pisa,
2017), a young woman was described as “too brainy for jail” after she physically attacked
her partner. Much of the article details how the perpetrator was a student at Oxford and
intended to become a surgeon. Meanwhile, the victim’s presence in the article is minimal,
implying his experience to be less important or interesting and missing an opportunity to
increase readers’ understanding of male victimisation.
Additionally, the article gives significant attention to the appearance of the perpetrator
(including multiple photos of her) and the aforementioned sympathy may in part be because
she fits the young, white, conventionally attractive image which the media focuses dis-
proportionately upon in their reporting of gender-based violence. This portrayal is also
reflective of the commonplace “femme fatale” presentation of women who commit crimes,
where fetishisation and exoticisation take priority over the facts of cases or victim experi-
ences (Goulandris and McLaughlin, 2016). Such cases suggest that the media is more likely
to pay attention to domestic abuse, including male victimisation, if it can in some way be
sexualised, illustrating how media sexism can also influence coverage of female perpetration.

Creating a hierarchy of domestic abuse

Speaking to the myth that domestic abuse is “worse” for male victim-survivors, the media
can be complicit in constructing a hierarchy of domestic abuse, framing certain experiences
as more serious or significant than others. For instance, the Daily Mail (Pleasance, 2014)
ran an article describing “‘one of the worst’ cases of domestic violence police have seen” in
its headline, concerning abuse perpetrated by a woman against her male partner. It goes on
to quote a police officer remarking that “This was a nasty attack. It is certainly one of the
most serious cases of domestic violence I have ever come across. It was a relentless assault”.
There may be a well-intentioned element to this, in trying to demonstrate how serious men’s
victimisation can be, but, in the process, it unhelpfully suggests that domestic abuse is more
harmful or difficult for some people than others. Similar comparisons are made further on
in the article when a solicitor is quoted commenting that “It is harder for men to come
forward because of ideas of masculinity and that men should be tough”.
Much of the article also focuses solely and in detail on the physical abuse the man was
subjected to. Whilst this is undoubtedly important, it risks creating the impression that
physical violence is more serious than other aspects of domestic abuse, or the only form it
takes. This can impact on how other male victim-survivors make sense of their experiences
and whether or not they recognise that they are being subjected to abuse. By placing its
attention only on this attack, it also feeds into the perception that domestic violence is based
around “isolated incidents” rather than patterns of abusive behaviour (see also Lombard,

40
 The media and male victim-survivors of domestic abuse

this volume). The article does not mention any features of the relationship more broadly, or
whether the abuse took additional forms, such as coercive control. Perhaps the media is
especially keen to focus on physical violence when covering domestic abuse by women
against men because this is deemed particularly shocking and aberrant in relation to
dominant gender norms. It can thus help to paint a fuller picture of domestic abuse by
situating such acts within their wider context, both in terms of the nature of the relationship
more broadly and how it connects to wider social dynamics. For example, the article also
features a photo of the female perpetrator with a black eye but does not explain how this
was sustained.

Who are seen as the experts?

Some of the aforementioned quotes illustrate another issue with media coverage of male
victim-survivors. Such reports often rely heavily on what is said in court cases, by state
actors such as the judge, legal teams and police officers. However, there has been criticism
levelled at the priority those working in the criminal justice system receive as experts or
trustworthy sources within media reports of domestic abuse (Sutherland et al., 2016),
especially given the lack of care many victim-survivors describe regarding their treatment by
institutions such as the police. This was mentioned in several of the helpline calls we observed;
for example, Jordan remarked “I went to the police … the police officer said ‘are you having
a laugh?’”
There is a great deal of research illustrating how police culture is highly masculinised
(Brown, 2007). Because of this and continued inadequacies in police responses to domestic
abuse more broadly, many male victim-survivors, who may perceive themselves as failing to
“be a man”, are likely to be reluctant to come to them for help. Additionally, research has
identified “a gap of trust” (Donovan and Barnes, 2020) between LGBTQ+ victims of domestic
abuse and the police. Consequently, it could at times be viewed as disrespectful for police
perspectives to be centred when many victim-survivors do not feel safe to include them in the
help-seeking process. Similarly, research on representations of violence against women has
identified that feminist expertise is routinely side-lined in reporting (Boyle, 2019). The media
could therefore look to include the perspectives of experts who provide support to domestic
abuse victims, such as specialist, community-specific third-sector organisations. Yet it should
also be recognised that some of those seeking to advocate for men primarily focus on anti-
feminist, “men’s rights” agendas, so it is important to listen to those actually working with
male victim-survivors, such as – in the UK context – the Men’s Advice Line.

Has there been progress?

It is also important to recognise examples of progress where it is made in media coverage of
domestic abuse. For instance, in 2019 the BBC released a 50-minute documentary entitled
Abused By My Girlfriend. The documentary approaches male victimisation in a different
manner from the aforementioned news articles. It focuses in-depth on the case of a young
man and, whilst it does discuss the harrowing physical violence he was subjected to, it also
provides insights into the impacts of controlling and coercive behaviour on him. The victim-
survivor and his family are given space to discuss the harm of the abuse he suffered and
responsibility is placed on the perpetrator without her actions being presented as “mon-
strous” or “deviant”.

41
 Stephen R. Burrell and Alishya Dhir

At the same time, there are still notable issues with how the documentary has been
marketed. The BBC used sensationalist language in their promotional materials, citing a
police officer’s comment that it was “one of the most extreme cases of domestic violence
they had ever dealt with”. Again, whilst it may be well-intentioned to seek to “prove” this, it
unhelpfully hierarchises and distorts the unique and subjective nature of how individuals are
harmed, whilst also ignoring the ultimate harm that some cases of domestic abuse lead to in
homicide. Of course, media marketing needs to attract attention and convince people to
engage with the product, but surely it is possible to do this in a way which remains sensitive,
respectful and accurate to the nature of domestic abuse.

Conclusion
The media can play an important part in efforts to tackle domestic abuse, by enhancing
people’s awareness and understandings and their motivation to help stop it. This would be
highly valuable in relation to male victim-survivors, about whom there remains a lack of
cognisance and considerable myths and misconceptions. Within discussions about male vic-
timisation there needs to be more of a focus on the facts; what’s actually happening to men
and what help they need, rather than re-hashing politically charged debates about questions
such as “gender symmetry”. Domestic abuse is a complex issue, which manifests in people’s
lives in a variety of ways and it is important to recognise that. There are both similarities and
differences in men’s and women’s experiences of domestic abuse – and one common thread is
that media coverage often fails victim-survivors of all genders. But the media is changing and
there are good examples of reporting on domestic abuse and journalists working with anti-
violence activists to foster social change. One powerful thing the media can do is to help bring
into question restrictive gendered expectations, by telling a wider range of stories about the
complex and diverse nature of people’s lives, practices and experiences. This includes pro-
viding more open and honest insights into men’s experiences of vulnerability.

References
Abused By My Girlfriend (2019) BBC Three. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/
p0700912/abused-by-my-girlfriend (Accessed: 12 March 2022).
Baker, N., Crick, A. and Pisa, N. (2017) ‘Too brainy for jail: Oxford student surgeon who stabbed
Tinder boyfriend could avoid prison thanks to “extraordinary” talent’, The Sun, 17 May.
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invisibility’, Journal of Sociology, 56 (4), pp. 554–570.
Gill, R. and Toms, K. (2019) ‘Trending now: Feminism, sexism, misogyny and postfeminism in British
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Routledge, pp. 97–112.
Goulandris, A. and McLaughlin, E. (2016) ‘What’s in a name? The UK newspapers’ fabrication and
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 The media and male victim-survivors of domestic abuse

Hanson, K. and Lysova, A. (2021) ‘The father, the son, and the abuser: The portrayal of male victims
of intimate partner homicide in the news media’, Homicide Studies. Online first, 25 September.
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Durham University.

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 3
INVISIBLE FEELINGS,
ANTI-ASIAN VIOLENCES
AND ABOLITION FEMINISMS
Salonee Bhaman and Rachel Kuo

We begin with two deaths. Michelle Go was killed after being pushed onto the subway
tracks on 15 January 2022 in New York City. Weeks later, Christina Yuna Lee was as-
saulted and stabbed to death in her Chinatown apartment. Both were college-educated
Asian American women with professional class backgrounds.1 Their deaths were described
by various media outlets as “shocking” and “senseless” acts of violence. While neither
incident was deemed to be racially motivated, media coverage frequently emphasised their
racial and gender identities as Asian American women and also circulated details of the
attackers’ “criminal backgrounds” and histories of assault (Newman et al., 2022). Both
attackers were Black men. This coverage followed familiar patterns of exploiting narratives
of Black criminality and exacerbating Black and Asian conflict. In ongoing coverage of anti-
Asian violence in urban spaces during the pandemic, news outlets have highlighted at-
tackers’ prior arrest records, former incarceration and homelessness (Hong et al., 2021). In
New York City, the racial and gendered dimensions of Go and Lee’s murders became
inextricably linked to political conversations about responding to anti-Asian violence and
ongoing debates about the role of policing.
The attacks on Go and Lee both occurred within a context of ongoing violence
directed against Asian women, prompting feelings of heightened fear and anxiety over the
possibility of verbal and physical violence during daily life. The specific details of these
two acts of violence — pushed in front of a train and followed home at night — provoke
a kind of visceral horror. These murders also occurred almost a year after the highly
publicised and devastating murders of eight people, six of whom are Asian women,
during targeted attacks on Asian-owned massage parlours in Atlanta, Georgia in March
2021. Unlike the murders of Go and Lee, the perpetrator in the Atlanta shootings was a
white man, who targeted massage parlours because they represented “sexual temptation”
to him (New York Times Live, 2021). His identification of the massage parlour as a site of
sexual temptation signals a broader truth: Asian women occupy a particular place,
constructed within a social imaginary and amplified by media, as simultaneously sexually
available, devious and submissive, as both criminals and victims. In this construction,
they are rendered permanently vulnerable to danger while also being dangerous (Shimizu,
2005; Cheng, 2018; Ninh, 2018).

44 DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-6
 Invisible feelings, anti-Asian violences and abolition feminisms

Understanding these instances of anti-Asian, gender-based violence together allows us to

see a broader pattern. Through the pandemic, widespread media coverage of the gruesome
deaths of Asian women marks a rupture from the silence that has historically shrouded
similar moments of gender-based violence. This unmuting has functioned in two ways, both
exposing histories of white supremacist constructions of Asian American women while
simultaneously suggesting carceral solutions targeted towards other minority communities
as appropriate redress.
By questioning how violence against Asian women becomes rendered legible and visible
(and illegible and invisible) in the US media landscape, this chapter offers theoretical fra-
meworks for understanding racial and gendered violence in the context of how state violence
structures death and dying. In addition, this chapter outlines the duality of criminalised
violence against Asian women alongside the racialisation of Asian women as criminals. We
connect subsequent state-based responses to this violence, particularly demonstrating how
crime-based frameworks lead to expansions of structural harms. Media coverage and public
discourse about anti-Asian violences under the umbrella of #StopAsianHate has worked to
make Asian-ness more visible in discussions of racism and has also been used as an argument
for racial justice motivations to increase policing. While policing has always been racially
unjust, the stories of Go and Lee, combined with other media spectacles of the perceived new
phenomena of anti-Asian racism, offer sites to examine and critique the narrative possibility
that a “racially just” response to violence requires additional policing.
We argue that to “stop Asian hate”, we must address the historical and contemporary
problems of US imperialism, militarism and policing. In doing so, we build on scholarly
discourses that intervene in narratives of racial and gendered violence as spectacular and
unpredictable (e.g. Noble, 2014; Hong, 2015) and criticisms of carceral feminisms and
narratives of violence that emphasise policing, punishment and hate crime legislation as
legitimate and effective responses to racialised and gendered violence (e.g. Bernstein, 2012;
Law, 2014; Kim, 2018). We end with a vision of abolition feminism as a response to anti-
Asian violences past and present.

Invisible feelings and the visibility of violence against Asian women

The tenor of being rendered silent and invisible is a theme that permeates much of Asian
American discourse, particularly surrounding violence and media (e.g. Roshanravan, 2018).
The mutable visibility of Asian women’s specific experiences with gendered violence is not a
unique phenomenon. For example, the construction of intimate partner violence and rape
against women as a “universal” issue has resulted in a broader prioritisation of professional-
class white women in resource distribution and policies while simultaneously rendering
violence against women of colour illegible (Richie, 2012). Similarly, media sensationalism
surrounding “missing white woman” syndrome (Ifill, 2004) ignores other incidents of
gendered violence (see Musial, and Falkof this volume).
At least part of the anger that permeated Asian American spaces in early 2022 was in
response to this historical erasure. But, far from encountering that familiar silence, news of
Christina Yuna Lee’s murder in 2022 was circulated through multiple networks on Twitter
and received front-page coverage in The New York Times, New York Post and New York Daily
News. In comparison, the deaths of two Asian women during robberies at massage parlours in
New Mexico, around the same time in late January 2022, received scant mainstream media
coverage outside of local outlets. However, on social media platforms, Asian American

45
 Salonee Bhaman and Rachel Kuo

writers connected Lee’s story to the murders of Sihui Fang, a massage worker in New Mexico
and Julia (Yuliya) Li, a businesswoman in Minnesota2, aggregating incidents of violence
under the hashtag #StopAsianHate. What is rendered invisible by this aggregation are the
differences in their lives and positionalities and what remains unclear is the appropriate form
of response to these harms.
Some, like author Min Jin Lee, have argued on Twitter that “after each event, we tend to
give context to the perpetrator and de-contextualise the experiences of victims” (@min-
jinlee11, 26 February) as part of a call to pay more attention to the specificity of each
individual’s circumstances within the broad brush of Asian America. Others named this
decontextualisation as a form of invisibilisation, which rendered their own concerns about
safety and racism unimportant within progressive spaces. A baseline critique of the
aggregation of various incidents of violence into “anti-Asian hate” is that this fails to
interrogate the class and gender of individual victims.
Some hope that naming the aforementioned violence targeted at women is a step towards
a more thorough accounting of root causes. On a GoFundMe Memorial page (Lee, 2022),
Christina Yuna Lee’s family wrote that “her death is part of an alarming pattern of
unchecked, hateful violence against women, namely women of Asian descent and women of
color that can no longer stand without consequence”. Speaking in interviews with major
news outlets, Asian women in New York City reported feeling hopeless, alone and “suf-
focated” as well as needing to be constantly vigilant (Venkatraman, 2022). Overwhelmingly,
those speaking out expressed a desire for safety and acknowledgement alongside frustration
with the failures of existing systems for accountability and redress (Kim, 2022).
The coverage of Go and Lee’s tragic murders did not emerge from a vacuum. We speculate
that they became newsworthy because of several factors– including the ongoing coverage of
racist remarks made by conservative lawmakers and increased public discourse surrounding
gendered violence against Asian American women in the aftermath of the Atlanta spa shootings.
Go and Lee were also professional-class, educated women living alone in New York City during
a time when activists had mounted sustained calls to dismantle racially violent police depart-
ments and redistribute funds away from jails and prisons. Their murders, when read in a way
that foregrounded their Asian American identities, suggested to some that perhaps there could
also be a racially just argument for increasing policing.
The responses of public officials, from New York City Mayor Eric Adams to various
pro-police and conservative lobbyist groups, suggest that the highly documented coverage
of the murders of Go and Lee has made their deaths a rallying point for those advocating
for specific public safety interventions. For example, Go’s name has been frequently evoked
in calls to address danger in New York City’s subway system. Rather than focus on the clear
failure and neglect of social safety nets, these acts of violence continue to be in-
strumentalised by a carceral mayoral regime to expand the criminalisation of poverty.
Without a broader vision that seeks an end to white supremacy writ large and critical
analysis that connects all forms of policing to systems of violence, solving the problem of
“Asian hate” often ends up both bolstering existing state structures of racialised violence
while also neglecting to address them as sources of violence.

Politicising Asian American women as victims

Often falsely equated with #BlackLivesMatter as an Asian American social movement,
#StopAsianHate functions as a broad catch-all for indexing anti-Asian racism that is devoid

46
 Invisible feelings, anti-Asian violences and abolition feminisms

of any liberatory politics. The call marks the aforementioned feelings of Asian invisibility
within the broader landscape of racial politics without a specific call to action, allowing for a
wide range of political responses and interpretations. Furthermore, the combination of racial
and gendered tropes of Asians as quiet and submissive have spooled into two related con-
clusions in various media outlets and government responses: Asians are less likely to report
crimes—and thus avenues must be made available to support Asians to report more crimes.
Even in its most seemingly innocuous uses, the calls to “stop hate” or “take hate more seri-
ously” have primarily translated to the expansion of hate crimes legislation to increase
resources for police training and data collection (Kuo and Bui, 2021). Additionally, reporting
of data collection by Stop AAPI Hate (an organisation tracking discriminatory incidents
against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders) has widely circulated the statistic that 63% of
incidents happen to Asian women and thus they are more likely to be targets of racialised
violence (Pillai et al., 2021). Notably, multiple incidents of violence against Asian women have
been made highly visible under the umbrella of #StopAsianHate, which has in turn also
motivated misogynistic behaviour in activist spaces through a hypermasculinist “more arms,
more police” organising in response to the feminised tropes of Asians as “submissive” (see
Asian American Feminist Collective, 2020).
The spectacular act of racial and gendered violence of the Atlanta shootings in March 2021
also exposed the many everyday compounded forms of economic violence and precarity for
working-class migrants while fueling the escalating rallying cries to #StopAsianHate. After
the shootings, police departments across US cities sent special units to Asian neighbourhoods
under the guise of providing safety. In New York City, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio referred
to the shootings as “domestic terrorism” and the NYPD’s Counterterrorism Unit (@
NYPDCounterterrorism, 16 March 2021) deployed military-grade “assets” to Asian com-
munities “out of an abundance of caution”. However, the presence of heightened policing in
Asian communities under the name of “public safety” has long been tied to ongoing violence,
policing and harassment against Asian women in the US, including immigration exclusions
against Chinese women through the 1875 Page Act; police raids of massage parlour workers;
and detention and deportation regimes targeting working-class Asian migrants. Notably, city
officials also did not make an effort to address the gendered nature of the attacks.
By May 2021, the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act passed to expedite police review of racist
incidents and expand community-based resources for crime reporting. The coupling
together of domestic terrorism and hate crimes framing as a response to anti-Asian vio-
lences makes the dangerous implication that using military and police force is the solution
to racial violence. The suggestion is especially troubling given that the histories of US
military occupation and permanent war in Asia (e.g. the Philippine-American War, World
War II, Korean War, Vietnam War, Afghanistan War, ongoing geopolitical tensions with
China and drone strikes in Pakistan) are connected to long-standing violence against Asian
people. The targeting of different places in Asia as foreign threats to be eliminated alongside
state desires for control and dominance over Asia work in tandem with everyday and
structural violences against Asian people living within the US.
At a local scale, the violent deaths of Go and Lee became an impetus for renewed calls to
address seemingly “random acts of violence” occurring in public New York City spaces,
including sidewalks and the transit system with expanded police presence and intervention.
Several conservative community groups have blamed bail reform, police accountability, and
other efforts to reduce the number of prisoners in state systems as the root of these acts of
violence. Additionally, Mayor Eric Adams pushed for the elimination of cash bail as a measure

47
 Salonee Bhaman and Rachel Kuo

to halt the release of “dangerous” people into the streets (Bates, 2022). He also instituted a new
“zero tolerance” subway plan in February 2022 to remove unhoused people from train lines
(where the primary housing alternative is NYC’s notoriously dangerous, crowded, and
unhealthy congregate shelter systems).3 The plan also increases partnerships between law
enforcement and city services, including healthcare, housing and homeless services.
These two phenomena — the rise in politicised anti-Asian violence and the rise in the
number of people unable to access support within the existing housing and mental health
system — are related but separate, each requiring specific attention and feminist analysis. It
is not the release of people from jails that is the problem, but the lack of access to stable
housing, healthcare, food and other resources in the aftermath; the abusive and socially
isolating conditions of jails and prisons; and the inadequate and violent kinds of care that
comes with coercive institutionalisation into psychiatric wards (Ben-Moshe, 2020). These
are the violences that are often hidden behind walls and tucked away from the public — that
cannot easily be captured neatly for an Instagram post or in a pithy hashtag.
While these calls are rooted in an effort to respond to the fear and anxiety prompted by
Go and Lee’s deaths, they obscure more than they reveal about the root causes of these
tragedies. Indeed, Asians and Asian Americans have faced increased targeted harassment
and violence in the last two years, much of it tacitly endorsed by the Trump administration’s
statements regarding China and the coronavirus. During this same time, the already
threadbare social infrastructure providing support to an economically precarious and
unstable racialised underclass within the US has faced historic challenges. The result has
been the steady spilling over of otherwise “invisible” violence into the spaces of home, work
and commute — fomenting feelings of crises across racial and class lines.
As Black feminist theorists have long pointed out, the production of Black death, through
extralegal and state-sanctioned means, has been rendered normative to the course of pre-
serving everyday life (e.g. Gilmore, 2007; Hartman, 1997). To make sense of violence against
Asian American women, we must move beyond a singular politics of identity towards a more
expansive politics of difference (see Lowe, 1996). We must critique the legitimisation of state
violence and the deployment of death through systems of racial and gendered difference
against those rendered marginal and “dangerous” in order to protect lives worth living. The
stories we tell about this violence must reflect the much more complicated history of how
Asian American women have occupied these multiple positionalities.

Dangerous and endangered positions

Asian women are constructed as simultaneously dangerous and endangered — categories
with porous and shifting boundaries — within the United States’ criminal legal system.
Understanding this particular positionality requires attention towards specificities of
material experiences (e.g. class, immigration status) that are homogenised and flattened by
broad calls to “Stop Asian Hate”. To actually stop anti-Asian violences, we need to
understand and undo the ways that Asian women are collectively and structurally rendered
vulnerable through immigration, welfare and national security policy. In other words, we
must understand the production of differential structured vulnerability rather than pose
individual acts of violence as the sole problem.
Doing so requires us to zoom out and consider the long history of US racism and
imperialism and the way that both have created specific forms of violence that draw people
in and out in different ways. In this section, we demonstrate how the foundational

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 Invisible feelings, anti-Asian violences and abolition feminisms

construction of Asian women as dangerous, deviant and threatening to American mores

occurred as a product of efforts to police the borders of the US and secure and preserve white
national identity. We tie narratives of race, gender and sexuality with how they are concretised
into policies that shape the material conditions that expose Asian women to violence. Policing
the movements of Asian women created early apparatuses for the surveillance, management
and detention of immigrants in the US (Chan, 1991; Luibheid, 2002).
In the 19th century, “Yellow Peril” narratives (or fears of Chinese migration) also
depicted all Chinese women as sex workers who were undesirable contagions that spread
disease and threatened white masculinity. These narratives found life in media portrayals of
Asian difference as dangerous. In the US, figurations of Asian women shifted from spec-
tacles on display in exhibitions in sequestered viewing rooms (e.g. Afong Moy and Pwan Ye
Koo) to public nuisances when their public presence became too “excessive” (Kang, 2002).
This also converged with moral stigmatisation and scrutinisation of migration by single
Chinese women as criminal and fraudulent. Steeped in anxieties over racialised labour and
contagion, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Page Act of 1875, which both tar-
geted Chinese migrants for exclusion from the nation, were the first legal limits on free
migration into the US (Lee, 2003). The Page Act barred Chinese women from entering the
US by citing fears that they were being trafficked as sex workers. In addition to restrictive
property covenants and land ordinances, the spectre of immigrants as dangerous frequently
mobilised around anxieties about miscegenation and also justified enforced geographies of
racial segregation within cities like New York (Lui, 2005).
In contrast to the Asian women as “prostitute”, beginning at the turn of the twentieth
century, the US government would negotiate a “Gentlemen’s Agreement”, which allowed
Asian women to migrate as wives and brides. Japanese migrant farmers within the US could
marry foreign brides and sponsor their migration (Ngai, 2004). While Japanese brides were
allowed selective passage into the US through a recommitment to heteropatriarchal mar-
riage, their arrival spurred new anti-Asian sentiment rooted in fears of excessive repro-
duction. These fears would be mobilised in later decades to justify incarceration and the
forced removal of Japanese communities during the Second World War. Read together,
both the Gentlemen’s Agreement and the Page Act surface related anxieties around inter-
racial sex, assimilation and challenges to white property rights operating in two different
policy registers: one defined by exclusion and the other by limited and highly controversial
inclusion (Luibheid, 2002).
Outside of the structures of immigration control and restriction, many of the first en-
counters between the US and Asian women occurred during military invasion and occu-
pation, where occupation also created local sex industries in Asia. Demonstrated by
multiple scholars, regimes of policing and regulating the bodies of Asian women in
military-occupied Korea (Okazawa-Rey, 1997; Yuh, 2004), the Philippines (Tadiar, 2004)
and Vietnam (Hoang, 2015) produced an extensive body of knowledge that pathologised
Asian women’s sexuality. US military constructions of deviant Asian sexuality at mid-
century dovetailed with an abundance of US cultural production representing Asian
women as subservient, docile, and sexually available. While artistic works like Madame
Butterfly and Miss Saigon (and later films like Stanley Kubrick’s (1987) Full Metal Jacket)
ushered in a new era of Asian women’s hypersexuality represented and amplified through
mass media (Shimizu, 2005), journalists and pundits working in more staid forms also
worked to recast nations like Japan as non-threatening through the use of Orientalist
tropes emphasising a culture of feminised docility and infantile helplessness (Cheng, 2018).

49
 Salonee Bhaman and Rachel Kuo

In representing Asian women as alternatively deviant or imperiled, cultural work

reinforced their fundamental difference.
As the US began to ease restrictions governing in-migration from Asia in the mid-
century, primarily through policies regulating family and work-based migration through
sponsorships (e.g. the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act, temporary H-1 visas), Asian women were
exposed to other forms of violence (see Ngai, 2004; Choy, 2003). While seemingly expansive
on the surface, the terms accompanying these policies tied migrants to family members and
employers as sponsors which created economic vulnerabilities and dependencies that could
be exploited and expose women to abuse and violence (Das Gupta, 2006). For example,
roadblocks to naturalisation, such as two-year waiting periods, the threat of deportation
and the loss of immigration status penalises divorce and separation from US citizen spouses.
This enabled and incentivised — and continues to enable and incentivise — intimate partner
violence by criminalising attempts to leave marriages and imposing onerous conditions on
those alleging abuse (Das Gupta, 2006).
The expansion of Asian migration into the US was also met with swift backlash from
conservative lawmakers and anti-immigration lobbyists. Beginning in the 1970s, INS officials
began to more aggressively pursue and punish cases against couples they suspected of being in
“fraudulent” marriages. These cases often pivoted on tropes of Asian women being “decep-
tive” and “dishonest”. In the mid-1990s, the scapegoating of immigrants as economic burdens
and as potential “terrorists” and dangerous criminals, was further concretised into policies,
such as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA)
and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). In addition
to expanding law enforcement authority in arresting immigrants and expediting processes of
detention and deportation, these policies punished immigrants seeking welfare benefits by
casting them as threats to the public purse (Das Gupta, 2006). Additionally, state responses to
gender-based violence and intimate partner violence default to law enforcement and criminal
punishment. The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is tied to the 1994 Crime Control
Act, which astronomically expanded policing and mass incarceration. VAWA increases
punishment for those convicted of intimate violence and tethers protections to formal criminal
accusations and reporting of violence. Within this policy matrix, migrant women stand on
shifting ground: the subjects of suspicion unless they are willing and able to mobilise carceral
resources attesting to their imperilled status (Richie, 2012).
While this long history may not speak directly to the motivations behind recent attacks
against Asian women in the United States, it offers useful context about the ways that the
criminalisation of Asian women as a dangerous category has functioned to limit the options
and life courses available to many. These reforms to welfare, migration and policing have
prompted technologies of surveillance and punishment applied to domestic welfare re-
cipients to also become routinely leveraged against migrants, with the double threats
of deportation and detention close at hand. It cannot be left unmentioned that the fear of
deportation under these same statutes and experiences of years of abuse and harassment at
the hands of law enforcement accompanied 38-year-old Yang Song, a massage worker in
Flushing, as she plummeted to her death during a police raid in 2017 (Grant and Whitford,
2017). While we may not definitely know why particular attackers target specific victims, we
do know the ways that Asian women have been constructed as vulnerable (and made
structurally vulnerable). Our responses to the violence that continues to affect Asian women
in the US must take aim at the roots of these structures if we hope to build community
safety in ways that do not produce further disavowals of life and death.

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Conclusion: Abolition feminisms

Both of us are co-leaders of the Asian American Feminist Collective.4 Right after the
shootings in Atlanta, our inboxes were inundated with media requests for a quote making
sense of the violence. Understanding the murders of Asian women required labour, expertise
and analysis by Asian women. Similarly, we observed friends and organisers at Red Canary
Song (RCS), a collective formed after the death of massage worker Yang Song, receive
increased public attention. RCS has long been organising for more safety and care for Asian
and Asian American sex workers and massage parlour workers and calling attention to ways
police hurt Asian migrant communities. We can only assume that our previous work about
issues of police violence, sex work and Asian women drove this attention. Earlier, in
September 2020, the Asian American Feminist Collective had released a statement against the
creation of an Asian Hate Crime Task Force in the NYPD, co-signed by RCS.
Our sudden visibility relied on the tokenisation of our racial and gendered identities versus
our feminist analysis. Journalists wanted to know, why were these Asian women killed? What
can be done? In conversations with media outlets prior to the shootings in Atlanta throughout
the fall and winter of 2020 and early 2021, as more highly publicised incidents of violence
against Asians and Asian Americans were reported, we occasionally received requests from
reporters who wanted to publish different perspectives on safety and policing in Asian and
Asian American communities. Repeatedly, we were asked to explain and prove why police are
harmful to our communities. The quotes we gave were almost all redacted or fully omitted
from the pieces that were eventually published.
In media coverage of violence, journalists and reporters often seek to tell a specific
narrative of violence that is recognisable — where there can be a cause and effect or readily
identifiable explanations of responsibility. In other words, death and violence are treated as
something exceptional to everyday life. Thus, it is difficult to translate everyday structures
of death and dying unless there are quite literally, incidents of death and dying worthy of
public attention. In building a collective politics of difference, Grace Kyungwon Hong
(2015) reminds us how the preservation of particular lives holds the “exacerbated dispersal
of minoritized death” (p. 8), where our ability to live protected lives depends on someone
else’s inability to do so.
Structural vulnerability produces “good targets” of violence. In this chapter, we have
demonstrated the ways people may be deemed unworthy of protection by the state as well as
the tensions in which Asians become recognised as needing state protection. We also argue
that Asians and Asian Americans should not make bids for inclusion into a charter of
protection that will always exclude some and be deadly to others. Carceral reforms will not
make us safer but will produce further systems of vulnerability.
The purposeful dismantling of social safety nets like food assistance and access to shelter,
accompanied by the attendant expansion of carceral systems of policing and punishment, have
worked in tandem to expose Asian women to everyday violence and foreclose possibilities for
independently sustaining access to care and safety. In some cases, this violence is slow: the daily
indignities of working under precarious and exploitative conditions. In others, it is spectacular:
months before her death, Michelle Go’s attacker repeatedly sought, and failed to receive,
mental health services. In many cases, it is quotidien: a constant process of negotiating whether
to stay with a violent partner or risk family separation, deportation and homelessness.
Abolition feminism redirects our energy away from systems of police and punishment
towards other alternatives that address root causes of violence and provide sustainable

51
 Salonee Bhaman and Rachel Kuo

forms of care and safety (see for example Davis et al., 2022 and Kaba, 2021). We must
dismantle the carceral and punitive systems that render people disposable and expose them
to premature death (Gilmore, 2007). While it may seem we have limited options to respond
in moments of loss, grief and tragedy, we can work more expansively and creatively to
change our systems to prevent future forms of violence. To “stop Asian hate” means
continuing to work towards ongoing efforts to end policing; for safe and accessible housing
and access to mental healthcare; and for building stronger social safety nets.

Acknowledgements
Parts of this chapter are adapted and expanded from Kuo and Bhaman’s article for Truthout,
“Attacks on Asian women are fueled by criminalization, war and economic injustice”, pub-
lished on 23 March 2021. We are grateful to our friends and partners in the Asian American
Feminist Collective: Julie Ae Kim, Senti Sojwal and Tiffany Diane Tso. This chapter is stit-
ched together from ongoing conversations — walking down Chrystie Street together, phone
calls during walks to the grocery store and text threads.

Notes
1 We use the term “Asian” to denote a process of racialisation and “Asian American” in reference to
a distinct political category that may or may not be intentionally claimed.
2 Of interest, in a local CBS news report (23 February) of this shooting, the perpetrator is a 15-year-
old boy described by the local police spokesman as having “an extensive and violent criminal
history”.
3 For details, see the Subway Safety Plan, available at: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/home/
downloads/pdf/press-releases/2022/the-subway-safety-plan.pdf
4 As a small feminist formation with local roots in New York City that has a relatively sizable social
media presence, we are often misinterpreted as a national Asian womens’ organisation.

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54
 4
TOWARDS A FAIR JUSTICE
SYSTEM IN CANADA
Women and girls homicide database project
Kandice Parker, Melanie A. Morrison, Todd G. Morrison,
Senator Lillian Eva Quan Dyck, and Karissa Wall

In July 2013, a 25-year-old fashion design student named Bella Laboucan-McLean mys-
teriously fell to her death from a Toronto high-rise condo. In that same year, a 20-year-old
mother named Cheyenne Santana Marie Fox was murdered in Toronto while working as an
escort. Also in 2013, 15-year-old Leah Anderson left her aunt’s house in God’s Lake
Narrows, Manitoba, to go ice skating; she was found dead two days later. What do these
three murder victims have in common? All these victims are Indigenous women. In Canada,
pervasive, ongoing, colonial settler narratives and stereotypes dehumanise Indigenous
populations, maintaining a social narrative that views Indigenous persons as less credible,
less worthy and prone to criminality (Jackson, 1989; Proulx, 2000). Indeed, Bella Laboucan-
McLean’s family, after her suspicious death, were often questioned on whether Bella lived
“a high-risk lifestyle” (Auger, 2016), a stereotype that has been used to justify the ongoing
tragedy of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada (Amnesty
International, 2004). Such stereotypes are entwined with media apathy surrounding missing
and murdered Indigenous women. Gilchrist (2010) found that the Canadian media is 3.5 times
less likely to report on missing and murdered Indigenous women, as compared to missing and
murdered white women. Further, media reports on missing and murdered Indigenous women
are shorter, less detailed, and less intimate than media reports on missing and murdered
women who are white. Degrading stereotypes – such as the “Pocahontas” trope (Ho, 2015)
and characterisation of victims as “prostitutes,” “street people,” and “addicts” (Martin Hill,
2003) – blame Indigenous women and girls for their “lifestyle choices” (Strega et al., 2014) and
discount the pervasive social and economic marginalisation of Indigenous women and girls in
Canada (Amnesty International, 2004).
In a 2004 study, Amnesty International revealed that historically, in Canada, perpetra-
tors who have victimised Indigenous persons are more likely to escape justice. Data from
the General Social Survey on Victimization in 2014 indicates that Indigenous persons are
two times more likely than non-Indigenous persons to experience violent victimisation
(Mahoney et al., 2017). Indigenous persons are nearly two times more likely to be physically
assaulted and three times more likely to be sexually assaulted than non-Indigenous persons
(Boyce, 2016). Furthermore, Indigenous persons are disproportionately more likely to be
victims of homicide (Mulligan, Axford, and Solecki, 2016). Although Indigenous Peoples

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-7 55
 Kandice Parker et al.

comprise approximately 5% of Canada’s population, Indigenous Peoples accounted for one-

quarter of all Canadian homicide victims in 2015 (ibid.). Amongst Indigenous Peoples, the
homicide rate for Indigenous women remains lower than that of Indigenous men,1 yet is six
times greater than the homicide rate for non-Indigenous women (ibid.). In 2014, the Royal
Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) reported that Indigenous women represented 16% of all
women victims of homicide officially known to police between 1980 and 2012. In addition,
while the number of homicides against non-Indigenous women has declined steadily since
1980, the number committed against Indigenous women has either remained constant or
increased. For example, in 1984, 8% of women homicide victims were Indigenous women; in
2012, the proportion had increased to 23% (RCMP, 2014). Strega et al. (2014) found that
Canadian media perpetuates stereotypes that blame Indigenous men and women for these
rates of violent victimisation, discounting ongoing colonialism and Canadian society’s col-
lective complicity in failing to address the ongoing effects of colonialism. In this chapter, we
review the outcomes of homicide cases involving non-Indigenous and Indigenous women and
girls by using a unique database of cases built largely from media reports. In addition to
reflecting on the gendered and racialised operation of “justice,” this dataset allows us to
highlight patterns in the media reporting of these homicides.

Context and methods

This research was conducted for the purpose of supporting Bill S-215: An Act to amend the
Criminal Code (sentencing for violent offences against Indigenous women), as proposed by
former Canadian Senator Lillian Dyck. This Bill was proposed as a means of legally es-
tablishing the identity of Indigenous women as an aggravating circumstance in cases of
assault, sexual assault and murder. The purpose of Bill S-215 was to demonstrate that
discrimination towards Indigenous women within the Canadian criminal justice system is
unacceptable and to indicate to the Canadian public that violence towards Indigenous
women will be neither tolerated nor regarded as less serious than the crimes committed
against non-Indigenous persons. On 10 April 2019, the bill was defeated at a second reading
in the House of Commons of Canada, with 237 Members of Parliament voting against the
bill and only 45 Members of Parliament voting in favour (Parliament of Canada, 2019).
To support the Bill and develop a resource to allow us to better map the problem, we
gathered information about justice outcomes in homicide cases involving women and girls in
Canada from the 1980s to 2013. The present database was built by first accessing the publicly
available data compiled by Pearce in 2013. In its original form, Pearce’s (2013) database
contains 3,329 names of women and girls who are missing, have been murdered, or died under
suspicious circumstances, including 824 who are Indigenous. The cases span from 1946 to
2013 and, in this format, contain seven variables: the victim’s name, their age, the year they
died or went missing, their race/ethnicity, the province in which they died or went missing, the
case type (missing, murdered, dead) and status details (i.e., “Charges laid; unknown out-
come”, “Murder of victim/Suicide of offender”, “Convicted – intimate partner”).
To create the present database, we filtered the cases by date and case type so that only
confirmed homicides from 1980 and onward were included. Given that our report relied on
using the victims’ names to search for further information, we also removed cases that
involved unidentified victims. The remaining 2,252 cases were retained for the purposes of
this research. An additional 76 cases were later removed because they occurred before 1980,
had been duplicated within the database, were not homicides, did not have a victim who was

56
 Towards a fair justice system in Canada

connected to Canada, or had a male victim. Five cases also were added during this period,
resulting in a final tally of 2,171 victims within the current database.
Eight pieces of information were added to each case: where the homicide took place; the
victim-perpetrator relationship (intimate partner, parent/guardian, family member, known
to victim, acquaintance or stranger); perpetrator name, race and gender; initial charge;
conviction type (first or second-degree murder, manslaughter or a lesser sentence) and
sentence length (in years and months). These data were collected by two graduate student
researchers at the University of Saskatchewan, who in turn supervised an additional 16
volunteer undergraduate research assistants in building and coding the data and checking
for data integrity. The data were collected from publicly available online news sources, the
Canadian Legal Information Institute’s online database of court transcripts and a digitised
archive of major Canadian newspapers (e.g., Ottawa Citizen, Winnipeg Sun, Toronto Sun)
available through the University of Saskatchewan. The initial Pearce data file was split into
30-case increments, then transferred to the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS)
for analysis. We further recorded the number of cases in which perpetrators had not yet
been charged or convicted, were eventually convicted of a lesser offence, were deemed not
criminally responsible, had died by suicide, had died under other circumstances prior to
conviction or had their charges stayed despite police considering the case solved. An open-
ended “Notes” column also was maintained for any additional information relevant to
sentencing outcomes (i.e., “underage perpetrator”).
To maintain comparability, the racial categories used to group perpetrators were taken
from those utilised by Pearce (2013). The categories are Indigenous, Asian, Black, white,
Latino/Hispanic, Middle Eastern, South Asian and Unknown.2 If a reliable source (i.e., a
newspaper or court transcript) confirmed the person’s race, it was entered as such. Cases
that were less definitive were sorted as, for instance, “Presumed Indigenous” only when
multiple pieces of information suggested the person’s category. For example, if a media
source suggested that the individual in question was connected to an Indigenous commu-
nity, if the homicide occurred on a reserve, the person’s photo was found and/or the per-
son’s family members were confirmed as Indigenous. The present analyses included cases
where a person’s identity was confirmed or presumed based on these characteristics. For
both victim and perpetrator race, the categories were collapsed to look specifically at dif-
ferences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous3 victims and perpetrators.
We faced challenges in navigating the biases in the reporting of online media sources.
Firstly, information about cases involving murdered white women was more readily
available (i.e., reported on by major news outlets) than those involving Indigenous women
(also Musial, this volume). In contrast, information surrounding murdered Indigenous
women and girls was more often found online via social media sources. Reflecting the
diversification of source material, our database contains more cases from 2000 onwards
than in previous decades,4 supporting the conclusion that social media can mitigate some of
the biases of mainstream news media (Moeke-Pickering et al., 2018). At the same time, the
race of white perpetrators was often unspecified.

General characteristics
The database contains cases ranging from 1980 to 2013. There are 2,171 total victims and
1,397 of these murder cases have been solved. The remaining 774 cases are either unsolved
or the outcome could not be accounted for by the search methods. Of the 1,405 victims

57
 Kandice Parker et al.

whose racial background could be identified, 601 (43%) were Indigenous. In terms of age,
half of the victims were 30 or younger, including 116 girls who were 10 or younger.
A total of 1,468 confirmed perpetrators were identified.5 This figure includes cases where
the perpetrator was convicted, died by suicide or other means prior to a trial or, in 26 cases,
had charges stayed but the police consider the case solved (as in the many unresolved cases
of Robert Pickton, a notorious Canadian serial killer). Of these perpetrators, 867 could be
categorised based on race, with 688 (80%) being classified as non-Indigenous perpetrators
and 161 (20%) classified as Indigenous perpetrators. Across all perpetrators, 92% were male.

Key findings
Our analysis of these homicide cases revealed that patterns in reported judicial outcomes do
not always map onto the kinds of discourses around gender, race, and homicide which
circulate in media and policy contexts, identified at the beginning of this chapter.
First, it is clear that violence against Indigenous women is not simply an intra-
community problem. For cases where both victim and perpetrator race could be identified,
34% of Indigenous victims were killed by non-Indigenous perpetrators. In contrast, 98% of
non-Indigenous victims were killed by non-Indigenous perpetrators. This is a meaningful
finding because it dispels the myth that violence towards Indigenous women is uniquely
intra-communal, and that Indigenous men are responsible for the high rates of homicide of
Indigenous women. This myth is reflected in news reports such as the 2015 CBC Radio
report entitled “RCMP: 70% of murdered indigenous women killed by indigenous men”. It
also challenges discourses which position Indigenous men as disproportionately dangerous
to white women. Second, this study shows that Indigenous women (29%) are significantly
more likely than non-Indigenous women (18%) to be killed by someone with whom they are
unacquainted (Figure 4.1).6 Moreover, while intimate partner violence affects all women,
non-Indigenous women (46%) are more likely to be killed by a former or current partner
than are Indigenous women (34%). These findings align with data presented by both the
Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC, 2010) and the RCMP (2014).
Importantly, these findings further demonstrate that misguided and unfair stereotypes

50 46
45
40
34
35
30 26
25 22
20 18
16
15
10 9 10
10 7
5 3
0
0
Inmate partner Stranger Known to vicm Family member Parent/guardian Acquaintance
Indigenous vicm Non-Indigenous vicm

Figure 4.1 Victim-perpetrator relationships by presumed or confirmed victim race (percent).

58
 Towards a fair justice system in Canada

inform cultural narratives about the murder and domestic abuse of Indigenous women,
defining the problems as contained within Indigenous communities. The findings also
powerfully highlight that the dominant threat – both to Indigenous and non-Indigenous
women – is from non-Indigenous perpetrators.
When we examined conviction type and race, we found that when the victim of a homicide
is non-Indigenous, the patterns of conviction are the same, regardless of the perpetrator’s
background. That is, approximately one-third of perpetrators when the victim is other than
Indigenous are convicted of first-degree murder, 45% of second-degree murder and 20% of
manslaughter. When the victim is Indigenous, however, the patterns of conviction change. In
cases of Indigenous victims and perpetrators, manslaughter convictions are far more common
(46%), whereas when the perpetrator is non-Indigenous and the victim is Indigenous, first-
degree murder charges are more likely (37% compared to 15% when the perpetrator/victim are
Indigenous)7 (Figure 4.2). The underlying causes of this discrepancy, in which Indigenous
perpetrators are significantly more likely to be convicted on more lenient charges, demand
further investigation. That is, do the differences truly reflect the degree of planning and intent
or are they related to biases in the judicial system? Conversely – and perhaps surprisingly given
the persistence of racial stereotyping in reporting on violence against women identified in
other chapters in this collection – perpetrator racial information has no impact on the sen-
tencing when the victim is non-Indigenous.
This pattern, however, is not maintained in relation to sentencing in second-degree
murder cases – one of two major conviction types where sentences are not predetermined.
Non-Indigenous perpetrators’ sentences are unaffected by the race of their victims, whereas
Indigenous perpetrators are sentenced less harshly when their victims are Indigenous (12.4
years) compared to when their victims are non-Indigenous (21.5 years)8 (Figure 4.3). For
manslaughter cases, no significant differences in sentencing outcomes were found. Where
the victim was Indigenous, perpetrators were, on average, sentenced to a significantly

50
46 46
44
45
39 39
40 37 36
35 33

30
25
25 22
20 18
15
15

10

0
Indigenous vicm and Indigenous vicm, non- Non-Indigenous vicm Non-Indigenous vicm,
Indigenous perpetrator Indigenous perpetrator and non-Indigenous Indigenous perpetrator
perpetrator
First degree murder Second degree murder Manslaughter

Figure 4.2 Conviction types based on presumed or confirmed victim and perpetrator race (percent).

59
 Kandice Parker et al.

24
21.5
22

20
17.4
18

16 14.9

14
12.4
12

10
Indigenous perpetrator Non-Indigenous perpetrator
Indigenous vicm Non-Indigenous vicm

Figure 4.3 Second-degree murder sentencing length (years) by presumed or confirmed victim and
perpetrator race.

shorter parole eligibility period (14.0 years) than in cases where the victim was non-
Indigenous (15.0 years).9
Of course, not all cases are solved and non-Indigenous victims (77%) are significantly more
likely to have their cases solved than Indigenous victims (52%).10 In this context, a solved case
is one wherein the perpetrator has been clearly identified and the case is considered by police
to be solved. This figure includes cases where the perpetrator was found not criminally
responsible, died prior to conviction, evaded police but is considered the only suspect in the
crime, or had charges stayed for reasons unrelated to a lack of evidence (i.e., the unresolved
Robert Pickton-affiliated cases). However, it does not include cases where a suspect was
charged but information about a conviction could not be found. NWAC (2010) reports a
nearly identical percentage of solved cases (53%), whereas the RCMP (2014) reports that 88%
of homicides of Indigenous women have been solved. The discrepancy between these two
figures requires further investigation; acquittals, inclusion or exclusion of suspicious deaths
and the role of media coverage could exert influence over these inconsistencies in data.

Future directions
Continued work needs to be done to account for the homicides that have occurred since
2013. We were unable to record acquittals in a consistent, systematic fashion; future work
that examines acquittals could yield additional valuable insight. Given the high-profile 2018
acquittals of Gerald Stanley and Raymond Cormier – white men who were each charged
with the murders of young Indigenous people – it is clear that the acquittals of violent
offenders form an important component in Indigenous Canadians’ perceptions of the
criminal justice system (Milward, 2018). In addition, no information regarding perpetrators’
previous criminal histories was recorded. Perpetrators such as John Martin Crawford, for
example, show that escalating levels of violence can occur after initial sentencing and release
from prison. Crawford was convicted of manslaughter in 1981, released after serving his
sentence and then went on to murder three more Indigenous women in 1992. Escalation of
violence also appears to be common, though not systematically documented, in cases of

60
 Towards a fair justice system in Canada

intimate partner violence, where previous victimisation was noted in media reports of a
woman’s homicide. Thus, questions around sentencing, conditions of release and how best
to prevent future violence from occurring are important points of discussion highlighted by
this database.

Conclusion
While previous research indicates that the Canadian media is complicit in perpetuating
negative stereotypes surrounding missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, the
current investigation was able to highlight this misrepresentation using the media itself.
Comprehensive online searching, complemented by legal and newspaper library sources,
revealed significant discrepancies in justice-related outcomes based on the race of victims
and perpetrators of homicide and evidenced the falsehood of pervasive Canadian stereotypes
surrounding the nature of violence towards Indigenous women and girls. Indigenous men are
not solely responsible for the high rates of homicide of Indigenous women. Conversely, non-
Indigenous men are responsible for 98% of the homicides of non-Indigenous women. The
findings dispel the myth that the homicides of Indigenous women are mostly the result of
domestic violence. Instead, the study reveals that non-Indigenous women are at a higher risk
of spousal violence and murder, while Indigenous women are more likely to be killed by a
stranger – often a non-Indigenous man. Moreover, the convictions and sentencing of per-
petrators are not free of racial bias. Indigenous perpetrators are typically convicted of a lesser
offence than are non-Indigenous perpetrators when found guilty of killing an Indigenous
woman. Further, when a second-degree murder conviction is secured, perpetrators of any race
receive sentencing lengths that are more lenient when their victim is Indigenous. Importantly,
Indigenous victims are also significantly less likely to have their cases solved than are non-
Indigenous victims. Our data also provide evidence that those who murder Indigenous women
receive lighter sentences than those who murder non-Indigenous women and these perpe-
trators are more likely to receive shorter parole eligibility periods.
These findings emphasise the importance of addressing the racial biases that exist within
Canadian consciousness and serve to marginalise Indigenous women and girls. The
Canadian government’s failure to legally sanction and effectively promote the idea that
Indigenous women and girls are worthy of extra protection – by defeating Bill S-215 – is a
missed opportunity towards reversing the status quo. Arguments that were made against the
bill illustrate the pervasive negative typecasting of Indigenous persons. For instance, critics
focused on the statistic, derived from this research, in which 66% of Indigenous women are
murdered by Indigenous men, arguing that the bill could lead to increased incarceration
for Indigenous offenders (Warick, 2019). This argument plays into the typecasting – as
outlined in this work – of violence against Indigenous women as an intra-community
problem. The statistic in which 98% of non-Indigenous women are murdered by non-
Indigenous men, in comparison, is neglected and not brought into discussions on violence
towards women. In response to the Canadian federal government’s rejection of Bill S-215,
former Senator Lillian Dyck stated, “One of the biggest challenges we’ve faced is indif-
ference to the plight of Indigenous women. This is just a shocking example of indifference”
(Warick, 2019, para. 5). A common saying among Indigenous advocates living in Canada is
that “there is no reconciliation in the absence of justice.” Canada has a responsibility to
acknowledge, and work to address, the systemic disadvantages experienced by Indigenous
women and girls, which are being upheld in the current legal system and broader colonial

61
 Kandice Parker et al.

society. On 21 June 2021, Bill C-15 was passed by the House of Commons of Canada. This
bill calls for the Government of Canada to take “all measures necessary to ensure that the
laws of Canada are consistent with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples” (Parliament of Canada, 2021). Article 22 of the United Nations
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples specifies that “states shall take measures, in
conjunction with Indigenous peoples, to ensure that Indigenous women and children enjoy the
full protection and guarantees against all forms of violence and discrimination” (United
Nations, 2007). Accordingly, Canada must commit to balancing the criminal justice system
and recognising that Indigenous women and girls are, too often, victims of violent crime and
that the perpetrators are often strangers. Such a commitment would further complement the
231 Calls for Justice outlined in Canada’s Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the
National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (see The National
Inquiry, 2019). The current Liberal government has been subject to intense criticism for doing
little to implement these Calls for Justice, to date. The findings of this study directly address
number 5.25 of The Inquiry’s Calls for Justice, which advocates for “research on men who
commit violence against Indigenous women, girls” (The National Inquiry, 2019).
This study’s investigation of media itself revealed trends that contradict typical Canadian
media representations in which the victimisation of Indigenous women and girls is dis-
regarded or excused. These contradictions emphasise the media’s role in maintaining
harmful and inaccurate stereotypes. The media needs to be held accountable for its role in
dehumanising Indigenous women and girls through inaccurate portrayals of their victimi-
sation and systemic racism. Canada needs responsible media reporting that works to
actively challenge popular myths about Indigenous persons and actively disrupt racialised
discrepancies in the frequency of, and tone in, reports of victimisation. Any effort towards
reconciliation in Canada must recognise the reality of the disproportionate violence ex-
perienced by Indigenous women and girls and advocate for their equal access to justice.

Notes
1 Globally, the average male homicide rate (9.7 per 100,000) is almost four times higher than the
average female homicide rate (2.7 per 100,000) ( UNODC, 2013). Around the world, men ex-
perience unique pressures to aggressively maintain dominance and power over other men – often
minority groups ( Connell, 1987). Socially marginalised men, such as Canadian Indigenous men,
often express destructive and exaggerated masculinities to emphasise their power and protest their
marginalised position ( Jewkes and Morrell, 2018). Furthermore, historical colonial violence and
the residential school system have destroyed many Indigenous cultures and traditions and brought
“violence into the homes and minds” ( Fanon, 1963, p. 38) of Indigenous Canadians ( Lacchin,
2015). This has led to various forms of self-destructiveness (i.e., alcohol and/or drug abuse and
suicides) and internalised/displaced violence (i.e., sexual abuse, homicide) ( Fleras, 2012).
2 These categories were used for comparison purposes only. It is recognised that the categories fail to
adequately account for the nuance of multiracial backgrounds. In the rare case of an Indigenous
person appearing to be white, they were categorised as Indigenous. In cases where the racial
background was reported as mixed, we attempted to use the category that fits best with the visual
representation of the individual and how they would be perceived by others.
3 This category includes white persons as well as all non-Indigenous people of colour. Although it is
recognised that the latter group may also face biases in the justice system, we chose to include them
in the analyses to highlight the potentially unique nature of the Indigenous experience.
4 231 occurred in the 1980s, 604 in the 1990s, 827 in the 2000s, and 410 from 2010 to 2013.
5 This figure is higher than the number of victims whose cases have been solved due to the 92
instances in which a victim was killed by multiple perpetrators.

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 Towards a fair justice system in Canada

6 The “not known to victim” category included strangers and acquaintances. The latter included
cases where the victim and perpetrator had met just prior to the murder taking place or those who
had lived in the same building but were otherwise not known to each other.
2 (3, N = 952) = 15.0,
p < .001, Φ = −.126.
7
2 (5, N = 568) = 28.8, p < .001, Cramer’s V = .225.
8 It is important to interpret this result with caution, as there were only four cases listed that
involved an Indigenous perpetrator and non-Indigenous victim.
9 F(1, 64) = 6.59, p = .011, partial eta squared = .028.
10
2 (1, N = 1,488) = 103.66, p < .001, Cramer’s V = .264.

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 5
FAMILICIDE, GENDER AND
“MENTAL ILLNESS”
Beyond false dualisms
Denise Buiten

Reading complex violences

Amidst growing attention to domestic and family violence in policy, media and public
discussion, some cases of family violence present as particularly knotty and difficult to
interpret. Familicide – also known as “family annihilation” – is one such form of violence.
Defined as the killing of an intimate partner and child(ren) (Wilson, Daly and Daniele,
1995) and frequently followed by suicide (Karlsson et al., 2021), familicide embodies a
trifecta of violence (Buiten, 2022): against an intimate partner or former partner, against
children and often against the self. It is a highly gendered crime, almost always committed
by men against women and children, signalling the role of gender relations in its consti-
tution (Karlsson et al., 2021; Websdale, 2010).
What can sometimes make it difficult to interpret, however, is that as a phenomenon
familicide has both distinct gendered markers that link it with the broader issue of domestic
abuse and femicide (Mailloux, 2014) and others that situate it outside of more widespread
forms of domestic violence. For instance, while domestic abuse, separation and custody
disputes preceding familicide are common (Johnson, 2005; Karlsson et al., 2021; Mailloux,
2014), another category of familicide offenders have no known history of domestic abuse,
appearing to be motivated by despair in the face of declining financial or reputational health
and acting out of the pseudo-altruistic belief they are sparing their family pain (Websdale,
2010). While varied typologies have been deployed in familicide research, they tend to share
this emphasis on two broad categories of offenders: one that fits with other forms of male-
perpetrated domestic homicide and one that – at least on the face of it – does not.
Given this, in contexts such as Australia and the United Kingdom, familicide is often
rendered intelligible through competing frames (Buiten and Coe, 2022; Galvin, Quinn and
Cleary, 2021). On the one hand, familicide is frequently assumed an anomaly, the outcome
of a psychiatric disturbance best explained by individual circumstances; on the other, it is
interpreted as part of a broader pattern of gendered domestic violence. Accounts informed
by the psy-disciplines are more likely to understand familicide (and especially familicide-
suicide) as the result of intense psychic pain, an act of desperation or delusional thinking.
This reading can be seen in cultural representations (Buiten, 2022; Galvin, Quinn and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-8 65
 Denise Buiten

Cleary, 2021) and research on familicide (Ewing, 1997; Schlesinger, 2000). Feminist-
informed accounts, on the other hand, generally position familicide side-by-side with other
domestic femicides, as another manifestation of male power and control in the context of
patriarchal norms and structures that produce and condone male violence against women.
While there is little feminist work specifically on familicide as a social issue, such inter-
pretations can be seen in feminist analyses of representations of familicide, in which psy-
chiatric explanations are criticised and a domestic violence framing is endorsed (e.g. Galvin,
Quinn and Cleary, 2021; Quinn, Prendergast and Galvin, 2019). These competing causal
explanations play out acutely in news reporting on familicide, in which a dualism can often
be observed between interpretations of familicide as an expression of either psychological
pain or patriarchal power.
This chapter presents a feminist sociological account of familicide that seeks to trouble
this dualism in media and popular culture – and how it is scaffolded by the persistence of
similar dualisms in some research and media advocacy. In this way, it points to how the
process of interrogating media representations involves also being astute to the language
used in research – including feminist research and activism – and the ways this can shape or
legitimise limiting cultural tropes of sad or bad men. In the analytic approach suggested,
gender and power remain at the centre of the analysis while taking seriously, and con-
textualising, experiences of distress that can accompany acts of violence against others
(Websdale, 2010). Familicide can, accordingly, be understood and represented as both a
form of gender-based violence deeply connected to other forms of male control of and
violence against women and children and as an expression and mobilisation of intense
feelings of distress and powerlessness produced in and through gendered power relations.
Moving beyond the dualisms, I argue, is important both for understanding and con-
textualising familicide and for advancing an appreciation of the utility of a feminist lens for
understanding complex forms of violence. This is particularly valuable in a context char-
acterised by backlash against feminist theorisations, which are sometimes regarded as
unidimensional and characterised by the silencing of psychological dimensions.
First, I outline examples of the discursive dualism that is constructed around familicide
in media, reflecting on some of the reasons this dualism endures and its connections to some
elements of feminist scholarship and activism. Then, I discuss how a feminist sociological
lens can be applied to interpret existing research on familicide in a way that illuminates the
imbrication of gender and power with perpetrators’ experiences of distress – and how this is
mobilised through violence.

Constructing dualisms
In 2016, Alan Hawe brutally killed his wife, Clodagh, and their three sons Liam (13), Niall
(11) and Ryan (6) in Count Cavan, Ireland, before killing himself. In the reporting that
followed, a mental “illness/distress frame” (Buiten and Coe, 2022) was common in Irish
news reporting (Galvin, Quinn and Cleary, 2021). Within this frame, familicide was inter-
preted directly as the outcome of diagnos(ed/able) “mental illness” such as depression, or
more broadly as the outcome of a culmination of personal stresses. Alan Hawe was vari-
ously characterised in medical terms as an otherwise loving father suffering “chronic
depression” and “serious mental health” issues, or as a man experiencing deep emotional
conflict and disillusionment in the face of personal failures (Galvin, Quinn and Cleary,
2021). However, while a mental illness/distress frame was more common, “feminist

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counterpointing” news frames were also deployed, presenting the case as an instance of
extreme domestic violence (Quinn, Prendergast and Galvin, 2019). This was especially true
of social media commentary, much of which sought to reject the mental health lens com-
monly adopted in the news (Quinn, Prendergast and Galvin, 2019). Within news publica-
tions themselves, such feminist counterpointing was also present. As a writer for the Irish
Examiner and journalism academic commented, reflecting the dialectic between media and
academic discourses, while mental illness may have been present, “what we are not told is
that murder-suicides are cases of extreme domestic violence” (Galvin, 2021). Here, Alan
Hawe’s experience of mental illness was accepted as significant but seen as insufficient to
account for his violence (Galvin, 2021). Others wholly rejected the notion that mental illness
was in any way salient to the murders, particularly the implicit suggestion that mental illness
may have diminished Hawe’s agency. A headline in The Sun reported, Alan Hawe “was evil
and NOT mentally ill” (Fruen, 2016).
Similar contestations occurred around the murder of Hannah Clark and her children
Aaliyah (6), Laianah (4), and Trey (3) by Rowan Baxter in Brisbane, Australia, early in
2020. Rowan Baxter acted with unthinkable cruelty when he tracked down his estranged
wife and three young children on their school run one morning, doused the inside of their
car in petrol and set it alight. He took his own life soon after. In response to this act of
violence, some commentators remarked that Baxter must have been mentally unwell
(Chung, 2020). Others ferociously rejected such claims, insisting that Baxter was a “mon-
ster”, “putrid scum” (Chung, 2020) fully in control of his decisions, acting not out of dis-
tress but out of a quest for control after years of perpetrating domestic abuse. A media
furore ensued when a detective inspector on the case suggested that police were looking into
whether the murders reflected “an issue of a woman suffering significant domestic violence
and her and her children perishing at the hands of her husband, or […] an instance of a
husband being driven too far by issues that he’s suffered by certain circumstances” (Baird,
2020). The insinuation that Baxter’s agency may in some way have been diminished, that
one explanation may be that he was “driven” to these acts of violence as an understandable
response to life stressors, was swiftly and forcefully criticised in media commentary. Under
pressure, the Detective Inspector who had made the comments stepped aside from the case.
Some defenders saw the angry response to his comments as a sign of the misplaced outrage
flowing from what were regarded narrow feminist frames that exclude all explanations of
male violence outside the motivation for power and control. As politician Pauline Hanson
was quoted in the media as saying, sarcastically, “How dare police deviate from the feminist
script of seeking excuses and explanations when women [kill partners and children] but
immediately judging a man in these circumstances as simply representing the evil violence
that is in all men” (Hanson as cited in Graham, 2020).
While Rowan Baxter had a known history of perpetrating coercive control, Fernando
Manrique did not. In 2016 Manrique murdered his wife, Maria Lutz, and two children,
Elisa (11) and Martin (10), by rigging their Sydney home with a poisonous gas system,
killing the entire family as they slept. In this case, early interpretations as to motive spec-
ulated that Elisa and Martin’s disability played a central role and that the familicide was a
symptom of overwhelming stress in the face of the presumed “burden” of raising autistic
children (Buiten and Coe, 2022). When the coronial inquest revealed it was Maria’s plans to
leave Manrique that triggered his decision and that Manrique had had a history of infi-
delity, news reporting re-characterised him unsympathetically as a selfish and controlling
man. In this case, too, the binary constructed around mental illness and domestic violence

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 Denise Buiten

as causes could be observed. As Harvey (2016) wrote in the Daily Telegraph, for instance,
“This is not mental illness. This is domestic violence”. As is common around such cases, a
tension existed around whether to interpret them as instances of domestic violence or mental
illness or distress.
In cases that map more cleanly onto feminist-informed understandings of domestic and
family violence – for example, a known history of domestic abuse preceding murders in the
context of separation or custody disputes – a domestic violence lens is more likely to be
taken up. In cases that do not present this way, news media is more likely to adopt news
frames that position familicide as mysterious, unsolvable tragedies; the clearest point of
hope for finding answers is assumed to be the excavation of the troubled psyche of per-
petrators. In both cases, what these constructions disallow is an examination of common
gendered drivers of both mental distress and patterned male violence against women – and
how both are profoundly intertwined.

Some roots to the polarity

The polarity that often exists between psychiatric and gendered sociological readings of
violence has a few driving factors. Indeed, the discourses observed in media and popular
culture have a somewhat porous relationship with research, which can act as a resource
through which to craft the intelligibility of different news frames. When it comes to fa-
milicide specifically, research is dominated by the psy-disciplines, with exceedingly little
sociological and feminist research in this area. While feminist work on issues such as
coercive control, domestic abuse and domestic homicide have amassed a growing evidence
base of nuanced research that has become increasingly mainstreamed (if always still con-
tested), when it comes to some other forms of family violence this is not the case. This is
especially so for forms of family violence that deviate from certain gendered patterns in
perpetration or motive, such as familicide which as discussed is not always preceded by a
history of abuse, and filicide which is committed roughly as often by women as by men
(Brown, Tyson and Fernandes Arias, 2018; O’Hagan, 2014). Media and public encounters
with these issues, therefore, have not been furnished with the same feminist analytical fra-
meworks as those offered to understand intimate partner homicide. This can create a gap into
which psychiatric and – often – anti-feminist explanations can flourish (Fitzroy, 2001).
Especially in the face of cases of violence seemingly committed out of the blue, the fall-back to
psychopathology is common; violence presenting as less intelligible or speakable as a public
issue is more likely to be attributed to the internal world of individuals (Guerin, 2017).
While efforts to address violence against women have been largely feminist-informed in the
last few decades (Kuskoff and Parsell, 2020), the area of mental illness has seen the continued
dominance of psy-disciplines (Rimke, 2016). It is interesting to note, however, that despite this
long history the hegemony of the psy-disciplines in understanding men’s mental struggles is
not inevitable. Indeed, while conceptualisations of mental illness and health have a long
history of being situated primarily as the purview of the disciplines and practices of the “psy-
complex” (Rimke, 2016), there has been feminist sociological engagement with these issues.
The 1970s and 1980s, for instance, saw a pronounced interest in feminist work in situating
men’s emotional struggles as the product of restrictive gender norms – one of the diverse
manifestations of patriarchy (Messner, 2016). However, since then a splintering has occurred
with respect to men’s groups’ relationships with feminism: pro-feminist men’s groups seeking
to focus primarily on challenging men’s structural privilege and anti-feminist groups

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continuing to engage with men’s mental health but in a way that recasts men’s troubles as
evidence that patriarchy is a myth and/or that feminism is harming men (Messner, 2016). As a
result, men’s experiences of poor mental health, when they are raised in relation to gender and
feminism, are frequently weaponised to discredit feminist claims. This has complicated fem-
inist engagement with issues around men’s mental health.
Further, as Yates (2019) points out, the feminist-informed anti-domestic violence sector
has a fraught relationship with other sectors that rely on more individualised, depoliticised
accounts of social problems. Take for example the alcohol and other drugs (AOD) sector,
which has had a complicated relationship with the anti-domestic violence sector when it
comes to considering the role of addiction and substance abuse in the perpetration of
violence (Yates, 2019). While, as Yates points out, there are some undeniable intersections
between substance abuse and domestic violence, the different strategic objectives and treat-
ment modalities of the two sectors have clashed. A key part of the work of the AOD sector has
been to destigmatise sufferers and attribute their behaviours to an illness; the anti-domestic
violence sector, on the other hand, has been focused on ensuring that the problematic be-
haviours and choices of perpetrators are centralised. So, while the AOD sector has historically
positioned addiction and associated behaviours as the outcome of an illness sufferers are not
personally responsible for, and for which individualised treatments are prescribed, the anti-
domestic violence sector has sought to hold men responsible for their violence and to politicise
it as a social problem best remedied through cultural and structural change (Yates, 2019).
Similarly, while mental illness and the perpetration of domestic violence can often intersect
(Fitzpatrick et al., 2022), there is an understandable concern that highlighting men’s mental
distress – especially seeking to attribute it some causal explanatory power with respect to
domestic and family violence – will normalise and depoliticise men’s violence, divesting men of
their responsibility in its perpetration (Smith, Bond and Jeffries, 2019).
These different framings – and the treatment modalities that flow from them – make for a
guarded feminist encounter with questions of men’s mental health in the context of domestic
violence perpetration. However, while this guardedness is understandable, sidestepping the
issue of men’s emotional distress in the context of their violence may not be productive
either. Considering violent men’s distress need not ignore or sideline the role of gender and
power; in fact, it is worth asking how patriarchal norms and structures contribute to pro-
ducing distress – and to legitimating a violent response to it – among so many men including
those who commit familicide. Rather than treating murder-suicide as either murder or
suicide, as is often the case (McPhedran et al., 2018), the continuums and connections
between them should be explored.

The motivations and context of familicide

Familicide is a relatively rare form of violence. While comparable national statistics are
difficult to establish, on average one familicide per year in Australia was been reported in
the media between 2014 and 2020 (Buiten, 2022). Karlsson et al. (2021), in their systematic
review of international literature on the issue, indicate that where statistics exist national
incidence rates sit between 1 and 2.55 in different national contexts per year. Of course,
familicide is a crime at the intersection of two more widespread forms of violence – intimate
partner homicide and filicide. Some familicide offenders, therefore, share common traits of
male filicide and intimate partner homicide perpetrators. Others, however, do not.

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 Denise Buiten

I draw on Websdale’s (2010) typological distinction and terminology, which distinguishes

between civil-reputable and livid-coercive perpetrators. Livid-coercive offenders generally have
a history of perpetrating domestic abuse and tend to kill their families in the face of impending
separation and/or custody disputes (Liem and Reichelmann, 2014; Websdale, 2010; Wilson,
Daly and Daniele, 1995). They are usually described as controlling, jealous, angry and
vengeful, acting out of the belief that if they cannot have their partner and family (in-tact), no
one can (Wilson, Daly and Daniele, 1995). Feeling abandoned and rejected (Liem and
Riechelmann, 2014), and facing the loss of control over their families, they kill, according to
Websdale (2010, p. 127), to “dissipate or dissolve unbearable feelings of humiliated fury”. In
many ways, these cases reflect patterns in intimate partner homicides (Monckton Smith, 2020)
and filicides by men (O’Hagan, 2014), in which revenge and control are common motives.
Civil-reputable familicide perpetrators, on the other hand, seldom have a known history of
violence or abuse against their partners or children, often presenting before the killings as ideal
husbands, fathers and community members (Websdale, 2010). Of course, many domestic
abusers are not evident as such to those outside of the immediate family, making claims as to
offenders’ non-violence rightfully subject to scrutiny. That said, while some familicide
offenders may mistakenly be presumed within this category, in-depth coronial investigations
in Australia (Barnes, 2015) and sociological research in the United States (Websdale, 2010)
suggests that, compared to intimate partner homicide alone, familicides are more often
committed by men who did not appear violent or abusive previously. These civil-reputable
offenders plan familicide in the wake of an impending or perceived “fall from grace”
(Websdale, 2010, p. 245) from which they wish (in their own thinking) to spare themselves and
their families. They act out of a brooding sense of depression, discontent and mounting
hopelessness often experiencing financial troubles or mental illness (Liem and Reichelmann,
2014; Oliffe et al., 2015; Websdale, 2010; Wilson, Daly and Daniele, 1995) and/or a “drastic
and sudden change or loss that negatively and significantly impacts the ability of the family to
sustain their current quality of living” (Mailloux, 2014, p. 923). Family annihilation is con-
sidered by such perpetrators the only viable solution to the loss, shame or fear they experience
– “brought about by some form of spiralling decline, usually in arenas associated with mas-
culinity such as finances, social status, or family leadership” (Buiten, 2022, p. 77).
In both cases, argues Websdale (2010), potent feelings of shame and powerlessness are
present. These pent-up emotions and relational conflicts, argues Schlesinger (2000), lead to
escalating psychic tension and fixated thinking – a “catathymic process” that results in ex-
plosive violence as a way to expunge the tension. However, what such an account fails to ask is
both how social contexts support the production of these painful feelings and why perpe-
trators seek to purge them through violence against others in ways that are uniquely gendered.

Gendering distress among perpetrators of familicide

This section contextualises the distress of perpetrators of familicide in a way that shows its
connection to many of the known drivers of male violence against women and moves beyond
psychocentric (Rimke, 2016) accounts of mental illness/distress by considering the gendered
aetiologies of violence. Specifically, a deep investment in normative gendered roles and
institutions shapes feelings of distress at the prospect of being unable to achieve a particular
vision of the gendered head of household perpetrators feel compelled and entitled to enact.
Of course, mental illness or distress alone does not necessitate violence and violence is an
uncommon feature of mental illness. However, to divorce violence from embodied emotion

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 Familicide, gender and “mental illness”

and emphasise the perpetration of violence only as an individual choice is to sidestep the
feminist call to contextualise violence both culturally and structurally (Kuskoff and Parsell,
2020). Indeed, rates of mental illness are high among abusers and men’s suicide and use of
interpersonal violence often co-occur (Fitzpatrick et al., 2022). Rather than assuming a one-
way causal relationship between mental illness/distress and violence, looking at their co-
occurrence in social context reveals the imbrication of gender and power in the emotional
worlds and choices of perpetrators.
More broadly, depression and suicide among men have been connected to a sense of
failed or thwarted masculine accomplishment (Chandler, 2019; Scourfield, 2005). For fa-
milicide offenders, the intense escalation of internal pressure and spiralling sense of hope-
lessness experienced is also connected to a perceived spoiling of the masculine identities and
functions they are deeply invested in (Websdale, 2010). Men who commit familicide com-
monly have a particularly deep attachment to their roles as heads of households, as
breadwinners and as stoic protectors and/or commanders of the family (Mailloux, 2014). In
this context, financial troubles are a common trigger, not as an explanation for the potency
of their distress or violence so much as a symptom of this attachment to gender roles.
Because investment in these roles and identities is so deep (Wood Harper and Voigt, 2007),
threats to their achievement can be experienced as particularly scolding, even un-survivable.
As Websdale (2010) argues, familicide perpetrators are characterised by intense shame and
humiliation, not as mere inner pathology but as socially situated manifestations of the
“restrictive and punishing standards of the gender regime” (p. 51), as it intersects with broader
modern imperatives towards the repression of feeling – a feature heightened by normative
masculinity (River and Flood, 2021).
Many familicide offenders, especially those who appear to commit violence out of the blue,
are men with strong social standing and/or positions in traditionally masculine roles such as
military, finance and farming (e.g. Anderson, Sisask and Varnik, 2011). They are more likely
than other homicide offenders to be middle-class (Karlsson et al., 2021) and to be part of what
appears to be a normatively ideal nuclear family. While this makes their distress and violence
seem unexpected, research on familicide suggests that this position can contribute to it,
deepening the shame perpetrators feel in the face of a perceived decline, the stress-strain ex-
perience heightened by the betrayal of social expectations (Wood Harper and Voigt, 2007).

Gendering the mobilisation of distress by familicide perpetrators

Embodied emotions, even intense ones, are not explanations for violence, however. Why,
we should ask, would perpetrators of familicide consider the murder of an entire family – of
those they profess to love – a reasonable solution to these feelings? It is worth pointing out
that most familicides do not occur when a perpetrator “snaps”, as is often assumed, but are
premeditated (Karlsson et al., 2021). “Emotions are not merely personal feelings”, explain
River and Flood (2021), “but are also mobilised in social relations” (p. 911). There is a space
between feeling and action. The feeling, the determination of how to respond to it and the
moment of action are all socially situated. Familicide not only occurs within the context of
gendered emotional distress but how this distress is responded to. It represents a particularly
distilled expression of hegemonic masculinity, which can be vengefully or seemingly
benevolently patriarchal. In both cases, “omnipotent control” is sought and enacted
(Johnson and Sachmann, 2014, p. 108). While perpetrators may feel powerlessness, em-
bedded within these acts is an entitlement to regain control over the situation and the family

71
 Denise Buiten

through a unilateral decision as “head of the household”. As research on men and suicide
shows, the norm of masculine stoicism dissuades the disclosure of mounting difficult feelings
and encourages their release through practices considered more masculine – one of which is
violence (River and Flood, 2021). In other words, familicide offenders seek to diffuse
intense tension and distress (Schlesinger, 2000) in ways that are shaped by the gendered
assumption of the right to determine the course of the family (Oliffe et al., 2015; Wood
Harper and Voigt, 2007) and through means coded as masculine.
While control and domination as core to the act of familicide are more overtly evident in
livid-coercive familicides, civil-reputable familicides also engender a profound sense of
patriarchal entitlement to control specifically over women, children and the family – perceived
as a unit. In order to be able to act in this way, perpetrators must position themselves as best
situated to evaluate and make decisions as to the wellbeing and futures of their families to the
extreme of determining life and death; even homicide becomes a rationalised means through
which to “sustain control and prevent the breakup of the family” (Jaffe and Juodis, 2006,
p.15). Familicide offenders feel not only deep shame but an entitled shame. This is akin to
what researchers in the area of gender and mass violence have called an aggrieved entitlement
(Kalish and Kimmel, 2010). As such, it is important to recognise that painful emotions, and
the way they are responded to, are bound up in gendered power relations.
In civil-reputable cases in which the initial impulse is suicide – where familicide is mo-
tivated by so-called altruism in the desire to prevent the emotional pain and/or financial
repercussions their suicide would cause – homicide becomes a way of doing their role as
heads of household in a unilaterally finite act as patriarch and “protector” (Wood Harper
and Voigt, 2007). This, in part, helps to explain why it is almost always men who kill both
their partner and children (Karlsson et al., 2021), while women do not. Though women do
kill their children at almost equal rates to men, suggesting they hold proprietary attitudes
towards children, men hold these towards both women and children – indeed towards the
family as a construct itself (Walklate and Petrie, 2013). The deep investment in not only
gender roles but also normative, gendered constructions of the nuclear family contributes to
familicide (Johnson and Sachmann, 2014), through the notion that a family can only survive
and thrive when it is in-tact in a particular sense – co-habiting, financially prosperous and
with the enjoyment of community standing, for instance. Indeed, individual members of the
family become subsumed under the unit of the family, over which familicide offenders
strongly feel they must preside. Perceiving themselves as “the core of their families”, which
are regarded as “extensions of themselves” (Jaffe and Juodis, 2006, p. 15), contributes to
rendering the extreme response that familicide is a thinkable solution.

Conclusion
It is tempting to divide violent men into murderous monsters or sad sufferers of personal
circumstances and mental anguish. These framings continue to structure news reporting, at
times deploying feminist discourses by challenging sympathetic portrayals of perpetrators,
only to produce monsterising news tropes. However, these framings ignore key insights
within feminist work around the normalisation of violence within common cultural scripts
of masculinity and the capacity to disrupt this – that male violence is not inherent either in
mental illness or as a manifestation of “evil”. When constructed in such binary terms, it
divests both emotion and violent action of context. Such binaries discourage a careful
consideration of how seemingly benevolent constructions of men as protectors and

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 Familicide, gender and “mental illness”

providers of a narrowly defined ideal of a family can harm not only men but legitimise some
men’s decision to harm women and children they profess to love. There are common
connections between the feelings of shame and powerlessness that familicide perpetrators
commonly experience and the wielding of power over women and children, including
through violence. Part of our work as feminist scholars is to challenge these binary framings
not only in media representations but in research.

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 6
FEMMINICIDIO IN ITALIAN
TELEVISED NEWS
A case study of La Vita in Diretta
Federica Formato

Introduction
In Italy, as well as in all other parts of the world, women continue to be murdered at the
hands of men they know. The Italian Office for Statistics (ISTAT) found that 92% of the
106 women killed in known circumstances in 2020 were victims of male violence; more
specifically, 51% were killed by their current partners/husbands, 6% by someone they were
in a relationship with, 25% by a relative and 9.6% by someone else they knew. In 2021, men
killed 116 women in Italy (ISTAT, 2021).
In this chapter, I present a sociolinguistic analysis of five news reports of femminicidio, that
is the killing of women by men known to them for reasons linked to gendered roles and
expectations, during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020–2021. The reports aired on an afternoon
television programme called La Vita in Diretta (Rai 1, 2000 – continuing): an infotainment
programme that deals with political and other news, alongside hosting celebrities and dis-
cussing lighter content. This study aims to expand on previous work surrounding the language
of femminicidio in Italian media (Busso, Combei, and Tordini, 2020; Formato, 2019) as well as
femicide in other languages or contexts (Gillespie et al., 2013; Karlsson et al., 2021; Janzen,
2018; Lloyd and Ramon, 2017; Santaemilia and Maruenda, 2014). This is linked to Fowler
(2013)’s argument, i.e., the news represent the world in a non-neutral reflection of facts,
through what can be seen to be symbolic words/expressions. I argue that this is particularly
true for violence against women, as narratives are usually found to perpetuate sexist, patri-
archal myths and expectations (Easteal, Holland and Judd, 2015).
In the next section, I present the background literature that is useful to understand how
femicide is narrated in news. I then introduce the dataset and the methods of investigation,
explaining how the texts are read through a discourse analytical approach, before pre-
senting the results, divided into emerging patterns and presenting telling examples. Finally, I
draw some conclusions.

Understanding femminicidio
In this chapter, I use the term femminicidio acknowledging that other scholars have framed
this crime with different terminology, including “intimate partner femicide” (Monckton

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-9 75
 Federica Formato

Smith, 2020), “intimate terrorism” (Johnson, 1995) and “intimate murders” (Wykes, 1995) –
terms which keep gender in view to differing degrees. The term femminicidio is convincingly
defined by Bandelli and Porcelli “as an issue of intimate and domestic violence, rooted in
culture, a phenomenon that erupted because of men’s incapability to accept women’s
assertion of freedom” (2016, p. 9). This is a narrower definition than often applied to the
English term femicide which does not, necessarily, refer exclusively to the context of inti-
mate relationships.
As with theorisations of other forms of men’s violence against women, feminist scholars
of femicide have highlighted the gendered nature of this violence. Gender here encapsulates
concepts such as (hegemonic) masculinities (Messerschmidt, 2017), rigid heteronormative
identities, roles and relationships (Bondelli and Porcelli, 2016), as well as gendered social
arrangements to which (perceived) male power is at the centre (Taylor and Jasinski, 2011).
These concepts not only explain male violence against women (including femicide) but also
provide a useful ground to see how people operate these values in society (Testoni et al.,
2020). More specifically, in patriarchal societies, male violence against women is part of a
status quo in heteronormative relations (Bandelli and Porcelli, 2016), reproducing unequal
and fixed gender arrangements (male dominance vs female subordination, see Corradi et al.,
2016). For instance, Messerschmidt (2017) discusses the connections between hegemonic
masculinity (dominant values such as strength, toughness and power that are believed to
belong to men and regulate societies) and emphasised femininity. I argue that this is par-
amount, both men and women in the femminicidio scenario must be seen through symbolic
gender(ed) values: men (seeing themselves) as powerful and women confined as “comple-
mentary, compliant and accommodating” in the relationship (Messerschmidt, 2017, p. 72).
The notion of male power is one of the main aspects of femicides; more specifically, the
attempt to re-establish power and control (Taylor, 2009) following the belief that these were
lost because of women’s choices. Specifically, men who kill their intimate partners are driven
by the willingness to re-possess, through “a sense of ownership” (Radford and Russell,
1992, p. 3), what they believe belongs to them: in this view, women are mere objects, do not
have freedom and are at the disposal of men. In other words, “women become the targets of
the man’s attempt to re-assert his masculinity/identity” (Boonzaier, 2018, p. 201).
The literature demonstrates that similar gendered notions of masculinities and femi-
ninities can be found around the world; however, Messerschmidt (2017) also urges to
consider a focus on local embodiments of these values. Zara et al. (2019) investigated 86
cases of femicides in Northwest Italy from 1993 to 2013 and found that information on the
crime (through, for instance, documents written by coroners) suggests that women’s deci-
sion to leave the relationships was the trigger for their killings in all cases. Also in Italy,
Testoni et al. (2020) argue that sexist attitudes were the reasons provided by the nine male
interviewees convicted of gendered violence. Finally, Bandelli and Porcelli (2016) discuss the
idea of a “typical Italian family” in which roles are unequal and imbalanced (see also
Formato, 2019).
The local embodiments of these values are evidenced not only in social norms and legis-
lation but also in media texts. There seems to be agreement on the idea that “media portrayals
of violence against women provide a potential site for the reproduction of gender inequality”
(Easteal, Holland and Judd, 2015, p. 104). Chapters by Buiten and Parker et al. in this volume
discuss how femicide, and the related crime of familicide, is made meaningful – and which
femicides “count” – in different national contexts. Karlsson et al. (2021), investigated seven
Swedish newspapers and found that, among other factors, there was no recognition of the

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 Femminicidio in Italian televised news

structural aspects of the gendered crime and that alternative theories as to why the killings
occurred were proposed to justify the actions of those men who committed the crimes. In
examining Spanish newspapers El Pais and El Mundo, Santaemilia and Maruenda (2014)
found that the crimes were seen through abstract nouns (such as danger or drama), whilst
Gillespie et al. (2013) argue that the news portrayed femicides as isolated incidents in US
media. Returning to Italy, Busso, Combei and Tordini (2020) quantitatively compared the
language used in a TV programme (Amore Criminale) and articles from four newspapers
(from September 2013 to May 2014); they found that love is seen as a fundamental aspect of
the media narrations of the gendered crime. In investigating 331 newspaper articles
(2013–2016) through corpus linguistics techniques, I similarly found that gelosia (jealousy)
was statistically significant among other patterns in what I defined as “forensic narratives”
(Formato, 2019, p. 224).
This brief review reminds us that what femminicidio means is continually under (local)
negotiation and can reveal relevant aspects about gender, violence and power. In the
context of the Covid-19 pandemic, much-existing commentary has focused on whether the
rates of femminicido have increased, with contradictory evidence emerging (e.g., Weil, 2020;
Standish and Weil, 2021; Aebi et al., 2021). Specifically, Aebi et al. (2021) discuss a “situ-
ational hypothesis”, i.e., the plausible scenario in which more women would feel unsafe in
their homes, based on the simultaneity of reduced space (that is people sharing the same
place for longer) and the likely absence of social control, thus generating an increase in
cases. However, it is important not to reduce the seriousness of femminicidio to frequency
exclusively. This study provides detailed scrutiny of a small number of television news
stories to investigate some of the meanings attached to femminicidio in the context of the
Italian lockdown and other restrictions to public life.

Methodology
The aim of this section is twofold; namely, I present and discuss the collection of the dataset
and I explain the methods carried out for the investigation. In conceptualising this chapter,
I planned to use televised news from Rai 1, Rai 2 and Rai 3 (three channels of the national
broadcaster), starting from the first Covid-19 lockdown (that is from March 2020), in order
to explore whether/how the potentially distinctive risks to women during the pandemic
shaped the understanding of femminicidio. However, I found that the main news pro-
grammes did not frequently report episodes of femminicidio: indeed, I could only find three
reports. This was possibly due to the priority given to the pandemic and its consequences
(e.g., the number of infections and government measures). However, this absence is telling,
specifically in relation to the number of femicides that occurred in 2020 (106).
What followed were attempts to re-frame the investigation, whilst maintaining the
original focus on televised news stories and on specific episodes of femminicidio during the
Covid-19 pandemic. In researching what the TV schedule could offer, I chose La Vita in
Diretta, a programme which has aired since 2000 on the national channel, Rai 1, from 3–5
pm, with an audience share of around 14%–15% monthly (Auditel, 2022). The anchorman
of this programme is Alberto Matano, a former journalist of the Rai 1 TV news; the
programme is an infotainment one, meaning it deals with current affairs, from social issues
to politics, to lighter content such as showbusiness. La Vita in Diretta was selected to enrich
the established literature on print media and provide more insights into how language is
used to frame femminicidio.

77
 Federica Formato

Starting from the YouTube page of the channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/rai),

I searched the name of the programme La Vita in Diretta together with the term fem-
minicidio. This search identified 25 videos on the topic of femminicidio during the Covid-
19 pandemic period. Four of these reports were short (only 2–3 minutes) pre-recorded
segments and were excluded on this basis. The remaining 21 videos addressed the topic
in a range of ways. Whilst the majority of videos dealt with individual cases, there were
four focused on femminicidio in more general terms, with reports hinging on interven-
tions of the Head of State, other politicians or lawyers commenting on the topic. Of
those focussing on individual cases, there were three narrating trials relating to fem-
minicidi which occurred in the previous years; five reported on attempted femminicidi,
that is when the victim survived the crime; four instances referred to women killed by
other family members (e.g., a case where a woman was killed by her brother). The last
five are the ones I investigate in this chapter, which focused on contemporary instances
of femminicidi (see Table 6.1).
In these five narratives, Matano either presents the report from another journalist or
follows up the report with some questions for the journalists on the crime scenes. Some
relatives or acquaintances of the victims are also interviewed; notably, none of the reports
includes interviews with supporters of the perpetrator. In two episodes, we also see a
criminologist, Roberta Bruzzone, explaining the dynamics of violence against women.
Bruzzone does not exclusively specialise in violence against women and has also dealt with
different types of crimes in her career.
The qualitative investigation of the transcribed reports identified three key areas I will
now go on to explore:

• the absence of the term femminicidio in the narration

• use of specific referential strategies, e.g., first names of both victims and perpetrators
• focus on motives and emotional states and counternarratives of perpetrators.

The analysis offered in the next section delves into these three patterns and presents telling
examples (with my translations in English) from the dataset.

The linguistic framing of femminicidio in La Vita in Diretta

In this section, I first investigate the absence of the term femminicidio. Before I discuss
femminicidio, it is important to contextualise the term in relation to legal (mis)use. This term
is not currently part of the Italian penal code (as also described in detail in Formato, 2019).
This means that concerns arise in i) how femicides are counted and ii) how these cases are
framed in court. Whilst the parliament passed a so-called femminicidio law in 2013, the term
is never used in the text of this law (see Formato, 2019). The 2018–2022 parliament
increased its engagement with the issue, having formed a Commissione parlamentare di in-
chiesta sul femminicidio, nonché su ogni forma di violenza di genere (Parliamentary committee
on femminicidio as well as all other forms of gendered violence). Furthermore, it is believed
that the term has been only once used in sentencing, in the case of a woman, Stefania Noce,
killed at the hand of her ex-boyfriend in 2011. Yet, the term was later removed from the
sentence because the judge defined it as “un brutto neologismo dal sapore sociologico” (an
awful sociology-related neologism) (JNews, 2021). It is for these reasons that I investigated
the ways in which the crime is labelled. On this topic, Bandelli and Porcelli (2016) suggest

78
 Table 6.1 Corpus of televised news recalling episodes of femminicido in La Vita in Diretta

Date Victim Video title URL

25 November 2020 Loredana Scalone A tradimento https://www.youtube.com/watch?
(Trecherously) v=NE3m8OhYS8s
16 February 2021 Piera Napoli Aveva paura https://www.youtube.com/watch?
(She was scared) v=x7puXE6Fcnc
21 October 2021 Elena Casanova Femminicidio Brescia: uccisa a martellate per https://www.youtube.com/watch?

79
strada, arrestato l’ex v=TGx8bz5iiSQ
(Femicide Brescia: killed with a hammer on
the street, ex- partner arrested)
22 November 2021 Cecilia Juana Hazana Cecilia, uccisa dall’ex per una foto sui social https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Loayza (Cecilia, killed by her ex because of a v=RMNK0ncA_Gc
picture posted on social media)
13 December 2021 Jenny Cantarero Uccisa dall’ex, caccia all’assassino di Jenny https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Femminicidio in Italian televised news

(Killed by her ex, hunt for Jenny’s v=rX2naaVdwzs

murderer)
 Federica Formato

that the use of femminicidio in Italian newspapers rose sharply in 2012; however, in my own
previous work, I found a decrease in use from 2013 to 2016 (Formato, 2019).
Despite the fact that femminicidio was used in creating the corpus of narratives to
investigate, the actual reports selected only use the term once, in the case of Elena Casanova
when Matano says:

e poi Roberta, la cosa fondamentale è non sottovalutare questi segnali, perché tutte le volte
che purtroppo noi parliamo di un femminicidio, c’è sempre poi un passato diciamo di gente
and then Roberta, the important aspect is not to underestimate these flags, because all
the times we talk about a femicide, there is always a past made of people.

Matano is here interviewing Bruzzone, the criminologist, about the importance of witnesses
and victims reporting abusive behaviour to the police as a way of preventing femminicidio.
Here, the term is accompanied by the indeterminate article un (a), not referring to specific
cases. This term is not used in any other episode. Instead, there is reference to omicidio
(homicide) in four episodes, delitto or delitto premeditato (premeditated crime) in three, as
well as individual instances of storia terribile (horrible story) and vicenda (episode). In the
case of the former two, there seems to be a preference for legal terms, highlighting the
severity of what happened. However, the wide use of the more neutral term omicidio
maintains that the killing of a woman at the hand of a known person or an ex-partner
equals any other killing that occurs for unspecified motives. In my view, one can see here a
fierce resistance to disregard the social impact of the crime and, possibly, the political, social
and cultural work needed to address this issue. Furthermore, in the latter pair (storia ter-
ribile and vicenda), the crime is arguably downgraded to a story or an episode, under-
estimating the criminal aspect as well as its structural aspect, confirming what was already
suggested by Santaemilia and Maruenda (2014) and Gillespie et al. (2013). What emerges is
that terms replacing femminicidio are disregarding the gender aspect, in keeping with a
society that continuously renders women’s issues invisible.
Strategies used to nominate or refer to people are always interesting as they can reveal
how the people involved are seen in relation to distance and proximity, as well as how
they are conceptualised based on age, gender, ethnicity and position in the story. To begin
with, it is possibly unsurprising that the first name of the victim is used in all the episodes.
In a previous study (Potts and Formato, 2021), we found that judges most often used
the first name of the victim when reading sentences to perpetrators. We argue that this
signalled the judges’ willingness to connect with the victims and those in court. However,
the functions of these strategies might be different in relation to televised news: the
proximity created here aims to present the victim as one of us, as someone to whom
everybody could relate.
Two interesting aspects emerge from the report of the femminicidio of a Peruvian-born
woman, Cecilia Juana Hazana Loayza. Loayza’s origins are never disclosed in La Vita in
Diretta but were easy to find in other news reports. Interestingly, Loayza was the only one
of the five victims not to be referred to by her full name, as her surname is never mentioned.
In addition, the journalist reporting from the scene alternates between Cecilia (used three
times) and Juana (used twice) in the introductory part of the report, suggesting a certain
instability in identifying the victim. These aspects are, in my view, telling in relation to
perceptions around the nationality or rather the foreign-ness of the victim and are

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 Femminicidio in Italian televised news

illustrative of what Sue et al. (2007, p. 273) refer to as microinequities when reporting on
how people of colour are talked to or about.
Differently from what is discussed above for victims, there are no consistent patterns in
relation to how the men committing the femicides are referred to. The male perpetrators are
mostly, and expectedly, described with kinship terms such as, for instance, marito (ex-
husband). In one episode, the killer is almost always referred to by his name and surname,
to build a connection with his legal history (having been condemned for stalking and having
been given a restrictive order); in two other episodes, they are also referred to with either
alternating names and surnames or are referred to exclusively through their name. However,
in the remaining two episodes their details are not shared, possibly framing a lack of
responsibility given to the murderers.
The final pattern investigated is a well-known issue in reporting male violence against
women (see Formato, 2019; Busso, Combei and Tordini, 2020; Zara et al., 2019), that of
attributing violence to the killer’s jealousy, unconditional love, or a sudden loss of control.
In the report about the femicide of Piera Napoli, for instance, the journalist states “uccisa, lo
ricordiamo, inflitta da più di 30 coltellate dal marito completamente impazzito dalla gelosia”
([she was] killed, just to remind you, suffering more than 30 stab wounds at the hand of her
husband, totally driven crazy by jealousy). In translating into English, one very telling
meaning seems to be lost: the verb infliggere (to inflict), here used to describe how the
woman was killed, undermines the physical pain and focuses on the moral pain. Specifically,
this verb is meant to convey a punishment given to someone. This, therefore, relates to
jealousy as an accepted value (in heterosexual relationships) which seems to be the force
behind the crime. In the same episode, the journalist invites the victim’s aunt to recount the
story by saying “era geloso anche dei cugini” (he was jealous of her cousins too); in doing so,
he seems to wish to strengthen the role of jealousy in this crime. Similarly, the killer of Elena
Casanova is described as “geloso possessivo” (possessively jealous) whilst also recalling the
words allegedly used by the killer in the police interview: “è stato un raptus” (I snapped),
both contributing to a narrative that eases the killer’s responsibility as well as privileging his
account of the crime. The anchorman describes the events around the murder of Loayza by
suggesting that the killer “impazzisce” (has gone crazy) and we later are told of his “furia
omicida” (homicidal rage). Whilst furia reflects an emotional state of short length (Treccani,
2021), the journalist pictures a different scenario than the one factually told, as this femicide
was preceded by long-standing crimes such as stalking and other criminal behaviours to-
wards the victim. Criminologist Bruzzone, whilst not challenging the anchorman or the
journalists in this episode, explains that it is important to stop

di parlare di soggetti folli, di gelosia, di raptus [ … ] questi sono soggetti che pianificano
lucidamente e che puniscono le donne che osano lasciarli
talking about crazy people, jealousy and losing control [ … ] [as] these are people who
lucidly plan and who punish women who dare to split up with them.

The exploitation of values associated with heterosexual relationships, such as love and jeal-
ousy through the maintenance of control from the man’s side, forms part of how these fe-
micides have been narrated, contributing to reinforcing the status quo that Bruzzone’s
comments seek to disrupt (Testoni et al., 2020; Taylor and Jasinski, 2011; Busso, Combei and
Tordini, 2020).

81
 Federica Formato

Conclusions
This chapter aims to present a small-scale study of how the gendered crime of femminicidio
is narrated in televised news within the two years of the Covid-19 pandemic. It explores five
reports of the infotainment programme La Vita in Diretta, which airs on the first channel of
the national TV Rai. The three linguistics aspects investigated – the absence of the term
femminicidio, referential strategies, and motives as well as emotional states – suggest that the
narratives are not balanced and are detrimental to women, confirming previous studies on
the topic. These patterns undermine the seriousness of the crime and promote unfair jus-
tifications for those who commit the crime, based on emotional states and myths about
heterosexual relations. Based on this, I concur with what has been pinpointed by Easteal,
Holland and Judd (2015) in relation to gendered violence, that television is a medium that
“cultivates the taste sensibilities of its audience” (2015, p. 204). The failure to reframe the
narratives of the crime through structural and gender aspects is indicative of the societal,
cultural, and legal imbalances in Italy, which still see women as subordinate to men.

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 7
CRUEL BENEVOLENCE
Vulnerable menaces, menacing vulnerabilities
and the white male vigilante trope
Kathryn Claire Higgins

In 2007, a Sudanese Australian teenager named Liep Gony was murdered on a suburban
Melbourne sidewalk. Two young white men, both unknown to Gony, beat him to death
in broad daylight. In a 2018 episode of the Australian current affairs television program
Four Corners, Liep’s mother, Martha, cries as she recounts her final moments with
her son:

I arrived and saw him getting lifted into the back of the ambulance. And we all rushed
to hold him. His brother was trying to hold his legs and I was trying to hold him, but
the paramedics pushed us back
(Four Corners, 2018)

Liep’s murder—an unambiguous instance of racist vigilante violence — was initially mis-
reported by Australian journalists as an incident of gang-related violence within Melbourne’s
Black African diasporic communities (Windle, 2008). Though corrected in later coverage, this
early misrepresentation was nonetheless critical in precipitating a recurrent narrative in local
crime reporting known as the “African gang crime” narrative (Majavu, 2020; Weber et al,
2021). Since 2007, this narrative has symbolically articulated Melbourne’s Black African1
communities with the problems of criminal violence, public disorder and social conflict
regardless of whether as victims or perpetrators, with news media the primary site of this
articulation (Windle, 2008; Majavu, 2020). Angry white men killed Liep Gony in a flurry of
racist hatred — and yet, the murder become the foundation stone of a persistent discourse of
Black African criminality.
This incident was the first iteration of the story I trace in this chapter — a story about
how the threat of white vigilantism has been weaponised, through media storytelling, to
justify the criminalisation of Black African communities in Australia. While white male
vigilantes are rarely subject to the same regimes of representation that give symbolic form to
“criminalised” people and populations, they nonetheless recur in stories about crime and
social conflict. As the alleged criminality of racialised subjects remains firmly in the fore-
ground of the “African gang narrative”, the white male vigilante haunts the background.
What is the political utility of this haunting?

84 DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-10
 Cruel benevolence

News stories about crime and social violence are “sites of vulnerability politics”, where
different and oftentimes competing claims to different kinds of openness to harm — most
basically, the harms of crime and the harms of the criminal legal system — confront one
another in representation and “struggle for public recognition” (Higgins, 2022, p. 2114).
Here, I inquire into the kinds of work that the figure of the white male vigilante performs
within that politics. More precisely, I situate the vigilante trope within a broader cultural
rise of “white male victimhood”, which increasingly positions moves towards social justice
and equality as intolerable forms of injury for white male subjects (Banet-Weiser, 2021;
Chouliaraki, 2021; Sengul, 2022).
Most scholarship on the cultural significance of the vigilante within media storytelling
accentuates his hypermasculine invulnerability and strength, conceptualising the trope as a
site for critiques of the “weak” state and for the staging of alternative patriarchal fantasies.
However, tracing the operations of the vigilante trope in crime reporting makes it unde-
niably clear that vulnerability is in fact central to its symbolic function. Ambivalently po-
sitioned between threat and threatened, the white male vigilante animates a politics of
vulnerability that I describe as one of cruel benevolence — in which the vulnerability of
racialised subjects like Liep and Martha to vigilante violence is authenticated as real and
wrong, but for the ultimate purpose of morally animating practices of state violence against
those same subjects.

Macho men, media and the emasculated state

The vigilante is a long-established narrative trope within media representations of violence
and social conflict, both fictional and journalistic. Almost always white and male, he is a
citizen who has been moved (or “forced”) to “take matters into his own hands” in the face
of the (self-perceived) dispossession, disempowerment and/or insecurity of his community.
More specifically, vigilantism is understood as an “alternative means of controlling crime
and providing safety where the state does not” (Gross, 2016, p. 239), and so too as both an
indicator of and a response to a weakened state monopoly on the use of violence (Bjørgo and
Mares, 2019). However, as Liep Gony’s murder makes all too clear, white male vigilantism
also has roots in histories of lynching and racial punishment, the motivations for which are
usually to inspire fear and forcefully re-assert white patriarchal power rather than to sup-
plement a perceived lack of public safety (Senechal de la Roche, 1996).
As a figure that circulates in media culture, the vigilante can be best understood as a site
of expression for the fantasy lives of white masculinity, including fantasies of control,
strength, heroism and valour (see Thobani, 2010; Frame, 2021; Sotirin, 2021). Historically,
the primary arenas for the staging of these fantasies have been comic books and action films
in which the emasculation of the state — signified through rampant criminal activity,
ineffectual policing, state corruption, a porous border and intersecting anxieties about the
moral degradation of (predominantly white) women and children — is countered with
hypermasculine performances of protection and/or retribution by individual aggrieved men
(Frame, 2021, p.169).
Buttressing these performances, often, are dramatised representations of the vulnera-
bility of (predominantly, white) women to criminal violence (Frame, 2021, p.171). These
representations valourise vigilante violence while constructing a gendered backdrop of
weakness and incapacity against which the hypermasculine strength of the vigilante can
stand out. In this way, the vigilante trope connects with the long history of “white women’s

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 Kathryn Claire Higgins

tears” lending justificatory support to white men’s (fictional and factual) violence, espe-
cially against racialised communities (Phipps, 2020; Hamad, 2019), as well as the “alt-
right lore” that it is “white, militarised, authoritarian masculinity” that must hold the line
between order and chaos in modern societies (Frame, 2021, p.171; also Johnson, 2017;
Wall, 2020).
However, the white male vigilante is more than a caricature of masculine strength — the
trope signifies vulnerability and woundedness as much as its inverse. Vigilantes inhabit
liminal spaces between safety and violence, “frontier zones” where the imagined protective
and/or ordering capacities of the state have petered out into anarchy (Abrahams, 1998).
These spaces serve as staging sites of “masculine valor” but also as “[terrains that reveal] the
hollowness of their masculinity as men come face to face with the utter vulnerability of their
bodies to injury and death” (Thobani, 2010, p. 56). The white, militarised, authoritarian
masculinity that the vigilante signifies is thus, at its core, a masculinity in crisis (Solomon-
Godeau, 1995, cited in Thobani, 2010, p.57) and this sense of crisis extends to the mascu-
linist state that the trope both admonishes and reasserts (Brown, 1995). As icons of state
failure, vigilantes accentuate the flimsiness and futility of law, border regimes and the
strongman state, even as they simultaneously reinforce white supremacist patriarchy as an
ideal of social organisation (Palmer, this volume).
Vigilantes, therefore, exist in a deeply ambivalent normative relationship to state
power (Bjørgo and Mares, 2019). As self-ordained agents of safety and justice, they are
defined by the extrajudicial character of their actions — they are vigilantes precisely
because they are not police officers, who are in turn often constructed as corrupt and/or
ineffectual. However, as cultural figures, white male vigilantes propagate an imagination
of how everyday security is built and maintained that is remarkably similar to the one
that has historically bolstered the popular legitimacy of policing: that of the thin blue line.
This is an imaginary which positions policing (and, I propose, vigilantism) as an always-
almost-failure in a social world characterised by a permanent, relentless and irreducible
tilt towards violence (Wall, 2020). Historically, it has valourised police officers by placing
them, imaginatively, on the frontlines of a permanent, everyday war against social
decline. It is unsurprising, then, that the vigilante resonates culturally with the backlash
masculinities that characterise many contemporary populist and far-right movements —
movements which, in turn, often champion police officers even while denigrating other
branches of liberal state power (Thobani, 2010, p.56–58; Banet-Weiser, 2018; Bratich,
2022; Sengul, 2022).
This ambivalent positioning becomes even more pointed in non-fiction journalistic
media, wherein the vigilante usually appears in the context of reporting on social conflict
and crime. Stories about incel violence, white nationalist terrorism and citizen efforts at law
enforcement all help comprise the milieu of contemporary mediated vigilantism. While the
law offers an easy symbolic division between citizen vigilantes and police officers, my
analysis below tracks a more complicated symbolic achievement: separating the figure of
the white male vigilante from the figure of “the criminal”. Here, the vigilante trope is not
simply a fantasy representation of masculine invulnerability, nor a celebratory represen-
tation of patriarchal protection. Rather, it is the vigilante’s constructed sense of moral
ambivalence — his weak-strength, victim-villainy, right-wrongness — that underpins the
trope’s symbolic function: to re-enshrine the necessity of prerogative state power (in the
form of crime control) and so to reassert the moral legitimacy of the “protective” patri-
archal state (Brown, 1995).

86
 Cruel benevolence

Three “ordinary blokes”, two weeping women

To unpick the work of the white male vigilante trope vis-à-vis the cultural legitimacy of state
violence, I consider three examples of white men who appeared as vigilantes in Australian
news reporting on so-called “African gang crime” and its social consequences. All three are
from 2017–2019 — a period that saw the narrative revived with force in local crime journalism
as conservative politician Matthew Guy sought to propagate concerns about “law and order”
to unseat Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews in the 2018 state election (Weber et al., 2021).
First, a television news report about a self-described “ordinary bloke” named Frank, who
after a verbal confrontation with a group of teenagers (including some young Black African
men) outside his home decided to hire two armed guards — at a cost of $1,000 per day — to
“secure” his property (A Current Affair, 2019). Second, another television report is about a
man named Giulio, who undertook a “citizen’s arrest” of a young Black African man in his
neighbourhood after witnessing an incident of theft (9News, 2017). And third, a newspaper
feature about a teenager named Xavier, who together with his friends took up baseball bats
and confronted a group of Black African teenagers at a local train station the day after his
phone was stolen by an unrelated group of Black African teens (Rose and Rooney, 2019).
Presented alongside Frank’s story is that of a teenage girl named Alika. Crying, Alika tes-
tifies to her fear of being victimised by racist vigilante violence because she is Black. Like Martha
above, she is allocated space within the “African gang crime” narrative to make her vulnera-
bility emotionally intelligible to news audiences; her inclusion introduces moral ambivalence
around the vigilante by clearly positioning him as a (potential) victimiser. However, as I pro-
posed above, it is precisely this ambivalence that animates the vigilante within the cultural
justification of state violence. Here, in contrast to the political uses of “white women’s tears”
(Hamad, 2019; Phipps, 2020), Black women and girls’ tears play a crucial role in the logic of
cruel benevolence. Within vigilante narratives, they are harnessed to morally condemn the
vigilante, but only as a means of morally glorifying the coercive powers of the state. This is an
allegorical good cop/bad cop in which racialised communities, despite their publicly mediated
suffering, nonetheless find themselves at the constructed root of violence — and so, still, the
ultimate targets of “protective” practices of state surveillance, punishment and control.

Vulnerable menaces
The white male vigilante trope is framed by an ambivalent politics of vulnerability in which
he is positioned as both a victim of intolerable vulnerability to violence and a potential
agent of violence — simultaneously both a security subject and a security threat. In the first
instance, maintaining this ambivalent positioning relies on representational work that
thickens the moral distinction between vigilantism and criminal violence — principally, by
finding ways to accentuate the white male vigilante as himself a vulnerable figure. As Sotirin
(2021, p. 5) argues, the vigilante is a figure of “victim justice,” and so a constructed sense of
victimhood is fundamental to making vigilantism ethically intelligible. In Australian news
narratives, three symbolic strategies regularly recur to help fortify the vigilante/criminal
boundary: deresponsibilisation, disempowerment and a discourse of service and sacrifice.

Deresponsibilisation
First, the white male vigilante is deresponsibilised for his violence through representational
strategies that move him into a reactive positionality vis-à-vis the actions of criminalised

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subjects. Vigilantes are described as being “pushed to breaking point”, “at their wits’ end”,
“fed up”, “shaken” and “forced to take matters into their own hands”. Supporting this
positionality in Australian crime reporting is a persistently uneven allocation of historicity
between vigilantes and Black African youth. The vigilante’s actions, in other words, are
always placed in context and the vigilante himself is routinely granted space to speak about
his fears, motivations and anger — that is, to engage in justificatory discourse.
The current affairs episode about Frank provides a pointed example of this strategy. Frank
insists that it was an unacceptable threat of Black African violence that “forced” him to take
up arms against members of his community. As Frank testifies to these conditions, we see
images of broken bottles and toppled furniture, a small bruise on his girlfriend Jayde’s elbow
and CCTV footage of a verbal confrontation scored with tense, dramatic music, suggesting
escalating tension. While it might be said that Frank’s decision to hire armed guards to patrol
his home has introduced the possibility of lethal violence to his neighbourhood, Jayde asserts
the prior stakes of the conflict when she says: “they’re telling us they’re going to kill us … you
know, really, really vulgar things”. This sense of existential danger is later reinforced by the
reporter (who repeats that the pair “feared for their lives”) and the hired armed guard (who
states that people in the neighbourhood are “scared to death”).
By contrast, the actions of Black African teenagers are placed in a vacuum of meaning
and motivation. We are not told, nor are we invited to care, who they are, what they want,
or how they feel. Jayde claims that the teenagers “come in numbers and are just so angry”;
the adverb “just” strips this anger of possible connections to past events or circumstances
and the viewer is not invited to wonder why these teenagers might have been angry, or why
they might have congregated around Frank’s house in particular. Their (reported) anger is
presented as causeless, meaningless and even mindless. In this way, selective and uneven
historicisation operates as a strategy of deresponsibilisation, insisting that vigilante violence
should be morally interpreted only within the context of the (alleged) criminality of Black
African youth — and not, for example, within the longer history of racism and anti-
immigration sentiments in Australian society and culture. By denying complex historicity to
the anger of Black African youth, the report subtly positions whiteness as that which dis-
tinguishes between defence and aggression, and so between “good” and bad” expressions of
masculine power.

Disempowerment
Working in concert with deresponsibilisation is disempowerment, which routinely positions
the vigilante as “battling against the odds”. Xavier, as a child vigilante, offers a pointed
example of this strategy. Though the images accompanying Xavier’s story show him and his
friends physically encircling a group of Black African teenagers with bats in hand, the
headline reads “Robbery shakes teens”, moving Xavier and his friends into a passive,
victimised positionality. Moreover, a significant portion of the article is dedicated to
describing Xavier’s own (motivating) experience of subjugation: a robbery at the same bus
station the previous day during which “up to 20” people including two young men “of
African appearance” stole his phone and his necklace. The ambiguity around numbers here
is crucial: “twenty” is far more than the five white male youths visible in the accompanying
photograph, positioning Xavier’s stand as an act of resistance from below, rather than
dominance from above. This massification of Black African youth is also observable in
Frank’s story — the teenagers who confronted him outside his home are first described as

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numbering “twenty or thirty”, then later as “fifty or sixty”, though no more than five are
visible in the accompanying CCTV footage.
Accompanying the report on Xavier’s vigilantism, on the same page, is another: a hu-
manising, emotionally intimate interview with Xavier and his father. This report gives Xavier
a name, face, family, desires, losses, fears — all of which are denied to the young Black African
boys and men targeted by Xavier and his friends. Accompanying this report is another image:
a portrait of Xavier sitting with his father and brother standing protectively over him. This
image accentuates Xavier’s status as a child — intrinsically vulnerable and acting from a place
of disempowerment. There is moral absolution here in Xavier’s constructed sense of political
subjugation, which is subsequently authenticated through the extensive details of the crime
against him offered in the report. Xavier attests to his own trauma: “I feel shaken … I feel
scared”. His father corroborates his son’s disempowerment: “he’s turned to jelly”.

Discourses of service and sacrifice

Finally, the figure of the white male vigilante is symbolically separated from the figure of
“the criminal” through an implicit discourse of service and sacrifice animated by political
whiteness (HoSang, 2010; Phipps, 2020). In a similar way to the “thin blue line” imaginary
of policing, the vigilante is positioned as acting in response not only to his own vulnerability
but also to those around him: “his” community, which always excludes young Black
African boys and men. The story of Giulio and his “citizen’s arrest” provides an illustrative
example. Here, the reporter weaves a second-person, present-tense narrative to extend an
explicit imaginative invitation to the viewer and to imbue Giulio’s perception of his own
community as “unsafe” and “unprotected” with a sense of emotional authenticity:

Imagine you’re walking down this laneway. It’s broad daylight, and you’re in a nice area.
There’s no need to be concerned, right? Wrong. Suddenly, you’re attacked. Lightning
fast. Not by one person, not by two people, but a gang of thugs. It’s you against them, and
you don’t stand a chance. Before you know it, you’ve lost your wallet, you’ve lost your
keys, and you’ve lost your phone, and you’ve been beaten up, and they’re gone. It’s
terrifying. The reality is now, though, it doesn’t matter if the sun’s out, it doesn’t matter
what suburb you’re in. This could literally happen anywhere, at any time.
(9News, 2017)

This monologue is delivered in the present tense as the reporter walks down the laneway in
question. The proliferating use of the second-person pronoun “you” (“you’re walking …”
“You’re alone …” “You don’t stand a chance …”) performs two imaginative tasks simulta-
neously. First, it lends Giulio’s actions a sense of tacit moral approval by evoking the very sense
of fear and (white) vulnerability that is narratively positioned as the precipitating “cause” of
Giulio’s actions. Second and more obviously, it explicitly invites the viewer to identify with the
“victim”, to imagine that this victim could be them. In this way, the vigilante is positioned as
acting in response to communalised vulnerability rather than individual victimisation — with
whiteness implicitly positioned as that which gives “the community” (and so, the claim to
vulnerability) symbolic coherence through differentiation from the racialised “criminal” actor.
***
The net achievement of these three strategies is to morally distinguish the vigilante from
the “criminal” by constructing vigilantism as responding to conditions of intolerable

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vulnerability rather than simply creating or exacerbating those conditions for Black African
subjects. Together, they help constitute a regime of representation in which the white male
vigilante is not intolerant, but pushed to the breaking point of his tolerance; not a criminal,
but an otherwise law-abiding citizen who has been forced by circumstance to the edges of
the law; not powerful, but painfully disempowered, abandoned by the state and forced to
“go it alone” against the growing threat of criminal violence. In this way, the white male
vigilante is tacitly decriminalised.

Menacing vulnerabilities
While the white male vigilante evades criminalisation through his positioning as dis-
empowered, protective and with limited responsibility for his actions, he nonetheless
remains subject to many of the same representational strategies that routinely construct
“criminals” as figures of threat. While he is rarely shown enacting violence, his capacity for
violence is routinely emphasised — and so, just as we are invited to feel for the vigilante, we
are also invited to fear him.
Regarding Frank’s decision to hire armed guards to patrol his property, the report
emphasises how Frank’s actions have created (or, at the very least, exacerbated) a climate of
danger in his neighbourhood: “Forget baseball bats. These weapons can kill”. The reference
to baseball bats is significant, as many reports (as in Xavier’s story above) foreground the
baseball bat as an icon of vigilantism: a symbol of amateur, under-resourced efforts of
citizen self-defence. While police officers carry firearms in Australia, citizen ownership
of handguns is rare. Here, the handgun becomes one of the protagonists of the story — out
of place in the Melbourne suburbs, inanimate yet filled with lethal potential. The journalist
reporting the story warns that the guard patrolling Frank’s home “will shoot if he needs to”,
but does not specify what might constitute such a need.
In this way, the vulnerability of the white male vigilante becomes, itself, menacing. The
trope animates an imagination of intensifying insecurity within the community: a vision of
violence begetting violence, with an escalating pattern extending into an uncertain future.
And, perhaps counterintuitively, it is the suffering of Black African women and girls that is
routinely called upon within these narratives to imbue this menacing quality with a sense of
emotional authenticity and moral urgency. Martha weeps as she recalls her son’s murder
and we are invited to feel for her — but her pain, we must remember, is only granted this
public visibility in the context of a current affairs investigation into “African gang crime”
(Four Corners, 2018). Similarly, when Alika cries, it is in the context of a story about Frank
being “forced” to threaten members of the Black African community with lethal violence in
order to “protect” his home. She tells the reporter:

I feel scared to leave the house especially during at nighttime because people are going
to start taking, like, things into their own hands … If it gets worse, I’m scared that …
anybody in the Sudanese community might eventually get killed just for looking the
way they are.
(A Current Affair, 2019)

The ambiguity of Alika’s use of the word “it” is of critical narrative significance: “it” may be
white men’s propensity for violent retribution, or “it” may be the alleged phenomenon of
“African gang crime” which the report has positioned as the cause of Frank’s actions. Either

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way, Alika’s testimony conjures an imaginary of everyday insecurity that is strikingly like
that of the thin blue line: one in which violence is intrinsic to masculinity, with spectacles of
women’s distress marking the boundary between its “good” and “bad” manifestations. As
one crime journalist interviewed as part of the report about Giulio’s “citizen’s arrest” warns:

We’re going to see more and more people tempted to take the law into their own hands.
This is an example of that. This guy’s a brave guy, he’s a good guy. He’s done what he
perceived to be the right thing. But of course, it could end in tears.

This brief cautionary comment captures the key operations of the white male vigilante as a
narrative trope. There is the promise of escalation and intensification in the repetitive
descriptor “more and more”; there is the redistribution of agency and subject/object reversal
in the description of the vigilante as “tempted”; there is a sense of inevitability in the use of
the phrase “of course”; there is a deferral of moral condemnation away from Giulio and
towards an imagined future vigilante through the use of the qualifier “this”, which positions
Giulio as an exception in order to position vigilantism as individually righteous and heroic
yet collectively dangerous and threatening. The euphemistic phrase “end in tears” gestures
to the stakes of vigilantism as a source of insecurity but leaves these stakes ambiguous.
Whose potential tears are we invited to fear or lament? What kind of injury or openness to
injury does the word “tears” stand for metaphorically? Similar silences can be observed in
the phrase “take matters into their own hands”. What kind of “matter” is being acted upon?
Whose hands, if not those of the vigilante, is this matter supposed to be in?

Cruel benevolence
Lauren Berlant (2011) coined the phrase “cruel optimism” to capture the kind of relation in
which an object of one’s desire actively subverts or scuppers the needs, values and moti-
vations which fuelled that desire in the first place. Following Berlant’s interpretation and
application of the concept of cruelty, we can conceptualise the kind of justificatory logic
that the white male vigilante trope activates as one of cruel benevolence: a relation within a
symbolic politics of vulnerability in which one type of vulnerability — in this case, Black
African women and girls’ vulnerability to racist vigilante violence — is appropriated as the
justificatory basis for practices which will ultimately exacerbate or entrench the vulnera-
bility of those same subjects.
In the case of the white male vigilante trope, racialised vulnerabilities are authenticated
only so that they may be repurposed to justify “protective” state interventions. This reflects,
in Berlant’s terms, an optimistic attachment to the benevolence of law enforcement and the
peacebuilding capacities of the strongman state. The subjects of this state protection,
however, are not Black African communities but, ultimately, white citizens — sometimes,
even vigilantes themselves. Frank’s testimony provides a pointed illustration:

“But, ah, but those guards are there more for their protection, more than mine, because
you know … if I do something stupid, what happens to me?” [Journalist: You go to jail]
“That’s right, and I don’t want that.”

This passing comment from Frank distils the logic of cruel benevolence. In the first instance,
Frank casts Black African youth into a position of vulnerability and himself as a threatening

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force. However, the possibility of “something stupid” happening is, in the final instance,
positioned as a threat to Frank: “… what happens to me?” he asks. The question of what
happens to the people he might (it is implied) attack is seemingly inconsequential; vigilantism
is a moral problem only insomuch as it exacerbates the vulnerability of the white citizen, in
this case to the punitive mechanisms of the criminal legal system. Frank’s excess is recast as
restraint and a zero-sum vision of public safety is enforced: Frank is not a “real” criminal, but
he will nonetheless act and be treated as one if the “real” criminals — Black African boys and
men — are not sought, stopped and punished.
Cruel benevolence is cruel, then, in at least two key senses. First, because it takes up the
vulnerability of racialised subjects as an object of moral concern, only to then refract this
concern through the suffering of white citizens. The spectacle of racist vigilante violence is
positioned as something to fear, but not on the basis of concern for the lives of Black
African subjects. Instead, the trope positions racist vigilantism (and Black African suf-
fering) as morally problematic primarily because of a) its potential to incriminate, in the
most literal sense, individual white boys and men; or b) its net contribution to a generalised
climate of social disorder and disharmony in Melbourne’s suburbs, in which white people
are positioned as the primary victims.
It is cruel in a second sense because it symbolically fortifies the moral case for the same state
practices that would intensify the vulnerabilities and limit the freedoms of Australia’s Black
African diaspora in the name of benevolent protection. The “wrongness” of vigilante violence
is routinely constructed in ways that forcefully recentre policing and the criminal legal system
as the “right” way to do things. Precariously teetering between hero and menace, the white
male vigilante trope reproduces the mythology that it is white patriarchal power that must
ultimately hold the line between a precariously “civilised” present and an intolerably violent
future, but capitalises on moral ambivalence to reassert the state as the correct site for its
exercise. Because vigilante violence is positioned as a reaction to the “real” threat of African
gang violence, coercive state intervention against the latter is positioned as essential and
effective action on the former. The result is that the various crime control practices invoked
through “African gang crime” reporting — harsher sentences, zero-tolerance policies, pre-
emptive policing — are imaginatively recast as forms of benevolent restraint. Even, as care.

Conclusion
Cruel benevolence is the logic — upholding the public morality of state violence — that
insists that you must, for your own good, be harmed. Writing about the rise of vigilante
masculinities in post-9/11 North America, Thobani (2010) describes how “saving Muslim
women” became a fig leaf for the racism and sexism inherent to the so-called War on Terror
(also Abu-Lughod, 2015). “White American masculinity”, she writes, “redefined itself in the
changed global order: the vigilante form was fed by fantasies of Islam as violent, and hence
requiring a greater violence to be vanished” (Thobani, 2010, p. 65). In much the same way,
Australian news media extend compassion and concern to Black African women and girls
not to take seriously the intersecting dangers of white supremacy and patriarchy in con-
temporary Australia, but to position them as victims of police failure — and so, to co-opt
their suffering for the moral justification of more, tougher, “better” policing.
In news storytelling, cruel benevolence is reproduced by staging spectacles of racialised
suffering alongside morally ambivalent accounts of white men’s violence, in order to
symbolically reposition policing, incarceration and punitive deportation as practices with

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protective, even anti-racist, potential. Of course, visibilising white men’s violence through
the news is an urgent and important task. Stories about white vigilantism and the threats it
poses to racialised populations should and must be told. However, when such stories are
framed by an optimistic attachment to white patriarchal protection, it is equally important
to remain “vigilant” to the often-unintuitive forms of political work they can perform. News
stories about white male vigilantes must a) responsibilise them for their violence; b) locate
them narratively within the context of historical white supremacy; and c) resist their dis-
courses of service and sacrifice to instead position them explicitly as agents of their own
political self-interest.

Note
1 Following Majavu (2020), the descriptor “Black African” here refers not to a specific community nor
to an articulation national identity, citizenship, belonging, and/or ancestry (as in the descriptors
“Sudanese Australian” or “African Australian”) but rather to a specific kind of racialization that
constructs its subjects as both Black and of African descent (see also Higgins, 2022, p. 2128).

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 8
EXPLORING US NEWS MEDIA
PORTRAYALS OF GIRLS’
VIOLENCE IN THE 1980S
AND 1990S
The emergence of a moral panic
Tia S. Andersen, Jennifer Silcox, and Deena A. Isom

Since the 1980s, feminist scholars have highlighted the news media’s sensationalist interest
in girls’ violence (Andersen et al., 2018; Andersen et al., 2021; Chesney-Lind and Pasko,
2018). Despite news media reports indicating girls’ violence is on the rise, research across
North America has shown that girls engage in considerably less violence than boys
(Chesney-Lind and Pasko, 2018; Silcox, 2019), and girls’ increasing proportion of official
arrest rates are likely due to more stringent policing of girls’ behaviours, especially the
behaviours of girls of colour (Stevens et al., 2011). Empirical examinations of news media
coverage of girls’ violence have suggested sensationalistic representations are reflective of a
moral panic (e.g., Andersen et al., 2021; McQueeney and Girgenti-Malone, 2018). Stanley
Cohen (1972) first used the term “moral panic” to describe the magnified media attention
given to the “mods” and “rockers”, a youth subculture in Britain, in the 1960s. Moral
panics are said to exist when the level of concern for a social event or social problem exceeds
what is objectively reasonable given empirical data (Cohen, 1972). With the increased
attention, the magnitude of the “condition, episode, person or group” becomes amplified
and described in opposition to traditional values (ibid, p.9). Girls’ use of crime and violence
has been portrayed in news media as a new and especially dangerous trend capable of
disrupting families, schools and society at large (McQueeney and Girgenti-Malone, 2018).
Folk devils, which refer to groups portrayed as direct threats to social norms, are typical
of moral panics because they help to identify the enemy and source of the threat using
deviant stereotypes in language and imagery (Cohen, 1972; Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 2009;
see also Gill, and Nilsson, this volume). Troubled youth, especially youth of colour, have
been popular folk devils to identify the threat of social change (Silcox, 2022). In the case of
girls’ violence, the “bad girl” folk devil has been constructed to demonstrate the societal
dangers when girls step outside of expected gender roles (Barron and Lacombe, 2005). The
new violent girl is portrayed as dangerous because she is no longer beholden to societal rules
of proper feminine behaviour. The violent girl folk devil has been characterised as a girl,
devoid of traditional feminine virtue, that uses violence and aggression to get what she

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-11 95
 Tia S. Andersen, Jennifer Silcox, and Deena A. Isom

wants. Not only does she defy her gender, but she also actively embodies traits typically
associated with masculinity (Chesney-Lind, 2006). Chesney-Lind and colleagues (2018) have
highlighted the ways in which journalists writing about girls’ violence associate their vio-
lence with the loosening of traditional feminine gender norms and societal fears about
women’s and girls’ increased freedoms.
Although most moral panics are volatile and dissipate as quickly as they appear, moral
panics involving women’s and girls’ violence have become institutionalised and persisted
through many decades (Silcox, 2023). According to Goode and Ben-Yehuda (2009), moral
panics become “routinised or institutionalised” when they have seemingly run their course
yet reappear every so often in a similar form. Each iteration of the violent girl folk devil has
embodied slightly different characteristics; however, the core of the portrayal remains the
same: girls’ use of violence threatens essentialist gender norms. Expanding upon Faludi
(2006), Chesney-Lind (2006) highlights the existence of a feminist backlash in American
news media whereby violent women and girls, especially women and girls of colour, are
represented as folk devils that threaten a nostalgic past where marginalised populations
knew their place in the social hierarchy. Thus, the institutionalisation of the violent girl
moral panic is indicative of a backlash against changing gender norms in media.

The current study

Although there has been much discussion surrounding the media’s constructions of violent
girls, there is a dearth of systematic empirical research on the topic. To date, only two
known studies have empirically examined national coverage of girls’ violence, both of which
focused exclusively on the coded language used to describe violent girls in the US and
Canadian print media (Andersen et al., 2018; Andersen et al., 2021). Although feminist
criminologists have provided compelling anecdotal evidence of the media hype surrounding
girls’ violence (Chesney-Lind and Pasko, 2004), no known study has empirically investi-
gated the emergence of the moral panic of girls’ violence in the 1980s and 1990s. We aim to
fill this gap.

Methodology
News coverage selection
To examine the emergence of the moral panic of girls’ violence in the US print media, we
retrieved print media articles published between January 1980 and December 1999 in the
following top seven circulating daily newspapers and the top two circulating weekly news
magazines (Cison Research, 2019; Mitchell and Rosenstiel, 2012): USA Today, The Wall
Street Journal, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, Chicago Tribune,
The Washington Post, Time and Newsweek. We chose a purposive sample of news outlets
with large circulation to reflect the potentially significant impact of the stories on the
opinions of the American news-consuming public. Articles were accessed through Lexis-
Nexis Academic, Factiva, ProQuest, and newspaper/magazine online archives using the
search terms “girl(s)” with either “violent”, “arrest”, “gang”, “attack”, “aggression” or
“crime”. We included only the articles that mentioned individuals or groups of girls in the
context of their participation in violent offending and/or gang membership and excluded
articles that focused exclusively on girls’ relational violence. We also excluded book and

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movie reviews from the analysis. A total of 97 articles met the inclusion criteria — 96
articles from daily newspapers and one article from a weekly news magazine.

Analysis
Article transcriptions were entered into NVivo, a qualitative data analysis computer soft-
ware program. We first created a file classification database containing each article’s title,
publication date, publication outlet, word count and title. Next, we collaboratively devel-
oped a coding frame and analysis protocol. The first author then independently read all the
article transcripts and used the constant comparative method to identify initial categories of
descriptions of girls’ violence (Harding, 2018). These initial categories were then reviewed
and grouped into salient conceptual themes, which were reviewed to identify patterns and
connections in the data. Themes that did not apply to 15% or more of the analytical sample
were not considered in the findings. Finally, because feminist criminologists (e.g., Andersen
et al., 2021; Chesney-Lind and Pasko, 2018; Andersen et al., 2018) have called attention to
racialised patterns in the news media’s constructions of violent girls, we also coded the race,
ethnicity and social class of girls when it was either explicitly stated or could be inferred
from coded language.
We engaged in several standard methods for establishing validity and credibility in
qualitative research. We maintained an audit trail to document our inquiry and decision-
making processes (Creswell and Miller, 2000; Lincoln and Guba, 1985). Next, we employed
investigator triangulation by using a collaborative research team, which provided different
perspectives (Lincoln and Guba, 1985; Denzin, 1978; Miles et al., 2014). Finally, rigour was
supported during coding and analysis by looking for and explaining negative evidence and
the meaning of outliers (Miles et al., 2014) and connecting the study’s findings to theory and
prior research (Patton, 2014).

Findings
Table 8.1 presents descriptive information for all newspaper and magazine articles included in
the analysis. Of the 97 articles identified related to girls’ physical violence, the majority were
news/feature articles obtained from daily newspapers. A small number of articles were cate-
gorised as opinion articles (e.g., editorials, op-ed articles, opinion columns or letters to the
editor). The word count of articles ranged from one hundred words to more than 4,300 words,

Table 8.1 Description of the analytical sample of print news media articles
(1980–1999) (n = 97)
n (%)
Publication Type
Daily newspaper articles 96 (99.0%)
Weekly news magazine articles 1 (1.0%)
Article Type
News 94 (96.9%)
Opinion 3 (3.1%)
Word Count (range) 100–4365
Word Count (average) 785.6

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 Tia S. Andersen, Jennifer Silcox, and Deena A. Isom

Table 8.2 Print media coverage of girls’ violence over time (1980–1999) (n = 97)

n (%) Total word count

Early 1980s (1980 – 1983) 2 (2.1%) 2,820
Mid 1980s (1984 – 1986) 7 (7.2%) 5,786
Late 1980s (1987 – 1989) 9 (9.3%) 8,633
Early 1990s (1990 – 1993) 33 (34.0%) 27,440
Mid 1990s (1994 – 1996) 19 (19.6%) 18,615
Late 1990s (1997 – 1999) 27 (27.8%) 12,212

with an average of nearly 800 words. Table 8.2 presents the number of articles published on
girls’ violence in the US print media per year and the respective total word counts. Though we
identified two articles published on girls’ violence in the early 1980s, we found a notable
increase in news media coverage of girls’ violence beginning in the mid-1980s and peaking in
the early 1990s.
Two themes emerged in our review of print media coverage of girls’ violence in the 1980s
and 1990s, each capturing a different dimension of the violent girl moral panic: 1) girls in
gangs and 2) girls’ gratuitous use of violence. For convenience, we present these themes as
though they are separate. However, in practice, these themes sometimes overlapped in
individual articles and are not mutually exclusive.

The panic surrounding the discovery of girls in gangs

The most prevalent theme that emerged from our analysis was the panic surrounding girls’
gang membership, which almost exclusively focused on girls of colour living in margin-
alised, low-income communities. Though we identified a small number of articles men-
tioning girls’ gang violence published in the 1980s, the first detailed examination of girls’
gang violence in our sample was the 1990 New York Times article, “Life in Girls’ Gang:
Colors and Bloody Noses” (Mydans, 1990). By the mid-1990s, such articles proliferated in
the print media. Such articles often described particularly egregious incidents of girls’ gang-
related violence and were accompanied by a review of girls’ arrest rates showing an
apparent increase in girls’ assaultive behaviour. These constructions often framed girls’
violence as increasing to epidemic levels and proclaimed that girls’ gang violence was more
serious than boys’ gang violence. The following examples are illustrative of the general tone
of these constructions:

There are more girls in gangs, more girls in the drug trade, more girls carrying guns
and knives, more girls in trouble. The rise in crime by girls 17 years old or younger,
experts say, results from less supervision, the breakup of families and an increase in
gang behavior.
(Lee, 1991)

Female gangs are every bit as ruthless as the boys. They’re shooting, stabbing, and
they’re into drug sales and stickups.
(Leslie, 1993)

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Such articles were often accompanied by quotes from police officers, social workers, or
psychiatrists, such as the passage from a Chicago Tribune article, which quoted a police
officer as saying, girl gang members in Chicago neighbourhoods were “the worst we have
run into. The girl gangs are more vicious at times than the guys” (Smith, 1986). As ex-
emplified by these excerpts, girls were portrayed as not only embracing masculine norms but
doing so with a violent gusto beyond what was typical of boys.
Consistent with observations by Chesney-Lind and Pasko (2018), many media accounts of
girls’ gang membership in the early 1990s masculinised girls and suggested girls joined gangs
to imitate boys. For instance, a Chicago Tribune article described a 17-year-old Latina gang
member as, “being one of the bad boys” (Wilson, 1993). Also, consider the following excerpt
from the Newsweek article, “Girls Will Be Girls”, which was accompanied by a photograph of
a Black girl wearing a bandana around her face pointing a gun and captioned with, “some
girls now carry guns. Others hide razor blades in their mouths” (Leslie, 1993). The article
referred to “the plague of teen violence” as an “equal opportunity scourge” and described,

Girls [are] breaking into the traditionally male world of gangs … The Kings, one of San
Antonio’s largest gangs, recently started accepting young women. Where male gang
members used to refer to the girls as ‘hos and bitches’, … they’re a little more reluctant
now as those female gang members start to equal them in fights and drive-by-shootings. …
Crime by girls is on the rise, or so various jurisdictions report. In Massachusetts, for
instance, 15 percent of the crimes that girls were convicted of committing in 1987 were
violent offenses. By 1991, that number had soared to 38 percent.
(Leslie, 1993)

Similarly, in the New York Times article “For Gold Earrings and Protection, More Girls
Take the Road to Violence”, girls were described as increasingly joining “loosely organised
gangs, imitations of the ones they see boys forming” and “trying to prove they are just as
tough as the boys” (Lee, 1991). Interestingly, despite the repeated references to boys’ vio-
lence as a point of comparison, discussion of those “traditionally male” worlds was largely
absent. This heightened the sense of gendered threat: girls’ violence was discursively linked
with excess (more, more, more) with no sense as to whether this reflected broader increases
in, or changes to the patterns of, crime reporting.
In contrast, other constructions of girls’ gang membership often juxtaposed their vio-
lence against feminine stereotypes, as evidenced by a preoccupation with girls’ appearances,
fashion choices, jewellery and other feminine accoutrements. The following example from
the New York Times provides an illustration:

[Her] road to crime has been paved with huge gold earrings and name-brand clothes …
When these girl gangs are violent, the most common victims are other girls or young
women. Fifteen-year-old [name redacted] was stabbed to death in Manhattan as she
rode the subway home from school on Sept. 20 after refusing to give her gold hoop
earrings to a pack of girls who surrounded her.
(Lee, 1991)

Media portrayals of Latina girls’ gang membership, in particular, often reinforced gender
stereotypes of femininity by emphasising girls’ appearance. Consider the following description
of a Latina gang initiation ceremony from the New York Times:

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 Tia S. Andersen, Jennifer Silcox, and Deena A. Isom

It was Shadow’s coming out party, her initiation into the Tiny Diablas girls’ gang in
the Watts district, and she was dressed in the height of gang fashion: narrow cor-
duroy pants, a sweatshirt in the gang color purple, extravagantly teased hair and
exaggerated black-red makeup … Small compacts were opened. A can of hair spray
was passed around. Rings were redistributed to their owners. … The court-in, which
mimics the similar but often more violent initiation ceremony of male gangs, is an
expected event in the childhood of many girls in the inner city … Fashion was high
tonight: baggy boys’ trousers sagging over corduroy bedroom slippers, boys’ black
polo shirts, large hoops in ears and bunches of keys and trinkets hanging from
waists. Lively chatter and clouds of Aqua Net hairspray filled the room as the girls
applied dark lipstick, dark blush, black eyeliner and dark eyeshadow surrounded by
white eyeshadow.
(Mydans, 1990)

The article went on to juxtapose the girls’ masculine apparel with their exaggeratedly
feminine hair, makeup and jewellery while describing female gang members as offering
“support in highly stereotyped female roles for the young men they call their homeboys”
(Mydans, 1990). The messaging in these articles is clear: while girl gang members might
adorn themselves in typical masculine gang attire and use violence when it suits them, girls
ultimately maintain superficial feminine interests in fashion, gossip, and romantic re-
lationships. In this type of reporting, girls are simultaneously criticised for adopting mas-
culine norms and belittled for adhering to stereotypical feminine norms.

The panic surrounding the discovery of girls’ gratuitous violence

The second major category that emerged from the analysis was the panic surrounding the
discovery of girls’ gratuitous violence: a brutality that was characterised as unpredictable and
excessive. Consistent with previous research (Chesney-Lind and Pasko, 2018; Chesney-Lind
and Pasko, 2004; Silcox, 2023; Andersen et al., 2018), we found evidence of ill-contextualised
sensational cases of girls’ violence being used as evidence of a widespread epidemic, thereby
perpetuating the developing moral panic of girls’ violence. One article, for instance, listed
several shocking incidents of violence involving young children, including “two 12-year-old
[girls] who shot and killed a man ‘for no reason’”(Landers, 1995). Similarly,

A 25-year-old woman died tonight after a severe beating by two teen-age girls who, the
police said, assaulted her when she complained that their car was blocking the street.
The authorities … said it was unusual for girls to commit so brutal a crime, although
the county police said violence by teen-age girls and young women was on the rise
throughout the area. Paul Ebert, the Commonwealth Attorney for Prince William
County, said in an interview that the girls had administered ‘an unusually brutal
beating with little justification’.
(Janofsky, 1999)

Such rhetoric reinforces the overarching moral panic that all girls were becoming un-
predictably violent. Girls’ violence was framed as truly frightening, inexplicable and easily
provoked by routine encounters. Through their lack of contextualisation, these stories
framed isolated incidents of violence as exemplars of an epidemic of girls’ violence.

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Such media articles often framed the epidemic of girls’ violence as their uncontrollable
rage. These narratives described girls as angry, dangerous, out of control and unpredictable.
The following examples are typical and illustrate the general tone of these depictions:

What is it that burns inside, that makes young girls so angry they pull out a knife or a
gun? What is it that turns sugar and spice and everything nice into vengeance, violence
and vice? Criminal violence used to be a guy thing. Now girls are joining the ranks of
juvenile offenders in force.
(Trafford, 1997)

What was once considered the domain of boys--the inability to express rage in a safe
way--is now, slowly but surely, becoming part of the lives of girls too … . Angry girls
who can’t vent anger in safe ways grow up to be angry women who commit crimes.
Consider the case of two 9th graders at Edison Senior High in Miami. The girls had
had a violent argument at school. It escalated when one shot the other in front of
classmates and a busload of horrified elementary school students. … Witnesses say
[she] waited for [her] and then shot her at close range. Kicking her and kicking her.
Think about it: kicking her when she was down. I don’t remember any fights like that
in high school. Certainly not among girls. … [N]ow girls are as prone to do battle as
their brothers. Violence is an equal opportunity recruiter.
(Veciana-Suarez, 1997)

It’s not just boys … some girls carry small guns in their purses and razor blades in their
mouths, in case they need to protect themselves – or find a victim ripe for the taking.
The plague of teen violence is an equal-opportunity scourge … ‘I’ve been amazed at
the brutality of the beatings of girls by other girls,’ says Dr. Naftali Berrill, director of
the New York Forensic Mental Health Group. The violence is a vicious, antisocial
pack mentality aimed at a target who is incapable of fighting back, says Berrill. The
pack smells weakness, and the situation turns into a free-for-all where no individual
person feels responsible. … These young girls are very angry and very hostile.
(Leslie, 1993)

Similarly, in describing the growing proportion of juvenile court caseloads that involved
girls, one Chicago Tribune article quoted a Florida International University criminal justice
professor as saying, “it shows how angry these children are” (Veciana-Suarez, 1997). Girls’
anger was depicted as a ticking time bomb that erupts in gratuitous violence that is largely
inexplicable and without major provocation.
When girls’ behaviour was contextualised, it was often described as resulting from the
erosion of traditional femininity. For instance, an article published in The New York Times
described girls’ violence as stemming from their independence: “girls, in seeking the same
freedoms as boys and getting them, are also emulating some of the most negative aspects of
male rebellion” (Lee, 1991). In addition, several articles framed girls’ violence as stemming
from changing gender roles, including the socialisation of girls to be aggressive and more
mothers entering the workforce. Consider the following example from USA Today:

Girls are increasingly willing to use physical aggression to get what they want, experts
say. ‘Girls feel more free to be aggressive with other girls, and in some cases, even with

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 Tia S. Andersen, Jennifer Silcox, and Deena A. Isom

smaller boys,’ … [G]irls ages 12–16 are increasingly apt to use their fists ‘to settle
disputes or get attention. We’re seeing much more expressed aggression on the part of
females … We are trying to teach girls to ‘be more assertive.’ … Some girls are ‘taking
this one step further - to aggression.’ In addition ‘there is a deterioration in the support
systems girls used to have,’ she says. There are fewer two-parent families, and more
moms away working.
(Peterson, 1993)

Thus, in addition to reinforcing the overarching moral panic of girls’ growing violence, these
stories framed isolated incidents of girls’ violence as exemplars of problems with contempo-
rary girlhood and motherhood, further reinforcing the backlash against gender equity.

Discussion
Moral panics often arise when social norms are threatened; to identify the threat, the media
will often rely on the use of sensationalistic folk devils to easily demarcate the lines between
“us” versus “them”. In moral panics, concern and consensus are often established using ill-
contextualised statistics or anecdotal observations interpreted by “expert” voices that
reinforce the provided narrative in lieu of intricate social context. In the 1980s and 1990s
print media, girls’ increasing arrest rates were often described as indicative of a larger social
problem with girls’ physical violence by interviewed experts, such as child psychiatrists, law
enforcement officials and academicians. Often, just as it feels like the social problem could
not become more dire, the problem fades from public consciousness as quickly as it
emerged. However, girls’ non-traditional behaviours, including crime and violence, have
generated an institutionalised moral panic. Rather than dissipating quickly, the heightened
concern about girls’ violence and the associated folk devils, have re-emerged consistently
over the years in slightly different configurations. We argue that the institutionalised moral
panic is reflective of a broader feminist backlash. During times of political advancement,
Chesney-Lind (2006) argues that progressive and social change is met with conservative
backlash whereby women and girls, especially women and girls of colour, are presented as
threats to the social order. The enduring nature of the moral panic surrounding girls’ non-
traditional behaviours is part of a larger backlash surrounding women’s rights movement
and provides justification for additional oversight, control, oppression and marginalisation
of girls.
Little is known – empirically speaking – about the media’s role in guiding the hysteria of
girls’ violence. This chapter fills that gap by examining the origins of the moral panic about
girls’ violence in the US media. We highlight a systemic construction of girls’ violence that
works to reinforce gendered and racialised expectations for girls’ behaviour, thus providing
a firmer foundation for future investigations into media representations of girls’ aggression
and violence. Two themes emerged from our inductive content analysis of articles published
in top circulating print media outlets in the 1980s and 1990s, the first being concern for gang
girls. Discussions of girls’ gang membership almost exclusively focused on girls of colour
living in marginalised, low-income communities and either masculinised girls in gangs or
juxtaposed their violence against stereotypes of girlhood and femininity. The second theme
was the panic surrounding the discovery of girls’ gratuitous violence. These stories framed
isolated incidents of sensational cases as exemplars of an epidemic of girls’ violence and
reinforced the overarching moral panic that girls were suddenly becoming violent. These

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narratives often framed girls as angry and out of control and blamed girls’ violence on the
erosion of traditional gender norms, contemporary girlhood and motherhood. Portrayals
consistently described girls as embracing masculine norms and described girls’ violence as a
product of weakening gender roles and gender equality. Girls in the 1980s and 1990s were
also the first generation to reap the benefits of, as well as experience the backlash against,
second-wave feminism, especially for women and girls breaking orthodox norms. Thus, this
distinct cultural moment laid the foundation for the violent girl moral panic.
While among the first to empirically examine the media’s construction of violent girls, this
study still has several limitations. First, our sample was limited to print media articles found in
top-circulating newspapers and weekly news magazines. While our sample reflected media
constructions of girls’ violence in highly visible print media outlets, we presume that different
themes would have emerged from the analysis of other media outlets. For example, online
media or tabloid journalism may produce a more sensationalised construction of girls’ vio-
lence given the ubiquity of clickbait content used by online content publishers to direct traffic
to their website and generate revenue. Second, because research suggests that youth of colour
are less often seen as childlike than their White counterparts, our search terms (“girl” rather
than “woman”) may overrepresent media coverage of violence committed by White girls (e.g.,
Goff et al., 2014). Finally, although racialised, classed and gendered media stereotypes may
partially explain policy and practice changes that resulted in getting “harsher on girls”
(Stevens et al., 2011), identifying a causal relationship is beyond the scope of this study. Future
studies should also consider changes over time in media bombast with an emphasis on
the specific cultural and historical contexts to assess if or how the framing established by the
violent girl moral panic has persisted, shifted, or evolved.
Through content analysis, we empirically examined 20 years of news coverage of girls’
violence to examine the media constructions of girls’ violence. By using a purposive national
sample of newspapers and news magazines with the highest circulation and including all
cases featuring girls’ violence, we shed light on the emergence of the moral panic of girls’
violence in the US media. We highlight a systemic construction of girls’ violence that works
to reinforce gendered and racialised ideals, thus providing a firmer foundation for future
investigations into media representations of girls’ aggression and violence.

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 9
CHILD SEXUAL EXPLOITATION
AND SCAPEGOATING
MINORITY COMMUNITIES
Aisha K. Gill

Introduction
Over the last decade, the UK has been beset by a moral panic concerning South Asian men
grooming white girls for sexual exploitation (Gill and Harrison, 2015). This moral panic
emerged from a number of well-publicised sexual exploitation cases, the most infamous of
which took place in Rochdale, Greater Manchester and in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. In
the Rochdale case, a group of nine men — eight of Pakistani origin or descent — preyed on
underage white girls for sex before trafficking them for prostitution. The men involved were
convicted of rape and conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with children, trafficking for
sexual exploitation, sexual activity with a girl under 16, aiding and abetting rape, and sexual
assault.
Although sexual exploitation and grooming cases involving ethnically diverse perpetra-
tors and survivors have been identified all over the UK, media attention has tended to
overemphasise those in which Asian men have sexually exploited white girls in deindus-
trialised and socioeconomically deprived parts of northern England. While the true picture
is significantly more complex than the media reporting suggests, what seems consistent in
these cases is that young people — regardless of ethnicity — in working-class communities
devoid of investment in key public services have found themselves vulnerable to sexual
exploitation. This is due to a combination of school exclusions, ill-equipped safeguarding
services and consequent exposure to the night-time economy, which, in some areas, dis-
proportionately employs Asian men (Novara Media, 2019).
However, the media consistently oversimplifies the narrative by highlighting that most of
the perpetrators in well-publicised cases were Muslim men of Pakistani origin who preyed
on white girls, thus linking public perception of sexual exploitation to race and culture
(Sian, Law and Sayyid, 2012). Using an analysis of news coverage over a six-year period
from 2012
2018, this chapter examines media portrayal of South Asian men — particularly
Pakistani men — as predators who groom and sexually exploit white female children in the
UK. It reveals how such portrayals simultaneously construct these men as “folk devils” and
marginalise the violence and abuse experienced by Black and Asian women and girls from
the same communities.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-12 105

 Aisha K. Gill

Grooming and sexual exploitation

The term “grooming” commonly describes “the tactics used by child sex offenders in their
efforts to sexually abuse children” (Craven, Brown and Gilchrist, 2006, p. 287). Salter
(1995) conceptualises grooming as a range of actions performed by an offender during the
initial stages of sexual abuse. Grooming strategies are intended to secure further oppor-
tunities for abuse while reducing the likelihood of the child’s disclosure, often by estab-
lishing trust with the child and/or their carer. According to McAlinden (2012, p. 11),
grooming entails (1) the use of a variety of manipulative and controlling techniques; (2) with
a vulnerable subject; (3) in a range of interpersonal and social settings; (4) in order to
establish trust or normalise sexually harmful behaviour and (5) with the overall aim of
facilitating exploitation and/or prohibiting exposure.
The academic literature identifies three types of grooming: (1) self-grooming, (2) grooming
the intended victim’s environment and significant others and (3) grooming the child (Craven,
Brown and Gilchrist, 2006). As the scope of this article is limited to the grooming and sexual
exploitation of underage girls, only the third type of grooming is discussed in detail. Child
grooming usually involves both psychological and physical measures. Perpetrators use psy-
chological grooming as a precursor to physical grooming, developing a relationship with the
child and building trust before slowly beginning to breach physical and psychological
boundaries. Psychological grooming also encourages the child not to disclose the abuse
through tactics such as isolating her/him, making her/him feel responsible for the abuse, is-
suing bribes and/or making threats (Craven, Brown and Gilchrist, 2006). When physical
grooming occurs, the perpetrator/victim relationship is gradually sexualised.
As with the term “grooming”, the concept of child sexual exploitation (CSE) has no fixed
definition, even in a policing context. Different forces use different terms for CSE, including
“localised grooming”, “street grooming” and “internal trafficking”, and these all have slightly
variant meanings (Cockbain, 2013). The National Working Group for Sexually Exploited
Children and Young People (2008, n.p.) developed the definition most commonly used by the
government:

The sexual exploitation of children and young people under 18 involves exploitative
situations, contexts and relationships where young people (or a third person or per-
sons) receive ‘something’ (e.g. food, accommodation, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes,
affection, gifts, money) as a result of performing, and/or others performing on them,
sexual activities. Child sexual exploitation can occur through the use of technology
without the child’s immediate recognition, for example the persuasion to post sexual
images on the internet/mobile phones with no immediate payment or gain. In all cases,
those exploiting the child/young person have power over them by virtue of their age,
gender, intellect, physical strength and/or economic or other resources.

These variations in how CSE is defined have serious ramifications for victim/survivors. In
2011, British children’s charity Barnardos published Puppet on a String: The Urgent Need to
Cut Children Free from Sexual Exploitation, noting the increasing sophistication of tech-
niques for grooming children for sexual exploitation in the UK. Children were being
“brainwashed by abusers in the most pernicious way … often transported between towns
and cities to be subjected to multiple acts of abuse by groups of men” (Barnardos, 2011,
p. 2). Despite several non-governmental organisations reporting that high numbers of

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sexual exploitation victims have accessed their services over the last decade, comparatively
few prosecutions have been made. This is because a general lack of knowledge on the part of
legal/service professionals about how to identify grooming, how it affects victims, or how it
is perpetrated against children and young people in the UK complicates detecting, inves-
tigating and prosecuting such crimes.
Despite this, there are signs that CSE is being more widely reported. From 2010 to 2016,
the National Crime Agency saw an increase in referrals from 400 to 1,800 a month, with the
Home Office noting a resultant increase in convictions from 4,982 in 2014 to 5,940 in 2015
(Home Office, 2017b) — although these figures indicate that attrition rates remain high. In
2017, the Centre for Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse found that 17,600 children nationally
were recorded as being at risk of CSE; children’s services recorded a further 1,300 children
as being at risk of trafficking (Kelly and Karsna, 2017). In response to this growing
recognition of the scale of CSE, the Home Office recruited a network of analysts via the
Police Transformation Fund and found that of the 8,995 victims identified by police as
being at risk of CSE, the majority of offenders and victims were white: 59% of offenders
were white, 12% Asian and 8% black; 70% of victims were white, 5% black and 2% Asian.
Approximately one-fifth of the data for victim and perpetrator ethnicity was missing
(NPCC, 2016). Since 2017, there has been a sharp increase in reporting of child sexual abuse
offences to the police. In the year to March 2020, over 83,300 child sexual abuse offences
were recorded by police, an increase of nearly 270% since 2013. In the same period, there
were approximately 8,200 charges for CSA offences (Home Office, 2021).
While research on the trafficking of women and children across international borders
(Shelley, 2010) has received significant media and political attention, little is known about
the extent of the problem in the UK. In 2017, the Home Office gave its most robust
estimate: there are 4,000 victims of child trafficking nationally a year (Home Office,
2017a). In 2017, of the 2,118 children referred to the National Referral Mechanism (the
current system for identifying trafficking victims), the most common forms of exploita-
tion they experienced were labour exploitation (48%) and sexual exploitation (26%),
followed by unknown exploitation (20%) and domestic servitude (6%) (Home Office,
2017a). However, the Crown Prosecution Service CPS (2013) acknowledges the lack of
adequate information and research on sexual exploitation in the UK, explaining that
practical and ethical issues complicate data collection and research on young people
exploited in this manner.

Race, gender, crime and moral panics in the UK

Early scholarship on intersections between race, ethnicity and gender challenged the notion
that “race” is only relevant to the lived experience of minorities and that “white” as a racial
category should be ignored (Afshar and Maynard, 1994). Discussions of race were limited
to racism, construing the experiences of minority groups solely in terms of oppression. As a
social construction, the meaning of “race” varies according to time, place, circumstances
and relevant racialised categories (“Black” or “minority ethnic”) that are, in turn, influenced
by historical, political, policy and cultural contexts. However, the term “race” has long been
discredited as a pseudoscientific concept with roots in “race science”, a field that arbitrarily
sought to create social hierarchies based on physical characteristics alone (Davis, 1984).
Today, the term “ethnicity” is frequently used as an alternative to “race” in an attempt to
reflect the cultural rather than physical variations between groups under discussion. This

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reliance on the term “ethnicity” has its own problems in terms of homogenising or pro-
blematising particular groups or communities.
In the cases examined in this chapter, media coverage explicitly linked race and ethnicity
with masculinity as well as violence. This coverage drew specifically on the concept of
hegemonic masculinity, first developed by Connell (1995), referred to as “the most hon-
oured way of being a man” requiring “all other men to position themselves in relation to it”
and simultaneously legitimising “the global subordination of women to men” (Connell and
Messerschmidt, 2005, p. 832). Although Connell argued that hegemony is not synonymous
with violence, she did contend that it is often “supported by force” (Connell, 1995, p. 258).
The British media’s construction of a specifically South Asian notion of hegemonic
masculinity began long before the recent spate of high-profile CSE and grooming cases. The
Ouseley report (2001) on the Bradford race riots and the Cantle report (2001) on the
Oldham, Burnley and Bradford riots focused on cultural difference as the primary causal
factor in these events, maintaining that British South Asians and white Britons led “parallel
lives”. Media coverage of the riots described angry young Asian men who were alienated
from society and their own communities and became entangled in a life of crime and
violence — a vision that provided the foundation for what Claire Alexander calls the “new
Asian folk devil” (2000). Alexander argues that until these race riots, “Asian young men had
been largely invisible, presumed to be the beneficiaries of a rigid system of male hierarchy
and privilege, in which the concerns were about the women, not men, due to the issues
surrounding arranged marriages” (Alexander, 2000, p. 5). Following the riots, emphasis on
the criminality and deviance of the rioters reflected “the ongoing process of the crim-
inalization of Asian youth and their increased visibility in the criminal justice system”
(Alexander, 2004, p. 542). South Asian youth, particularly young South Asian males, came
to be seen as living in “a pathologized culture of poverty to stand as a symbol of its failures
and an increasing threat to wider society” (Alexander, 2004, p. 536). Since then, government
concern with community cohesion has fuelled the media’s appetite for identifying South
Asian men as a cause for moral panic — for example, reporting on “no-go” areas for whites
(Bunyan, 2001) and Asian territorial brutality (Jones, 2005).
At the same time, a culture of Islamophobia has also emerged, coinciding with more
frequent coverage of “Muslim culture” in government documents and academic publica-
tions. This construction of a monolithic Muslim identity is rooted in dominant Western
assumptions concerning “perceived racial, ethnic, or religious affiliation” (Alexander, 1999,
p. 45), despite the diversity of Muslims and Muslim communities in the UK which is home
to many long-established Muslim communities of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Somali
descent, the members of which speak a wide range of languages, including Urdu, Bengali
and Arabic (see Gill and Harrison, 2015).
These negative media characterisations and the prevailing cultural attitude of
Islamophobia that underpins them present a significant problem in terms of how South
Asian men and communities are perceived by the wider population (Gill and Day, 2020).
Foucault’s concept of problematisation directs attention to the ways in which a problem
comes to be framed and the implications of this framing for how the “development of a
given into a question … transform[s] a group of obstacles and difficulties into problems to
which the diverse solutions will attempt to produce a response” (2000, p. 118). Using this
concept to examine the British media’s portrayal of South Asian sex offenders underscores
the underlying and often implicit assumptions behind the construction of South Asian men
as a “problem” requiring an urgent solution.

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The news media’s role as an agent of moral indignation is often explored through the
sociological lens of “moral panics”: a concept developed in the 1970s (Cohen, 1972) to
explain the disproportionately high public concern over a perceived social problem.
Concern generated in a moral panic arises from identifying a specific threat that has the
potential to destroy important social values, norms or regulations, thus catalysing “a
demand for greater social regulation or control and a demand for a return to ‘traditional
values’” (Thompson, 1998, pp. 8–9). Moral panics thus reflect, and often reinforce, pre-
vailing power relations and incite intensified hostility towards a particular group, category
or cast of characters. According to Cohen’s early conceptualisation, the collective action a
moral panic triggers is marked by “mass hysteria, delusion and panics” (1972, p. 11) that
serve to direct public anxieties and fears towards a specific category of deviants identified as
“folk devils”. The “discovery” of the group seen as threatening or harmful to the sanctity of
society is accompanied by recasting the rest of society as defenders of their moral values.
Therefore, shifting the relative power ratios between these groups is key to understanding
the potential triggers of moral panics and the broader context within which they can
develop (Rohloff, 2008). Seldom have the actions of dominant groups come under the
necessary level of media scrutiny that can lead to a moral panic — instead, the media zeroes
in on the actions and practices of marginalised groups, demonstrating the centrality of
unequal power relations in generating moral panics. Media representation of specific crimes
and the groups they affect likewise shapes the depiction of some crimes as part of a worrying
pattern (for example, forced marriage), while others (for example, the murder of domestic
partners) are often discussed in disaggregate form, with news reports treating relevant cases
as isolated incidents (Gill and Walker, 2020).
Assessing the precise impact of selective media coverage on broad social attitudes is
challenging, because many people choose which newspaper to read on the basis of existing
views rather than vice versa. Although there are longstanding concerns about how framing
social issues in the media in a certain way can shape individuals’ attitudes, this remains a
complex subject without definitive conclusions (Barker and Petley, 2001). Examining the link
between media representations and policy-making is more amenable to empirical scrutiny.
Therefore, this chapter considers how South Asian men, and Pakistani men in particular, have
been constructed as folk devils by the British media in its depiction of recent cases involving
South Asian men’s sexual exploitation of white girls. It focuses specifically on how five
national newspapers represent grooming cases. Both conservative and liberal editorial media
perspectives were studied: The Daily Telegraph/Sunday Telegraph, a right-of-centre broad-
sheet; The Guardian/Observer, a left-of-centre broadsheet; the Daily Mail/Mail on Sunday, a
right-of-centre newspaper; The Times/Sunday Times, a moderate right-of-centre broadsheet;
and The Sun, a right-wing tabloid (see Gill and Day, 2020).

The portrayal of victims

Examining press reports of CSE and child sexual abuse cases over the last decade reveals
that victims from multiple cases were most commonly discussed as a group in longer ar-
ticles, whereas short reports concentrated on individual cases. Most articles described a
victim’s experiences of sexual abuse and exploitation, then gave an account of how the
victim had escaped the abuse, especially if that escape involved the police or social services.
Reports of this kind were based primarily on court transcripts and/or interviews with vic-
tims; a subset also involved interviews with professionals in the statutory sector as well as

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non-statutory organisations working specifically on CSE who regularly work on these types
of cases and/or the individuals involved in supporting victims in specific cases. A minority of
articles discussed relevant court proceedings (see Gill and Day, 2020).
Media portrayal of victims was overwhelmingly sympathetic, although the reports
clarified that such views were not necessarily shared by statutory agencies — some articles
stated that many of the professionals who worked with the young victims viewed them as
having made “lifestyle choices” (Syal, 2013) by freely engaging in sexual activity involving
Pakistani men; some labelled the girls, even those as young as 12, “prostitutes” (Syal, 2013).
The Mail Online (Boyle, 2017) provided excerpts from an interview with survivor Caitlin
Spencer (a pseudonym), who faced intense interrogation from the police following her
disclosure to them and was refused their protection: “For that reason, I never took it
further. The police told my mother that I was a known prostitute and to leave me to it, that
I’d stop when I was ready”.
Although public discourse has tended to focus on political correctness as the main
deterrent to investigating these offences, the above quotation from Caitlin highlights how
those being exploited were viewed by authorities. Class status for women (and girls) is often
mediated through moral demarcations that emphasise respectable sexual behaviour and
gender presentation (Armstrong et al., 2014; also Wood, this volume). A woman’s failure to
maintain classed and gendered sexual standards often results in her being labelled a “slut”
(or, in this case, a “prostitute”); women and girls thus face disproportionate responsibility
to safeguard their own respectability by forgoing sexual relationships until they reach the
appropriate age. Additionally, hegemonic masculinity has lionised white male masculinity
while designating minority men as “hypersexual” and therefore subordinate and dangerous
(Fischer, 2007). Historically, white women who engaged in sexual relationships outside their
“race” have been viewed either as sexual deviants or as in need of rescue from a sexually
violent “other”. Caitlin Spencer’s words indicate that early on in these cases, survivors were
primarily viewed as the former: The Sunday Times explained how those working on these
cases deployed “stock phrases: she’s making her own decisions or teenagers will do what
they want to do” (Smith, 2012, p. 10). But alongside this media sympathy for victims was a
corresponding demonisation of perpetrators.

Constructing child sexual exploitation as a cultural problem

The more sympathy was engendered for victims, the more perpetrators were demonised and
reviled in the media. Reports variously described the South Asian men involved in these
cases as “evil” people who had undertaken “depraved acts” (Mogra, 2013). One char-
acterised the girls in the Rochdale cases as being “recruited into sexual factory farming by
Muslim men described as ‘pure evil’ by detectives” (Pearson, 2012). Further, in the same
time period as the cases under discussion here, the Mail Online reported the murder of
17-year-old Laura Wilson by her 18-year-old boyfriend, Ashtiaq Ashgar, as Britain’s “first
white honour killing” (Brennan, 2016). After Laura’s death, it was revealed that social
workers were aware she had been exploited by groups of men since she was 11. It is not clear
if her partner was involved in her exploitation, but to ascribe the name “honour killing” to a
crime that bore all the hallmarks of a domestic homicide at the hands of an intimate partner
conflates two tropes about South Asian men and evokes ideas of racial exceptionalism. This
type of framing creates the conditions under which South Asian men in general can be
constructed as folk devils.

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The second, and most significant, factor influencing the way the media framed these cases is
the construction of sexual offending by South Asian men as a specific problem requiring an
urgent response. During his two-year investigation for The Times, Norfolk (2012) claimed that
he “revealed a crime model that police and care agencies refused to recognise — that most of
the victims were white and a majority of those in identified abuse networks were men of
Pakistani origin” (Deans 2013). Almost every newspaper reported that the perpetrators in
most cases were South Asian men targeting white girls. For instance, the Daily Telegraph
claimed that one of the victims in the Rochdale case “was singled out because she was white,
vulnerable and under-age” (Ward and Bunyan 2012, p. 1). Viewed collectively, the British
media’s coverage of the Rochdale case implied that one of its most shocking aspects was the
fact that the abusers were Pakistani Muslim men while the girls they abused were white.
Connected to this is the third factor influencing the media framing of the South Asian male
“problem”: the notion that inadequate responses from statutory agencies are caused by a fear
of those within such agencies being labelled racist.
Careful analysis of articles revealed two primary arguments for the media’s positioning
of these cases as representing a “cultural problem”. The first included newspaper reporting
that stigmatised immigrant communities in general and Pakistani men in particular, con-
structing CSE as a cultural problem while ignoring its place on the broader continuum of
violence against women and children. The second argument laid the blame on British
multiculturalism, associating it with fear on the part of both relevant authorities and the
general public that they would appear racist by identifying the cases as embodying imagined
“cultural problems”. Articles advancing this argument paralleled those that focused on
inadequate responses by statutory agencies.
Despite these patterns, the representation of CSE by Pakistani men was far from uniform
across the five newspapers. An overwhelming majority of articles were inflammatory to-
wards the perpetrators, ascribing broad and uninformed cultural reproof: the Daily Mail
and The Sun stigmatised Pakistani men and blamed multiculturalism, as did a significant
proportion of the articles in The Telegraph. For instance, the Daily Mail referred to the
“worrying trend of Asian men grooming and sexually exploiting vulnerable girls”
(Greenwood, 2013a) and the “dangerous trend of Pakistani men grooming young white
girls” (Greenwood, 2013b). The Daily Telegraph identified a “pattern of men from Pakistani
backgrounds grooming young white girls for sex” (Marsden, 2013, p. 12). Surprisingly,
given its political perspective, The Sun only published one article on the grooming cases in
2012 and 2013, though the reporter did argue that “White girls were targeted because they
were not in the mainly Pakistani gangs’ community or religion” (Veevers, 2012, pp. 12–13).
Articles in The Guardian were more likely to offer critical commentary though this was
by no means consistent. In a number of these pieces (Laville, 2012; Martinson, 2012),
reporters claimed that the UK has “an emerging model of CSE in which large groups of
Asian men target vulnerable white girls on the streets” (Laville and Topping, 2013, p. 8).
Indeed, one article claimed that “group grooming, as distinct from solitary sexual predators,
tends to be by British Asians of Pakistani Muslim background living in poorer communities
in the north” (White, 2012). One study by the CEOP exploring “localised grooming” found
that of the 31% of cases where ethnicity was known, 49% of perpetrators were white and
46% of perpetrators were Asian. The Office of the Children’s Commissioner for England
(OCCE) conducted a further study that included both online and offline CSE perpetrated in
groups and found that of the 84% of cases where ethnicity was available, 43% of perpe-
trators were white and 33% were Asian (Home Office, 2021). However, despite the single

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largest group identified as perpetrating CSE consistently being white, media attention
continues to suggest that the crime is uniquely related to the cultural practices of South
Asian men. The insistence that such behaviour is antithetical to “British values” is chal-
lenged by the fact that one in three young girls in the UK report being sexually harassed
while in school uniform (Southgate and Russell, 2018). Understanding the “Asian gangs”
moral panic in this context raises questions about the apparent lack of concern for the
majority-white perpetration of CSE, the sexual harassment of children or public discourse
on the sexual desirability of underage girls.

Conclusion
All the newspaper articles explored in this chapter underscored that the victims in high-profile
street-grooming cases were white, while the majority of the perpetrators were of South Asian
origin or descent. South Asian street-grooming gangs received disproportionate coverage at
the expense of other, similar cases involving mostly white perpetrators and/or ethnic minority
victims. This skewed media reporting fuelled a moral panic by linking ethnicity and CSE and
constructs South Asian men as folk devils. Over-reporting cases in which South Asian men
perpetrated grooming and sexual exploitation against white girls overlooks the broader sta-
tistics and causal socioeconomic factors — such as poverty and neglect — that are often at
the root of sexual exploitation. Studies by organisations such as the CEOP, CSE and OCCE,
the Home Office and the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) have demonstrated that
child-grooming and sexual exploitation acts are statistically more likely to be carried out by
white perpetrators. These reports have stressed that national conclusions about ethnicity
cannot be drawn from the data because much of that data came from a limited number of
geographic areas (Kelly and Karsna, 2017). When the OCCE published its Inquiry into Child
Sexual Exploitation in Gangs and Groups in 2013, it found that the vast majority of perpe-
trators were men of widely varying ages: some were as young as 14, while others were elderly
(Gill and Harrison, 2015). Where data were available, perpetrators and their victims were
shown to be ethnically diverse. While some women’s groups in the UK have suggested that
concern over South Asian sex offenders constitutes a “good” moral panic, since it raises
awareness to protect girls from abuse, many also recognise that it distorts public perception of
the prevalence of the problem across British society. Therefore, more must be done to combat
the full scope of CSE and grooming cases, accounting for all potential perpetrators and
victims. Raising moral outrage over this issue is a matter of priority, but it should be achieved
without recourse to racial stereotyping — this is helpful to no one, least of all future victims.

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 10
HIDDEN OR HYPERVISIBLE?
MAPPING THE MAKING OF A
MORAL PANIC OVER FEMALE
GENITAL MUTILATION/
CUTTING
Emmaleena Käkelä

Introduction
The umbrella term female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) encompasses a variety of
practices ranging from pricking to cutting and repositioning the labia minora or labia
majora (WHO, 2022). FGM/C is practised in a variety of contexts for a range of different
social, cultural, religious and psycho-sexual reasons. FGM/C can lead to several possible
short-term and long-term consequences, including physical, mental, sexual and repro-
ductive health complications (WHO, 2022). Although FGM/C is concentrated in around
30 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia1, since the beginning of international
campaigning to end FGM/C, these practices have been commonly framed as an “African
problem”. Critics argue that the contemporary international anti-FGM/C discourse
represents a continuation of the historical homogenisation and demonisation of cultures
of the Global South, perpetuating stereotypical and racist representations of Africa as
primitive, savage and barbaric (Adebisi, 2015; Njambi, 2004). In examining media and
political representations of FGM/C in the UK, this chapter seeks to illustrate both
the colonial continuities and new exclusionary nationalisms which have been harnessed to
fuel the moral panic over the continuation of FGM/C among migrant communities
in Europe.
With growing international migration, these practices are no longer confined to the
Global South2; globally more than 200 million girls and women have been affected by
FGM/C (WHO, 2022). In the last two decades, FGM/C has emerged as a “burning social
problem” in Europe (Johnsdotter and Mestre i Mestre, 2017, p. 14). This can be seen in the
proliferation of both national and international policies to tackle FGM/C (Johnsdotter and
Mestre i Mestre, 2017; Connelly et al., 2018). As this chapter problematises, the emergence
of these policy frameworks cannot simply be put down to the scale of the problem; rather,
Western responses to FGM/C can be attributed to wider societal tensions over cultural
diversity and national identity sparked by 9/11 and the European “refugee crisis”.

116 DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-13

 Hidden or hypervisible?

News media has played a significant part in the making of the moral panic over FGM/C
through its role in framing these practices and in informing public perceptions about the
causes and solutions to ending them (Sobel, 2015). Moral panic refers to a societal over-
reaction as a response to a perceived, exaggerated and simplified threat to shared values
(Cohen, 1972). The rising media interest in FGM/C in the UK culminated in 2015, when the
left-wing newspaper The Guardian launched the Global Media Campaign to End FGM,
with backing from high-profile organisations including the UN (Halonen, 2016). In utilising
the lens of femonationalism (Farris, 2017) this chapter contextualises, illustrates and pro-
blematises the increased political and media attention on FGM/C. The chapter begins by
illustrating the representations which have led critics to conclude that the Western media
discursively colonises the complexities of FGM/C and the lives of affected communities. I
will then present a case study of media and political discourses in Britain to demonstrate
how FGM/C has become increasingly entangled with anti-immigration sentiments and
exclusionary constructions of national identity and belonging.

Savages and saviours

Contemporary depictions of FGM/C contribute to producing Western knowledge about
African sexualities in ways that reinforce colonial stereotypes about backwardness, sexual
deviance and racial inferiority. Despite the complexity of dynamics, meanings and lived
experiences of FGM/C, analyses and representations of FGM/C in Europe and the US have
largely concentrated on the impacts FGM/C has on women’s sexuality (Sobel, 2015),
leading critics to accuse Western preoccupation with FGM/C of sensationalism and colonial
voyeurism:

The history of colonialism and neo-colonialism has afforded the more powerful west
the right to intervene in the lives of its ‘third world’ Others; a right which is not
reciprocal. And through the anti-FGM movement, the west has acquired yet another
chance to gaze at African women’s genitals.
(Njambi, 2004, p. 284)

Although FGM/C has been recognised as child abuse, campaigning more often tackles these
practices as a form of violence against women. Representations of FGM/C which primarily
focus on destroyed female sexuality have been critiqued for objectifying women by reducing
them to their genitalia (Boddy, 1998). FGM/C campaigns frequently utilise visual meta-
phors to portray female genitalia, often as infibulated flags or purses positioned to resemble
vulvar tissue (Khoja-Moolji, 2020; 28 Too Many, 2017), bloodied or cut flowers (Footprints
Foundation, 2017; End FGM European Network, 2020) or fruit resembling the shape of the
vulva (Al Mansoury in Dawood, 2015). The reduction of the complex practice of FGM/C to
female genitalia represents a continuation of imperialist caricatures of African sexualities;
historically, African women’s bodies were portrayed in particular ways to convey primi-
tivity and savagery to legitimise colonising, civilising missions by the West (Tamale, 2011).
While other forms of violence against women have also been represented through
problematic images, depictions of FGM/C are unique in their graphicness, often making
either visual or written references to razor blades and blood (Forward UK, 2015). Although
infibulation3 accounts for less than 10% of all worldwide FGM/C, media often focuses on
suturing and “kitchen table circumcisions” in efforts to homogenise these depictions as “the

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reality” of FGM/C (Njambi, 2004, Johnsdotter and Mestre i Mestre, 2017). These selected
framings of FGM/C as barbarity contribute to reproducing ideas about the underdeveloped
“Third World” (Wade, 2009). It has been argued that depictions of FGM/C serve a strategic
value in enforcing the gendered dichotomy between modern/backward which is entangled
with notions about Western cultural superiority (Wade, 2009; Gruenbaum, 2020). Although
depictions of primitivity and barbarity have become essential features of the anti-FGM/C
discourse, these are not necessarily recognised by women who come from contexts where
FGM/C is normalised or celebrated (Gruenbaum, 2020). As a result, first encounters with
Western representations can spark feelings of shock, embarrassment and loss in women who
are yet to make sense of what has happened to them (Käkelä, 2021).
The international anti-FGM/C discourse has been criticised for dehumanising and in-
fantilising African women (Tamale, 2011). Silencing of survivors and women’s lack of
choice are frequent themes in visual depictions of FGM/C. The construction of an “ideal
victim” who is powerless, voiceless and faceless has been central to representations of FGM/
C. Where women are visualised, posters often depict them as silenced, either with stitched or
covered mouths (End FGM, 2020). Portrayals of children also centre around themes of lack
of choice and consent; however, unlike posters of women, images of children often depict
either sad or faceless children, without explicit references to sexual violence (Home Office,
2014; Harrow Council, 2017; Metropolitan Police, 2019). A recent World Vision Finland
campaign poster (Little Black Book, 2022) represented a rare exception to this, presenting
closed lips which had been inverted to resemble the shape of a vulva, with a text across the
lips resembling stiches: “A girl is subjected to genital mutilation every ten seconds – speak
out to end the violence”. Alternatively, recent campaigns have depicted defiant women with
no lived experience of FGM/C (see for example Plan UK, 2014). The leading Guardian End
FGM campaign has been problematised for presenting a dichotomy between selected brave
activists who “give voice” to silenced victims (Halonen, 2016). These trends are notable, as
anthropologists and Black feminists have long criticised the international movement for
failing to recognise FGM/C-affected women’s capacity and efforts to challenge these practices
themselves (Nnaemeka, 2005).
Although FGM/C has been recognised as patriarchal violence, it notably differs from
most other forms of violence against women in that it is perpetuated by women themselves.
The complexity of women’s dual positionalities as survivors and perpetrators has rarely
been well captured by campaigns. In addition to infantilisation, the wider international anti-
FGM/C discourse has also been criticised for victim-blaming and for portraying African
women as bad mothers (Shweder, 2000). For instance, the Guardian media campaign has
been critiqued for attributing the continuation of FGM/C to passive and incapable parents
who are failing to protect their daughters (Halonen, 2016). Campaigning has tended to
place a disproportionate onus of responsibility on women, portraying small children with
slogans such as “be the mother who ends female genital mutilation in your family” (Home
Office, 2014) or images of women with slogans such as “Now that you know, say no to
FGM” (SafeHands for Mothers, 2015). Such victim-blaming attaches backwardness not
only to practices but also to the people affected by them, overlooking the ways wider
gendered inequalities constrain women’s spaces to resist FGM/C (Käkelä, 2020;
Gruenbaum, 2020). Researchers have increasingly called for more nuanced representations
of Black motherhood, arguing that women do not perpetuate FGM/C to do harm, but out
of the best interests of the child in contexts where socio-cultural beliefs, peer pressure and
women’s lower social position necessitate FGM/C as a strategy against social exclusion

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(Johnsdotter and Essén, 2016). However, it is worth noting good practice where it exists;
despite the criticisms laid later in this chapter, more recent UK Government campaign
materials stand out positively in depicting women and children in the context of the caring
family relationships within which FGM/C often takes place (Home Office, 2018).

Tip of the iceberg?

Rumours and anecdotal stories about the continuation of FGM/C are regularly reported in
the European press (Johnsdotter and Mestre i Mestre, 2017). Media and campaigners have
long described FGM/C as a “hidden problem” which persists due to a culture of secrecy and
the failure of European states to take the problem seriously. Most recently, this has been
demonstrated by a multi-award-winning campaign which sought to raise awareness about
the number of women at risk of FGM/C in Europe by depicting infibulated European flags
(Khoja-Moolji, 2020). However, although Western politicians, non-governmental organi-
sations and media frequently refer to “girls at risk”, the methods for calculating likely
prevalence and assessing risk are notoriously unreliable, thus arguably exaggerating the
scale of the problem (Johnsdotter and Mestre i Mestre, 2017). Estimates for the prevalence
of FGM/C among migrant communities in Europe largely overlook migration as an
instigator of cultural change in the abandonment of FGM/C (ibid.). Despite popular rep-
resentations about FGM/C as a hidden problem among migrant communities in Europe, it
has been argued that a “typical” FGM/C case is one in which the practice is committed as
an extra-territorial offence (ibid.). This has also been picked up by the media, which often
features reports about FGM/C in relation to “cutting season” during school holidays (ibid.).
These concerns are reflected in the emergence of safeguarding – or as argued by Khoja-
Moolji (2020), profiling – operations at the UK and other Western borders and intermittent
suggestions to subject girls at risk to compulsory genital examinations as a preventative
measure (Orange and Topping, 2014; Home Affairs Select Committee, 2016).
Across Europe, there has been a notable consensus among governments, non-
governmental organisations and political parties on banning FGM/C (Johnsdotter and
Mestre i Mestre, 2017; Bader and Mottier, 2020). Although in many European countries,
FGM/C has been illegal either under dedicated or general criminal legislation since the
1980s, to date fewer than fifty FGM/C criminal court cases exist in Europe (Johnsdotter and
Mestre i Mestre, 2017). While France stands out as a “shining example” with its relatively
high number of FGM/C prosecutions (Baillot et al., 2018, p. 9), other countries have only
seen a handful of prosecutions. In Sweden, 86 reports of FGM/C had led to only two court
cases by 2017; as suggested by researchers, it is unlikely that police would simultaneously
fail to identify large numbers of real cases of FGM/C, while investigating relatively high
numbers of false reports (Johnsdotter and Mestre i Mestre, 2017). The UK has only seen
one successful FGM/C prosecution in 2019, leading researchers to argue that the real
prevalence of FGM/C is likely notably lower than presumed (Karlsen, et al., 2022).

Making of the moral panic on FGM/C in the UK

In the UK, the zero-tolerance approach to FGM/C represents a rare area of political
consensus. In 2014, the UK Government (a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition) made
a commitment to end FGM/C within a generation. This political will has been partly fuelled
by media and campaigners who have argued that the UK has some of the higher rates of

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FGM/C in Europe (Dirrie, 2022), despite the lack of reliable data on continued prevalence.
Headlines about “FGM parties” where circumcisers are flown to the UK to cut several girls
at once periodically appear in the news media (Rhodes, 2016; Travis, 2014). These rumours
are not unique to the UK; in Sweden, a newspaper falsely reported that an entire school
class of girls had undergone FGM/C (Johnsdotter and Essén, 2017). In addition to reliance
on anecdotal evidence, UK media and political discourse frequently features a misuse of
prevalence statistics. For example, an article featured in the right-wing newspaper The Sun:
“Young girls are being mutilated at ‘FGM parties’ across Britain, charity claims” (Fruer,
2016) included a subheading referring to more than 8,000 identified victims. Nowhere in the
article was there an acknowledgement that these repurposed NHS figures include first-
generation migrant women who had experienced FGM/C prior to migration. This repre-
sents a wider pattern of misapprehensions, whereby identification of (usually adult) FGM/C
survivors in health settings is associated with the presumed continued prevalence of FGM/C
after migration (Johnsdotter and Mestre i Mestre, 2017; Bader and Mottier, 2020).
Paradoxically, although increased global displacement has fuelled the emergence of the
moral panic concerning FGM/C, media and politicians continue to overlook migration as
the explanatory factor in the sudden rise of FGM/C-affected women seen by health and
maternity services.
Misuse of figures on FGM/C prevalence has trickled down from media to the policy-
making realm to serve a strategic purpose to build support for punitive and bordering
practices:

According to a study based on census data4, there are around 20,000 girls in Britain
who are at risk of female genital mutilation. One hospital in North London alone has
recorded 450 cases of female genital mutilation in the last three years. But despite
female genital mutilation being illegal for 25 years, there has still not been a single
prosecution.
(Browne, 2013)

It sickens me to think that there were nearly 4,000 cases of FGM reported in our
country last year alone. Four thousand cases; think about that … … We need more
co-ordinated efforts to drive this out of our society. More prosecutions. No more
turning a blind eye on the false basis of cultural sensitivities.
(Cameron, 2015)

The growing media pressure and selective use of evidence have been instrumental in the
introduction of new legislation over the last decade. This has included the introduction of
FGM Protection Orders through the Serious Crime Act 2015 in England and Wales and the
corresponding Scottish legislation four years later (Female Genital Mutilation (Protection
and Guidance) (Scotland) Act 2020). Although the law in England and Wales has gone
further in introducing mandatory reporting duty for healthcare professionals and teachers,
both pieces of legislation reflect the increased focus on FGM protection over the last
decade. However, emerging evidence suggests that political pressures have driven hyper-
vigilant responses to FGM/C which can alienate and traumatise communities and families
(Käkelä, 2021; Karlsen et al., 2022). Notably, the punitive turn in FGM/C policy has not led
to increasing numbers of cases being identified (Karlsen et al., 2022). At the same time,
national FGM/C funding for support and outreach services has been reduced by 76%

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(Merrick, 2020). This is notable, considering that a significant majority of “reported cases”
likely represent women who have experienced FGM/C before migration and who, when
confronted by their own lived experiences of violence, would greatly benefit from such
services (Käkelä, 2021).

Femonationalism in the UK anti FGM/C discourse

Femonationalism refers to the ways gender equality is exploited within an otherwise
xenophobic rhetoric (Farris, 2017). With the rise of the nationalist far-right, political actors
have sought to advance anti-Islamic agendas under the guise of women’s rights (ibid.). This
mobilisation has been nourished by a deployment of a discursive media apparatus which
has reproduced Western cultural imagery of oppressive Islam, gender and sexuality in the
Global South (ibid.). Femonationalist rhetoric, and especially the equation of Islam and
gender oppression, has been instrumental in the widespread rejection of multicultural
policymaking in Europe following 9/11.
As demonstrated by the UK media and political discourses, femonationalist pursuits
frequently misplace gender equality as inherent in Western cultures and societies (Farris,
2017). It has been argued that “female migrant bodies constitute particular targets for
narratives of cultural incompatibility with national values” (Bader and Mottier, 2020,
p. 646). The UK political discourse embodies an exclusionary rhetoric, as politicians have
described FGM/C as “medieval” and “uncivilised” practices (Javid, 2018) which stand at
odds with the “liberating force of our [British] values” (Cameron, 2015) and which act as a
hindrance to the “emancipation revolution” in Britain (Browne, 2013). These descriptions
form a part of a calculated attempt to locate FGM/C in the past and as oppositional to
British culture. This juxtaposition between civilised/barbaric cultures has fuelled the rejec-
tion of state multiculturalism and the punitive turn in FGM/C policymaking. The UK
media discourse has frequently placed blame on statutory services for multicultural sensi-
tivities. This is exemplified by headlines featured in the BBC: “Female genital mutilation [is]
‘rising in soft-touch Scotland’” (Adams, 2013), the left-wing newspaper The Guardian:
“Racism label should not deter British police from FGM fight, says officer” (Moorhead,
2017) and commentaries by right-wing politicians in The Scotsman: “Scotland has to wake
up to reality of FGM abuse” (Monteith, 2017). Leading political actors have likewise
pointed fingers at statutory services for undermining “the confidence to enforce our values
for fear of causing offence” (Cameron, 2015) and for “nervousness amongst some profes-
sionals to confront the practice … head on” (Browne, 2013). It has been argued that such
narratives about turning a blind eye explicitly seek to erase the racial hierarchies which have
been a defining feature of FGM/C discourse (Khoja-Moolji, 2020).
With increased international displacement and intercultural tensions in the West, the
bodies of Black women have become a discursive tool for drawing the borders of the nation
and belonging (Ticktin, 2016; Khoja-Moolji, 2020). The issue of violence against women
has been harnessed selectively to demonise certain, mainly Black and Muslim, migrant
groups in order to oppose accelerated forced migration from Africa and parts of the Middle
East. The strategic use of FGM/C as an issue for the purposes of separating “us” from
“them” can also be seen in the conflation of FGM/C and Islamic extremism. Although
religion is a weak determinant for the prevalence of FGM/C, recent UK prime ministers
have been quick to associate FGM/C with radical Islam (see for example Johnson, 2014;
Cameron, 2015). Media have been likewise guilty of perpetuating the image of FGM/C as

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an Islamic problem; despite the complex relationship between religion and FGM/C, The
Guardian campaign has attributed the continuation of FGM/C to Islamic fundamentalism,
which elicits associations with terrorism (Halonen, 2016). However, while extremist orga-
nisations have weaponised other forms of violence against women, including forced mar-
riage and rape, FGM/C is generally perpetuated by families and communities, rather than
organised movements.
The framing of FGM/C as an issue of extremism illustrates how claims to protect
affected women have been increasingly couched in femonationalist rhetoric. For example, in
a column for the Daily Telegraph Boris Johnson (at the time, Mayor of London) suggested:

There are still Left-wing academics protesting that the war on FGM is a form of
imperialism, and that we are wrong to impose our Western norms. I say that is utter
rubbish, and a monstrous inversion of what I mean by liberalism. On the contrary: we
need to be stronger and clearer in asserting our understanding of British values. That
is nowhere more apparent in the daily job of those who protect us all from terror – and
who are engaged in tackling the spread of extremist and radical Islam.
(Johnson, 2014)

This rhetoric linking FGM/C campaigning to a war, describing it as a “battle” or “combat”,

is a recurrent feature across the political divide, also identified in analyses of the Guardian’s
campaigning (Halonen, 2016, p. 48). This illustrates a recent shift in FGM/C campaigning,
which first began by approaching FGM/C as a health issue or an illness that was to be
“eradicated”, before re-framing FGM/C as a human rights violation (Shell-Duncan, 2008).
In evoking the language of war, UK political and media discourse selectively enforces
simplistic representations of (presumed Muslim) victims and perpetrators, overlooking the
fact that FGM/C is most often performed by affected women themselves (Halonen, 2016).
As demonstrated by Boris Johnson’s framing, FGM/C has become increasingly interwoven
with concerns over national security, whereby calls to act are no longer only fuelled by the
need to protect women but also the British culture and nation. In his speech on
“Extremism” , David Cameron (2015) addressed FGM/C to position multiculturalism as a
threat to the UK national security. Swiss political discourse has likewise framed FGM/C as
a threat to the nation (Bader and Mottier, 2020). Campaigns have also been complicit
in this; in depicting European flags which were roughly sewn together to resemble infibu-
lation, the 28 Too Many posters framed FGM/C as a crime against not only women but
also the predominantly white Western nation states (Khoja-Moolji, 2020).
Cultural superiority perspectives have fuelled far-right nationalism and anti-immigration
sentiments (Gruenbaum, 2020; Wade, 2009), contributing to the making of Fortress
Europe. Although the then Home Secretary Amber Rudd (2016) claimed that the UK’s
“compassion does not stop at the border” in her speech addressing FGM/C, the Home
Office has been accused of exactly that. Despite commitments to protect girls and women
from FGM/C, subsequent Home Secretaries have pushed forward with strategies of
deterrence which have made it much harder for women to protect their daughters from
FGM/C by claiming asylum (Käkelä, 2022). The contradictory responses to FGM/C are
most pressingly illustrated by recent Home Secretary Priti Patel’s efforts to end FGM/C
through increased development funding while attempting to return a girl at risk of FGM/C
to an area of Sudan with a prevalence rate of over 97% (Summers, 2020). The situation is
only likely to get worse, as the recently passed Nationality and Borders Act 2022 penalises

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women for delayed claims, which are often a result of women’s unawareness of their right to
claim asylum on the grounds of FGM/C.

Conclusion
This chapter has traced the making of a moral panic over FGM/C by illuminating the
contradictions between available evidence and the dominant sensationalist representations
of the prevalence of FGM/C among migrant communities in Europe. In doing so, this
chapter has problematised the motivations which have underpinned the punitive turn in
responses to FGM/C in the UK. The entanglement of anti-FGM/C campaigning and anti-
Islam rhetoric has taken place against a backdrop of longstanding stereotyping of Muslim
women as powerless victims of multiple forms of culturally and religiously sanctioned
violence against women (Farris, 2017). The UK anti-FGM/C discourse illuminates the ways
the issue of FGM/C has been politicised to further anti-immigration and Islamophobic
agendas, at the expense of recognising FGM/C-affected women’s intersectional vulner-
abilities. Gruenbaum (2020) has argued that in the face of these increasingly exclusionary
discourses, scholars are tasked with not only contributing to ending FGM/C, but also with
preventing international hysteria which is turning FGM/C into a tool of fear and hatred.
This chapter has sought to contribute to these ends by problematising the extent to which
contemporary responses support FGM/C-affected women’s resistance and efforts to make
sense of the violence which has been done to them.

Notes
1 Countries with the highest prevalence rates are all in Africa, but FGM/C is also practised in some
parts of the Middle East and Asia Pacific Region.
2 This chapter addresses the stereotyping of FGM/C as an “African” practice. However, it is
important to recognise the history of clitoridectomy and labia removal also in Western medicine
( Gruenbaum, 2020).
3 Infibulation involves the narrowing of the vaginal opening through the creation of a covering seal
by cutting and repositioning the labia minora, or labia majora, sometimes through stitching, with
or without removal of the clitoral prepuce/clitoral hood and glans ( WHO, 2022).
4 UK Census data reports nationality, and ethnicity based on broad geographical categories (e.g.
African). The Census data does not capture the great diversity of ethnic groups in Africa, some of
which practice varying rates of FGM/C and some of which do not practice FGM/C at all.

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 11
EXAMINING THE ZIMBABWEAN
NEWS MEDIA’S FRAMING
OF MEN AS VICTIMS OF
SEXUAL ASSAULT
Mthokozisi Phathisani Ndhlovu

Introduction
Studies on the news media’s framing of sexual assault have predominantly interrogated
women as victims and men as perpetrators (Benedict, 1992; Meyers, 1997; Turkewitz, 2010;
Ndhlovu, 2020). This chapter seeks to expand the discussion by using the case studies of
three Zimbabwean daily newspapers, The Herald, Chronicle and NewsDay, to examine the
news media’s framing of sexual assault when men are victims and women are perpetrators.
Even though cases of sexual assault of men are not as widespread as of women, they have
been reported in Zimbabwe. This article argues that the manner in which the news media
talk about these cases shapes how we understand sexual assault, especially when the victim
is male. Consequently, this article uses frame analysis to analyse the stories of sexual assault
of men published by the three publications from 2010 to 2020.

News media’s framing of sexual assault in Zimbabwe and beyond

Sexual assault refers to non-consensual sexual acts that range from “touching and groping
to penetrative sex” (Lehmiller, 2018, p. 391). Such cases are widespread in Zimbabwe and
most of the reported cases involve women as victims and men as perpetrators. In
Zimbabwe, 43% of women have experienced physical, emotional and/or sexual abuse at
some point in time (Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency, 2012) while an average of
22 women are raped every day (Sithole, 2019). It is, however, difficult to obtain figures of
sexual assault of men since in Zimbabwe, like the rest of Africa, this form of abuse is
regarded as taboo (Shumba, 2004). This subsequently, “explains why there is scant litera-
ture showing the lived experiences of male survivors of rape perpetrated by women”
(Musevenzi, 2017, p. 2). In Zimbabwe, previous studies on news coverage of sexual assault
have explored women as victims and men as perpetrators. For instance, Ndhlovu (2020)
established that the Zimbabwean news media strip rape of criminality through accusing
women of inviting sexual exploitation through misguided behaviours. These findings are
consistent with global literature on media’s framing of sexual assault.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-14 127

 Mthokozisi Phathisani Ndhlovu

Benedict (1992) established that the media blame women for enticing their assailants by
their looks and sexuality while male perpetrators are depicted as helpless, driven beyond
self-control by lust. Such narratives, which are shaped by language and rape myths, are
destructive to rape victims and to the public’s understanding of sexual assault (Benedict,
1992). Similarly, Meyers (1997, pp. 61–62) argues that the media blame victims of sexual
assault for engaging in “questionable activities” or exhibiting behaviour “outside the tra-
ditional role of women”. Patriarchy has been blamed for perpetuating sexual violence
against women (Murnen, Wright and Kaluzny, 2002) as it legalises social power imbalances
between genders (Winn, 2018) and confines women to subordinate positions (Kambarami,
2006) to normalise men’s predatory behaviour (Nyathi and Ndhlovu, 2021). The media, on
the other hand, have been accused of promoting patriarchal dominance through biased
reporting of sexual assault (Turkewitz, 2010). While this literature provides insightful
contributions to understanding the role of the media in promoting patriarchy and dis-
crediting victims of sexual abuse, it is fundamental to examine how the media frame sexual
assault when the roles are reversed – men as victims and women and perpetrators.

Men as victims of sexual assault

Even though cases of women sexually violating men have been reported in Zimbabwe and
other countries, people remain sceptical about them. In fact, Davies and Rogers (2006,
p. 372), while reviewing literature on sexual assault of men, argue that since “people are
socialised to believe that women are sexually passive and men are sexual initiators, it is
difficult to imagine a dominant woman coercing an unwilling man to have sex”. So, when
women sexually violate men, people apportion blame to male victims and even accuse them
of deriving pleasure from the act (Davies and Rogers, 2006). As a result, some male victims
of sexual assault avoid reporting their cases to the police in fear that they will experience
negative treatment, be disbelieved, or blamed for their assault (Walker, Archer and Davies,
2005). Those who are brave enough to report their cases to the police face an enormous
legal battle since only a handful of cases result in conviction (Davies and Rogers, 2006).
The situation is even worse in Zimbabwe as the law does not recognise that women can
rape men: instead, women are charged with aggravated indecent assault – a crime that carries
the same penalty as rape (Gwarisa, 2020). The Zimbabwean law defines rape as deep pene-
tration, meaning that “at law only men can rape women and men can only be raped if there is
penetration through their anuses” (Marongwe, Tobias and Mawere, 2019, p. 76). Despite the
limitations of the Zimbabwean law, there is some research evidence pointing to an increase in
cases of women raping men in Zimbabwe. For instance, Marongwe, Tobias and Mawere
(2019) argue that between 2011 and 2017 there was an increase in cases of women raping men
in Zimbabwe allegedly for sperm harvesting or performing rituals.
Previous studies in Zimbabwe and beyond highlight society’s negative perception of male
victims of sexual assault (Marongwe, Tobias and Mawere, 2019; Walker, Archer and
Davies, 2005; Davies and Rogers, 2006). Generally, men who are abused by women are
regarded as weak and effeminate (Marongwe, Tobias and Mawere, 2019). Consequently,
male victims of sexual assault struggle to reconcile their masculine identity with their ordeal
(Riccardi, 2010). While some previous studies might have focused on men who were raped
by men, they provide insights into the psychological effects of sexual assault on male vic-
tims. Some of the long-term effects include depression, anxiety, self-blame, vulnerability and
emotional distancing (Walker, Archer and Davies, 2005). Marongwe, Tobias and Mawere

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(2019, p. 88) argue that: “The trauma that the victims suffered could be associated with the
reversal of sexual roles, where the affected men felt feminized”. It is against this background
that I examine how the Zimbabwean news media talk about the sexual assault of men and
the psychological and physical trauma associated with it. Following Riccardi’s (2010)
caution against simply applying research findings from female victims to male victims, this
study highlights the specificity of men’s victimisation and the ways this is handled in news
media, whilst keeping in view the broader arguments about gender, violence and repre-
sentation outlined in this introduction.

Methodology
This study focuses on the representation of men as victims of sexual assault in three
Zimbabwean newspapers: The Herald, Chronicle and NewsDay. I purposely selected the
three publications because they are the leading daily newspapers in Zimbabwe and they
serve different geographic regions. The Herald and NewsDay are largely circulated in the
northern and eastern parts of Zimbabwe while the Chronicle is predominantly circulated in
the southern parts of the country. The print version of The Herald is accessed by 49% of the
population while the Chronicle and NewsDay’s hardcopies are accessed by 28% and 13% of
the population, respectively (ZAMPS, 2021). On the other hand, the online version of The
Herald is accessed by 43% of the population while the online versions of the Chronicle and
NewsDay are accessed by 25% and 23% of the population, respectively (ZAMPS, 2021).
Within the period under study (2010–2020), the three daily newspapers published 84 stories
on the sexual assault of men – The Herald had 27 stories, NewsDay 32 and Chronicle 25. I
accessed these stories by searching for “female rapists”, “indecent assault” and “male sexual
abuse” on the websites of the three publications. I then excluded stories that focused on men
as perpetrators and women as victims of sexual assault.
An initial read-through of the articles allowed me to inductively generate framing cat-
egories (Connolly-Ahern and Broadway, 2008), determining “for each text which elements
and propositions can possibly function as framing or reasoning devices” (van Gorp, 2007,
p. 72). A frame refers to “a central organising idea or storyline that provides meaning to an
unfolding strip of events” (Gamson and Modigliani, quoted in Scheufele, 1999, p. 106).
Three key framing categories were identified: discrediting the narratives of male victims,
sensationalising sexual assault of men and humanising female perpetrators. All 84 stories fit
into one of these frames, with 22 stories discrediting the narratives of male victims, 39
sensationalising the assault and 23 humanising female perpetrators. There were no signifi-
cant differences between the three papers in terms of the frames chosen. In what follows, I
unpack how each of these frames operates.

Discrediting the narratives of male victims of sexual assault

An analysis of the sampled stories reveals how the three publications discredit the narratives
of men who are victims of sexual assault, citing sceptical sources, conflating rape with sex
and depicting sexual assault of men as extraordinary and unusual. To start with, the three
publications discredit the narratives of male victims of sexual assault by citing sources
sceptical of women’s capabilities of sexually violating men. This is noted in the NewsDay
story titled “Female rapists – men never saw it coming” (NewsDay, 2010). The article uses
popular opinion to discuss a news phenomenon. As suggested in the headline, it takes a

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rather scurrilous and incredulous tone, reinforced in the opening of the article which
describes women raping men as a “bizarre trend”. The journalist initially turns to “social
commentators” – specifically, two male academics from the University of Zimbabwe – for
their views. The men are not presented as research experts in this particular area but rather
offer very generic comments about the breakdown of society and the dominance of
superstition, explaining the phenomenon as linked to the harvesting of semen for rituals.
The story concludes with the views of three ordinary men – a vegetable vendor, a traditional
leader and a university student – all of whom are sceptical of the narratives of male victims.
That this scepticism spans such differently positioned men arguably gives it more credibility.
The vegetable vendor is quoted saying, “I still don’t believe these stories. I suspect that these
men are just making up such stories when they stay out from home”. Moreover, in the same
story the writer even notes that when the “initial” cases of women raping men were re-
ported, there was a “joke that these were men making excuses for their philandering
activities to avoid conflict at home”. Whilst the article does note that in a “patriarchal
society like Zimbabwe” men admitting to victimisation is “just taboo”, the tone of the
article does little to tackle this and provides scant context for the reports at the heart of this
“bizarre trend”.
The discrediting of male victims of sexual assault is also evident in The Herald story titled
“Local female rapists inspire Hollywood drama series” (Phiri, 2014). Notably, this story is
written by an entertainment reporter and concentrates on how the American drama series
Being Mary Jane deals with the issue. The article concludes with the “mixed reactions” to
the show from viewers, noting “in some instances, viewers make jokes about the assaults
with some wishing to be in the shoes of the rape victims”. The assumption is that men derive
pleasure from being raped by women – a “joke” which is also referenced in the headline of
the NewsDay article, with the double entendre of “coming”. Whilst in The Herald article this
is contrasted with views that “rape directed at any human being is no laughing matter”, the
article concludes by noting that “none of the cases have ever been proved and no arrests
have been made in spite of all the publicity”. This article thus speaks to the newsworthiness
of female sexual assault of men at the same time casting doubt on the veracity of men’s
claims, with criminal justice used as a measure of authenticity.
Moreover, the three publications discredit the narratives of male victims of sexual
assault by conflating rape with sex: this is already evident in the examples above, where
sexual assault is presented as a potentially desirable and pleasurable experience for men.
In addition, the three publications frequently use the phrase “had sex without his con-
sent” to describe instances when female perpetrators raped male victims. Conflating sex
with rape is problematic since it eliminates the violence and emotional trauma associated
with rape. In fact, Turkewitz (2010) argues that without consent the act cannot be re-
ferred to as sex. This is consistent with the reluctance by The Herald and Chronicle to use
rape to describe acts of women forcing men to be intimate with them. I observed that
whenever the two publications used the words “rape” and “rapist”, they ensured that
these words were enclosed in quotation marks. Enclosing a word in quotation marks
might indicate the author’s disagreement with its use (Van Gelder, 2021). As such, it can
be argued that the two publications have reservations about classifying these acts as rape
or even calling women committing such acts rapists, although (as discussed above) this is
consistent with the legal connotations of their usage. The Zimbabwean law uses indecent
assault instead of rape to refer to acts of women forcing men to be intimate with them
(Gwarisa, 2020).

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The three publications can be argued to be discrediting the narratives of male victims
of sexual assault by blaming them for inviting their ordeal. This can be noted in the
Chronicle story entitled “Women try to rape ‘well endowed’ man” (Mondela, 2017). In the
story, one of the women is quoted saying she wanted to have sex with the man since
he had a big penis: such a narrative shifts the blame to the male victim. Moreover, the
extent to which the victim conforms to a hegemonic construction of masculinity (well-
endowed) renders him an incredible victim capable of driving women beyond control.
Previous studies examining the news media’s framing of women as victims of sexual
assault established that the news media blame female victims for inviting their ordeal with
their conduct (Benedict, 1992; Meyers, 1997). Even though this article focuses on male
victims of sexual assault, it also observed that the news media blame them for their
ordeal.
Lastly, the three publications discredit the narratives of male victims of sexual assault by
depicting cases of sexual assault of men as extraordinary and unusual events. Notably, the
three publications frame sexual assault of men by women as “bizarre” (NewsDay, 2010), an
unusual occurrence (Phiri, 2014) and shocking (The Herald, 2011). What makes these stories
“bizarre” or unusual is precisely the overturning of gender norms and this is emphasised in
these reports in contradictory ways: the assertion of what men should be can either cast
doubt on the victim’s status as a man or as a victim.

Sensationalising male sexual abuse

Even though sexual assault of men is of serious concern, it was sensationalised by the three
publications. Media sensationalism, here, refers to the news media’s tendency to exaggerate
issues in order to attract audiences, but also to name and construct a “social problem” in
moralistic ways. Here, it is particularly important to highlight the way that ideas about
“superstition” and “ritual” were mobilised in a number of articles, to suggest that women’s
motivations for assaulting men were to “harvest” sperm. This can be seen in NewsDay
headlines like “Sperm harvesters strike again” (NewsDay, 2013a) and “Sperm harvesters
pounce” (NewsDay, 2013b) as well as in the use of terms such as “sperm thieves” and
“condom women” (NewsDay, 2011) to refer to women who rape men to collect their semen.
This language removes the violence and emotional trauma associated with rape. It further
repositions rape from a crime of violence to a crime of theft while also shifting focus from
male victims to the fate of the stolen ejaculate.
Moreover, the sensationalising of rape was noted through the use of unnecessary graphic
descriptions. For instance, in the Chronicle’s story about the “well endowed” man con-
sidered above (Mondela, 2017), it is reported that “a court heard on Thursday that the duo
fondled his penis until he became aroused”. This example brings together many of the
points I have made so far: it emphasises sex over violence and focuses on evidence of the
man’s physical arousal to cast doubt on the authenticity of the assault claim. However,
Fisher and Pina (2013, p. 57) argue that “an erection can be induced by fear and is not
necessarily indicative of pleasure or consent”. There are clear parallels here with the way
female victims of sexual assault are treated in the media (Soothill and Walby, 1991;
Turkewitz, 2010; Korn and Efrat, 2004). I argue that the three newspapers sensationalise
sexual assault of men to please their audiences since in Zimbabwe, male victims of sexual
assault are ridiculed for being weak and effeminate while their cases are treated with sus-
picion (Marongwe, Tobias and Mawere, 2019).

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Humanising female perpetrators

An analysis of the three publications’ stories reveals how they humanised the accused
women by focusing on extenuating circumstances. One example of this is the Chronicle story
“Female rapist jailed” (Mpofu, 2014), which focuses on a 24-year-old female perpetrator
sentenced to prison for 5 years for raping a minor. The story describes the accused as a
“married mum-of-two” and (as with other stories) places the accusation that she “raped”
the boy in quotation marks. Given she has been found guilty, it is also notable that the
report continues to describe her actions as “alleged”, and the reference to her children
further humanises her. The Chronicle, in including such details, shifts the story’s focus from
the minor who has been sexually violated to the predicament the perpetrator’s children will
be subjected to if she is given a lengthy sentence. The article also cites the abused boy’s
grandmother describing the abuse as “sickening”, but this is counterbalanced by the sala-
cious detail that is given about the assault.
Furthermore, the Chronicle, in a story titled “Woman jailed 12 years for indecent assault”
(Murape, 2011), humanises a female perpetrator who is alleged to have raped a 14-year-old
boy. It is written that the woman, who is 32-years-old and married to an octogenarian, sex-
ually abused the 14-year-old. One can argue that the publication through referring to the
husband as an octogenarian shifts focus from the accused woman to the circumstances that
might have forced her to commit the crime. The age difference between the woman and her
husband suggests that she might have been a victim of child marriage. In addition, one can
also conclude that the octogenarian husband was failing to perform well in the bedroom,
leaving the woman with no choice but to sexually abuse the 14-year-old.
Moreover, the three publications humanise female perpetrators through attributing their
crimes to external factors. This is noted in the NewsDay story titled “Female rapists – men
never saw it coming” already discussed above (NewsDay, 2010). The reporter cites a social
commentator who attributes the cases of women raping men to poverty. Some people in
Zimbabwe allegedly use semen for rituals that claim to make people wealthy (Vickers, 2011).
The story further notes that “women will have been instructed by a traditional healer to collect
semen and the only way is to rape an unsuspecting man”. It can therefore be argued that this
statement draws the readers’ attention to economic conditions forcing women to rape men to
collect semen in order for them to be rich. As such, the focus of the story shifts from the sexual
abuse of men to the circumstances of female perpetrators, positioning them as good people
forced by circumstances to sexually abuse men. In addition, the behaviour of female perpe-
trators is contextualised with reference to men’s sexual abuse of women. Reference can be
made to The Herald story titled “Female rape suspects: Scores besiege police station” (The
Herald, 2011). In the story, it is noted that cases of women raping men show “that tables have
turned”, suggesting that female perpetrators are responding to male violence. This suggests
that cases of females raping men are the cost of equality.
In rare cases, where the news media sympathise with the male victims, that sympathy is
sensationalised. This is noted in the NewsDay story titled “Female rapists pounce on
Beatrice man” (Saunyama, 2019). In the story, it is reported that the raped man was taken
to hospital after he sustained “bruises in his manhood”. While the story solicits sympathy
for the man who was raped by three women and dumped by the roadside, it only focuses on
the bruises he sustained without highlighting the emotional and psychological trauma he
experienced. This is consistent with most of the analysed stories as the three publications
failed to explain the emotional and psychological effects of sexual abuse on male victims.

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 Zimbabwean news media’s framing of men as victims

This study reveals something of the ways in which representations of male victims and
female perpetrators engage with ideas about appropriate gender behaviour to variously
humanise perpetrators and to direct our sympathies. A question remains over which women
(and men) are more likely to be sympathetically treated in the Zimbabwean media. This
research has already gestured towards some of the areas worth consideration – such as the
age, marital status or geographical location of the perpetrator. From the examples pre-
sented here, there is a suggestion that sympathy will be generated for female perpetrators on
the basis of their proximity to “ideal” womanhood (e.g. marriage, motherhood, age). There
are echoes here of existing feminist debates about the conditions under which certain male
perpetrators of abuse are granted “himpathy” (Manne, 2018) in news coverage that reveal
the continued investment in traditional gender relations which are at stake in reporting
gender-based violence of all kinds.

Conclusion
While previous studies showed that Zimbabwean society ridicules male victims of sexual
abuse for being weak and effeminate (Marongwe, Tobias and Mawere, 2019), this study has
demonstrated that such attitudes are also rife in news reporting which discredits the nar-
ratives of male victims, sensationalises sexual assault of men and humanises female per-
petrators. The failure to take women’s violence against men seriously is also evidenced by
the way these reports downplay the emotional, psychological and physical trauma endured
by male victims and shift focus from the accused woman to the circumstances that might
have forced her to commit the crime. Although there are some parallels here with the ways
in which female victim/survivors of sexual assault are treated by news media, there are also
important differences, linked to ideals about masculinity. In both cases, however, rape re-
porting works to uphold traditional gender ideologies and limits societal understanding of
crimes and their victims.

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 12
THE HIV MAN, ALEXANDRA
MAN AND HOTBOY
Swedish news coverage of rape as a folklore of fear
Gabriella Nilsson

Introduction
The news media figure of “HIV man”, which would reappear several times in subsequent
decades (1998, 2000, 2007 and 2008), was first introduced in Swedish news reports about rape
in 1992. The case involved an HIV-infected man who, according to the tabloid Expressen,
exposed a woman to “twenty hours of terror” (Brännström, 1992), in the form of repeated
vaginal, oral and anal rape, thereby also infecting her with HIV.1 Another newspaper, Dagens
Nyheter, reported that the woman’s only concern, while being raped, was “not to be touched
by his body fluids” (Nauman, 1992). This reporting was supplemented by facts about HIV and
AIDS, including the rate of HIV infection among Swedes and the current tally of AIDS-
related deaths. Thus, from the very beginning, the rape of the “twenty hours of terror” was
downplayed. News media rather dwelled on the apparently deliberate spread of HIV infec-
tion, “the new social and legal problem facing AIDS” (Expressen, 1992).
This chapter is based on news reports about two separate “HIV men” and one similar news
media figure, the “Alexandra man”, who appeared in Swedish news media between 1990 and
2010.2 The analysed cases all began as rape reports, but seemingly greater dangers, “the HIV
virus” and “the Internet”, were identified and prioritised over rape in the news. Based on the
overarching question “How is rape portrayed in the news media?” the objective is to analyse
how these news media figures were “utilised” by their contemporaries. In my previous work,
I have shown that news reports on rape function as placeholders in news media for the
continued reporting and debate of other issues; more specifically, various rape genres have
served different societal functions and rapists or rape cases are labelled in the news with
reference to these intended issues (Nilsson, 2019a, 2019b, 2020). The rape cases analysed in
this chapter stand out because they are labelled to indicate contemporary fears of, respec-
tively, infection (HIV) and new technology, namely, the fear of Internet pseudonyms
(Alexandra). Thus, these labels determined what issues would be discussed in the media space
accumulated by rape cases and, consequently, what issues would not be discussed (such as the
causes and consequences of rape). In the present chapter, I first analyse how the three rape
cases are described. I suggest that news reports implicate a “politics of emotion” (Ahmed,
2004) and form a “folklore of fear” (Stattin, 1984), which functions as a way of dealing with

136 DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-15

 The HIV man, Alexandra man and Hotboy

“liquid modernity” (Bauman, 2006). In conclusion, I reflect on the consequences of this for the
possibilities of counteracting rape.
Zygmunt Bauman argues that “liquid modernity” is constituted by the most menacing
aspect of our fear, namely our ignorance of what dangers threaten us. In Liquid Fear,
Bauman writes:

Fear is at its most fearsome when it is diffuse, scattered, unclear, unattached, un-
anchored, free-floating, with no clear address or cause; when it haunts us with no
visible rhyme or reason, when the menace we should be afraid of can be glimpsed
everywhere but is nowhere to be seen.
(2006, p. 2)

Two pervasive phenomena, quite literally glimpsed everywhere but nowhere to be seen,
are viruses and the Internet. Consisting of microparticles that spread unhindered and
invisible, in different periods both viruses and the Internet have induced fear. According to
Bauman, liquid fear does not hold shape long enough for us to identify its origin, let alone
manage its causes. One way of countering liquid fear would be to use a catalyst to force it to
manifest in some tangible form, preferably the human body. I will argue here that “the
rapist” is such a human-shaped catalyst.
Traditionally, folklore, more than any other form, served to personify the fearful invisible
forces of nature as human-type beings. Swedish folklorist Jochum Stattin (1990) writes that,
while certain frightening situations are so concretely and obviously dangerous that they do not
need to be described with the help of folklore, other, more vague and disturbing situations are
dangerous in ways that must be clarified through a folklore of fear. This folklore of fear
functions not only as a concretisation of the elusive but also combats “evil” by identifying
scapegoats in human form (Stattin, 1990, p. 168). I would argue that the news media is one
arena where the folklore (or perhaps media-lore) of fear is shaped and reproduced, and that
this explains the regular reappearance of “HIV men” and similar media figures.
Sara Ahmed (2004) shows that emotions are produced through chains of associations;
when two phenomena are presented together, a connection emerges that evokes either positive
or negative emotions. Associations are then reinforced by repetition until they become
“sticky”. Following Ahmed, the reporting on these news media figures can be analysed as
the political act of “sticking” the fear of infection and technology to the rapist’s body. Thus,
the politics of emotion work to evoke fear that can legitimise certain actions against certain
persons (and phenomena) (Ahmed, 2004, p. 12).

The HIV man

When the availability of an effective antiretroviral medication, in 1996, ended the AIDS
epidemic of the 1980s in Sweden, dramatisation of AIDS infection and political interest
both decreased (Thorsén, 2013, Ljung, 2001). Nevertheless, fear of infection still lacked a
clear form. In fact, I would suggest that once “gay men” no longer embodied public AIDS
stereotypes, fear of infection became fluid and sought a catalyst. Regarding HIV, one threat
was particularly manifest in both media and contemporary folklore, namely the narrative of
HIV-infected persons driven by vindictiveness and a desire to deliberately infect others. One
globally spread tale includes the experience of waking up alone after having had sexual
intercourse with a newly acquainted person, to the terrifying message “Welcome to the

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Wonderful World of AIDS” written on the bathroom mirror in red lipstick (Fine, 1987).
The rapist was a figure who embodied this fear. Given the question “How does a society
protect itself against HIV-infected persons who […] commit rape?” (Expressen, 1992), a
terrifying scenario was implicated in the news coverage of the HIV man.
The most hyper-mediatised Swedish HIV man was introduced in September 1998, when
a 45-year-old man was accused of rape. Upon searching the man’s apartment, the police
found antiretroviral HIV medication and a notebook with the names of 190 women. Later
was it revealed that, over a ten-year period, he had had intercourse with, and in several cases
drugged and sexually exploited, over a hundred women without using prophylactics. By
that time, HIV infection was considered a chronic condition rather than a deadly disease but,
according to the news media, the police were “hunting down a murderer” (Cantwell, 1998a).
The HIV man was lethal, a vindictive, hyper-sexual psychopath with a killer instinct, who
took revenge on women for the injustice of his illness (Cantwell, 1998b; TT, 1998b). More
than anything, the large number of victimised women aroused immense fear. Headlines stated
that “HIV panic” was spreading (Helsingborgs dagblad, 1998), as “hundreds of desperate
women contacted the police out of concern that they had contracted the deadly infection”
(TT, 1998a). Although none of the 130 women and 2 men with whom the HIV man had
intercourse were infected, the media narrative was not altered. “The fact that no one was
infected does not mean that it is harmless. […] Many of the younger women did not dare to
request he used a condom. Those who were picked up in his car were frightened when the car
drove to his apartment instead of to their home” (Hougner, 1998). The quote refers to a clear
act of sexual coercion, in which a man abducted and sexually abused scared young women,
but this is not addressed further. The HIV man’s acts of sexual violence were not considered
an issue relative to his deliberate attempt to spread of infection.
Stattin writes that an effective way to keep certain groups at a distance is to regard them
as criminals (Stattin, 1990, p. 120). Since publicly scapegoating HIV-affected groups, done
since the 1980s, was no longer acceptable, the rapist offered a legitimate surface on which
to project fears of infection and distance oneself from the infected. By situating the spread
of infection in the rapist’s body, it was possible to denounce the spreader of infection as
criminal. Some bodies are sticky, writes Ahmed (2004), which means that negative emotions
(in this case fear) are associated more easily with certain bodies than others, depending on
previous associations. The HIV man’s reappearance in the news media exemplifies the
stickiness of the rapist. In fact, in addition to the HIV men mentioned here, two different
“Hepatitis men” (1999 and 2008) also appear in news reports about rape. By transforming
the invisible threat of infection into a human-shaped rapist, the threat was made visible and
the spread of infection could be condemned and managed (with the police force). This
highlights that emotions are not (just) psychological states, but also political actions
(Ahmed, 2004). However, sticking fear of infection to the rapist’s body downplays the
criminality of rape. It was even hypothesised that the virus caused brain damage that made
the HIV man’s sexuality difficult to manage (Ljung, 2001, p. 95).
The Communicable Diseases Act became law in Sweden in 1989, making it a crime for
HIV-infected persons to fail to seek medical care and available treatment (Ljung, 2001,
p. 35). Thus, the issue associating the spread of infection with criminality was further
emphasised in the media when the HIV man escaped the police, and remained in hiding,
without access to antiretroviral drugs. The antiretroviral drugs, it was explained, reduced
his risk of infecting others and, more generally, explained: “why AIDS did not become the
explosive epidemic that many feared a few years ago” (Larsson, 1998). But now, according

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to the folklore of fear that news media reproduced, the HIV man stopped taking his an-
tiretroviral medicines. A friend disclosed that “he did not bring his medicine when he fled
from his apartment, and now he is getting thinner and thinner. Right now, he is very
confused’” (Wallin, 1998). The description of a desperate and “lethal” HIV-infected man on
the run without antiretroviral drugs was accompanied in the media by a photo depicting a
“severely emaciated man with large, slightly protruding, staring eyes” (Ljung, 2001, p. 92)
and the headline “The HIV man’s true face” (Harne, 1998). Finally, the body inhabited by
the invisible virus could be distinguished by the naked eye. As Bauman writes, after a long
time of discomfort and darkness (in this case, ten years in which women unknowingly were
endangered) sudden confrontation with the HIV man, the embodiment of the liquid fear of
infection, seemed to provide relief (Bauman, 2006).

The Alexandra man

In the spring of 2005, the “Alexandra man” was introduced in Swedish news media, and
identified as a 30-year-old man arrested and accused of raping two girls. When the police
searched the man’s computer, they found the pictures and contact information of up to 150
girls between the ages of 12 to 18. Alexandra man contacted these girls on various digital
platforms, including the rapidly growing chat forum Lunarstorm, and pretended to be a
woman named Alexandra. As “a friend” and by offering money or modelling careers,
“Alexandra” induced the girls to take sexually explicit pictures of themselves and to meet up
with a man (namely himself) for sex. He was later sentenced to ten years in prison for the
sexual exploitation of minors, sexual abuse and the rape of 58 girls.
However, the case catalysed liquid fear of “the Internet”. Fear of new technology is
nothing exceptional. The steam engine, electricity and the computer all gave rise to the same
anxiety, and consequently, to a folklore of fear. New technology, writes Stattin, moves us
into a borderlands (Stattin, 1990, p. 122). In some contemporary narratives of the Internet,
these borderlands are seen to offer emancipatory possibilities to experiment with identity,
but, in news coverage of the Alexandra man, this same freedom presented the threat and
explained the rapes. More specifically, the Internet inspired a liquid fear of who “lurked
behind the screen” (Sundsvalls tidning, 2006). The perception of the Internet as a dangerous
place was pervasive in reporting of the case “We are facing an explosion in the number of
online seductions” (Palmkvist, J. 2006); “Internet development and especially computers
with built-in webcams play right into the perpetrators’ hands”; and “Children and young
people today are just a click away from men” (Nord, 2007) were some of the concerns
expressed. Thus, coverage of the rapes implied that digital technology (built-in webcams)
and computer use (the “clicking”) constituted the danger, not men who rape children.
Particularly fearful was the recurring image of perpetrators in Internet borderlands reaching
into the children’s bedrooms without parents’ awareness: “Online abuse can take place
while the parents watch TV in the next room” (Letmark, 2007). In a similar rape case,
labelled the “Internet doctor” (2019) by the media, this fear took a further angle, when a
paediatrician, via his online care facility, was revealed to have persuaded parents to perform
actions on their children that were subsequently classified as sexual abuse.
When large-scale Internet use began in Sweden, in the mid-1990s, the Internet was
understood as a place for young people. In particular, the digital platform Lunarstorm, one
of the world’s first and largest chat forums with over a million members, came to symbolise
the young people’s Internet (New York Times, 2005). The Internet’s danger to young people

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 Gabriella Nilsson

was warned of early on. “Young people live dangerously online” read headlines when
Lunarstorm was mentioned (Svärdkrona, 2006). Youth culture has always been considered
a threat to morality and public order (Frykman, 1988), from jazz music in the 1930s,
through death metal and video violence in the 1980s, to online chat forums like Lunarstorm
in the 2000s. These phenomena are similar in posing, if any, a danger that is unclear. I
would argue that youth culture’s disruptive danger is such a vague and disturbing situation,
in need of clarification through a folklore of fear (Stattin, 1990, p. 168).
Thus, a pervasive theme of numerous folktales, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, was high-
lighted in the news reports about the Alexandra man. “He used a female alias to avoid scaring
the girls away” (Hansson, 2006); “The girls thought they were chatting with a woman
and therefore felt safe” (Palmkvist, P., 2006); “In long conversations on the Internet, ‘she’
lulled the girls into safety” (Barkman, 2006). In reality, the Alexandra man was a cynical sex
predator, an online paedophile, a rapist and a parent’s “worst nightmare” (El Rafie, 2006,
Andersson, 2006). “His goal was to have sex with 1,000 girls before his 30th birthday. He took
to the Internet to help him” (Härdmark, 2006). Without the Internet, it seems, the abuse
would not have happened. It is clear that, per Cohen (2002), the Alexandra man was evoked as
a “folk devil” within the moral panic that characterised contemporary views of the Internet.
Although not typical of “grooming” cases – most perpetrators do not assume an alias or hide
their sexual intentions (Rogland & Christianson, 2016) – the Alexandra man came to embody
the fear of the unknown and invisible Internet; the fear that a person is not who he pretends to
be. However, the media narrative failed to elaborate on the problems of rape while, once
more, an admittedly dangerous and evil rapist figure served as a catalyst, and his acts as a
placeholder, for dwelling on other fears.

Hotboy
I have illustrated how the liquid fear of invisible deadly viruses and unknown digital bor-
derlands were “held together” by the pre-established criminal figure of the rapist. The rapist,
in the form of the HIV man and the Alexandra man, was utilised as both embodiment and
placeholder for news media to dwell on the dangers of HIV and the Internet. In regard to
the case of yet another “HIV man”, labelled “Hotboy” by the media after his online alias,
both these fears were intertwined since it was revealed that HIV-infected Hotboy had pri-
marily operated online. In June 2007, a young woman told police that a 32-year-old man,
calling himself Hotboy, had sexually assaulted her. During the investigation, police found
that the man had been in contact with another 130 teenage girls, some as young as 12, via
various Internet chat forums. Under false pretences, he lured girls to hotel rooms, where he
offered them alcohol and filmed them having unprotected sex, in some cases raping them.
At least two girls were infected with HIV (Olsson, 2008, Darin, 2007, Wahldén, 2007,
Hellberg, 2007). Again, not the numerous sexual assaults but the growing threat of infection
via Internet contact evoked the floating fear.
Like HIV man and Alexandra man, Hotboy was described as “a wandering, intelligent
virus, a human insecure weapon, a self-destructiveness aimed at dragging the outside
world down into the abyss” (Rayman, 2009). There are apparent similarities between the
folklore of fear analysed here and the figures that appear in traditional folklore, not least
the dangerous male water creature Näcken (Nixie) who, in Scandinavian folklore, lured
victims into the water by playing the violin. He was especially dangerous to women,
whom he tried to seduce or in other ways harm by, for example, adopting false identities

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(Stattin, 1984, p. 26). Jochum Stattin describes how, despite adults’ disbelief in Näcken,
stories about the creature served to induce a fear of water in children, which prevented
them from drowning (Stattin, 1984, p. 35). Likewise, fearful news media figures like
Hotboy should make young women change their behaviour. But what behaviour? Cohen
claims that, during a moral panic that designates certain phenomena as a threat to
fundamental societal values, “moral entrepreneurs” intervene at a certain level of moral
indignation to demand action (Cohen, 2002). Interestingly, in the case of Hotboy, moral
opinion was divided.
Hotboy, as he embodied two separate liquid fears, seemed to require two parallel news
media narratives. One narrative highlighted the phenomenon of grooming, once again
putting girls’ behaviour on “youth sites” like Lunarstorm in the limelight. “The Internet
involves special risks: it is easier [for girls, presumably] to push the boundaries when you are
at home in your own room, in front of a screen and a webcam” (Rebas, 2007). This con-
temporary danger was contrasted with the presumed less dangerous past. “Meeting Peter by
the haystack in the old days, you knew who you tumbled with. But today, the good-looking,
young and blonde Peter whom you meet on the Internet, may turn out to be a 37-year-old
paedophile” (Rebas, 2007). Once again, not rape but fake identities posed the real threat,
against which girls needed to uphold their (moral) boundaries, even at home.
The other narrative highlighted the fear of the deliberate spread of the HIV virus. “None
of his sex partners knew about his dark secret” (Hellberg, 2007). In a dramatic tone, it was
disclosed that Hotboy had been infected as a teenager, but “despite that, he had sex with
many girls without using a condom. It may be a revenge for his lost life” (Metro, 2007).
Again, while HIV was treatable and considered a chronic condition, infection was presented
as a “dark secret” and a “lost life”. This narrative is clearly part of a folklore of fear,
seemingly aiming to promote the use of prophylactics, not counteracting rape. “There are
remarkably few discussions with teenagers about sexually transmitted diseases. There is an
increased need for this” (Wahldén, 2007), was the conclusion drawn by the media. Both
narratives diminish the significance of sexual violence, and the perpetrator’s responsibility,
placing responsibility on his (potential) victims.
Consequently, both narratives highlight a divide between those moral entrepreneurs who
warned of the consequences of an “Internet panic” (Rebas, 2007) and those who feared a
renewed “HIV panic” (Sydsvenskan, 2007). One side stressed that “[Hotboy] had unprotected
sex with some of the girls. At least two of them were infected with HIV. One would think that
the subsequent reporting would be about risk awareness and condom use. Instead, attention is
once again on the dangers lurking online. While some of the tips are sensible […] the fear also
leads to overreactions, such as parents giving their children an Internet ban” (Rebas, 2007).
The other side pointed out that “despite justified concerns over how the young girls were
treated [by Hotboy], it is important to calm the debate. The deed of individual criminals must
not lead to the nearly 4,000 HIV-infected people living in Sweden being considered pariahs.
Under no circumstances must Sweden return to the mood that prevailed during the first half of
the 1980s, when […] it could be said that people living with HIV should be isolated on a desert
island” (Sydsvenskan, 2007).
Stattin writes that practices used to protect oneself from Näcken and other figures reveal
something about contemporary challenges (Stattin, 1984, p. 27). In the case of Hotboy,
however, it seems unclear what these challenges were – the need to protect oneself against
infection or the Internet. The quotes above highlight a struggle over how the rapist figure
should be utilised in the news reports about Hotboy and, more specifically, which associations

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 Gabriella Nilsson

should be attached to the rapist’s sticky body and which should not. Thus, following Ahmed
(2004), we can conclude that the politics of emotion is an ongoing, antagonistic operation.

Discussion
Undeniably, sexual violence has received increased visibility in the public sphere over the
last few years, especially in the media, and, to some extent, in crime statistics (Alcoff, 2018;
Andersson et al., 2019). It is well-studied that news coverage of rape reproduces previous
news narratives, using familiar themes that are repeated over time (Bird, 2003; Simkin,
2013). Extensive research shows that these narratives perpetuate myths and stereotypes
about rape, rapists and rape victims (Burt, 1980; Franiuk, Seefelt, and Vandello, 2008;
Bonnes, 2013; Worthington, 2013; Waterhouse-Watson, 2016). A commonly used narrative
tool is the way that victims are described as either deserving or innocent; presented as
virgins attacked by monsters, or promiscuous women who brought the rape upon them-
selves (Benedict, 1992; Aldridge, 1995; Meyer, 2010; O’Hara, 2012). Perpetrators of sexual
violence are regularly described as “beasts” or “perverts” and as such distanced from
“ordinary men” (Mason and Monckton-Smith, 2008; Boshoff and Prinsloo, 2015).
However, this chapter has highlighted and elaborated on the paradox that I have touched
upon in previous work, namely that even though the news media report rape cases extensively
and increasingly, rape itself is hardly considered in the news. Rather, I have shown that most
rape genres, above all, serve as placeholders to accumulate news media space for discussion
and management of other, seemingly more urgent issues, such as migration, national identity,
city planning or celebrity (Nilsson, 2019a, 2019b, 2020) and, as in this chapter, the liquid fears
of viruses and the Internet. More generally, and historically, rape serves as a metaphor for the
devastation of honour and human dignity, as well as of natural resources and national ter-
ritories (Nilsson and Lövkrona, 2020). Rape, as a concept, is obviously a cultural, multi-
functional tool more than anything else; a Swiss Army knife used to manage all kinds of
societal problems (except, perhaps, patriarchy). In fact, rape is reminiscent of a root meta-
phor, in Sherry Ortner’s classic sense (1973); by establishing a certain view of the world, it
implicitly suggests certain valid and effective ways of acting upon it. That such a strong root
metaphor becomes sticky and therefore widely useful is not surprising. My main point,
however, is that attaching various dangers and fears to the rapist displaces other societal
problems, such as the act of rape itself, who rapes whom, how and why.
What consequences does this have for society’s perception and management of rape? We
know for a fact that, even in relatively gender-equal countries, rape is not becoming rarer,
but more common. As Linda Martín Alcoff (2018) has argued, the political effects of the
increased visibility of sexual violence have been highly variable. In addition, we know that
rape does not usually take place as described in the news media (Nilsson and Lövkrona,
2020). I would suggest that the seemingly great interest in rape, measured in the number of
sensationalised media reports and published articles, implicitly hides a failure to address
rape’s gender and violence aspect and specifically women’s exposure to rape by men. In this
chapter, I have compared news narratives to folklore to highlight how this “hiding” occurs
in news coverage of rape. Folklore, by definition, consists of paraphrases. The fear of
Näcken, as Stattin shows, does not emphasise the danger of Näcken himself, but that of
nature. This is the problem with news reports taking shape as a folklore of fear. Fear of the
HIV men and the Alexandra man emphasises the danger of infection and false identities at
the expense of rape.

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Notes
1 All quotations from print media have been translated from Swedish by the author.
2 The chapter is based on Swedish news media material collected within the study Rape in Sweden
1990–2015, carried out between 2015 and 2020 and financed by the Swedish Research Council.
Initially, all news articles about rape published in the tabloid Expressen during the period
1990–2015 were retrieved. Based on these articles, specific cases were selected for further analysis
with various objectives, after which articles about these cases were collected from all major
Swedish newspapers.

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 13
FORWARD AND BACKWARDS
Sexual violence in Portuguese news media
Júlia Garraio, Inês Amaral, Rita Basílio Simões, and Sofia José Santos

Introduction
In the last two decades, Portugal witnessed deep social-cultural transformations regarding
gender norms and is currently on par with the EU in terms of legislation concerning the
compliance towards international regimes of gender equality and the protection of women’s
rights (Poiares, 2016; Wall et al., 2016). Media visibility of gender-based violence and public
awareness of the seriousness of sexual violence have also been increasing (Simões, 2016;
Cerqueira and Gomes, 2017). Nonetheless, sexual violence is still pervasive in the country
and the journalistic practices that cover it are marked by diversity, tensions, contradictions,
improvements and setbacks. While providing an overview of trends and patterns of sexual
violence news coverage in Portugal, we will focus our attention on four of the most mediatic
rape stories in the first two decades of the 21st century: the Casa Pia ring of sexual ex-
ploitation of minors, the Telheiras rapist, the Gaia verdict and the rape allegation against
the national football icon Cristiano Ronaldo. Stemming from a critical, intersectional and
feminist perspective, we will analyse how these stories were covered by mainstream media
and map the diversity of journalism practices that were mobilised aiming to explore how
rape stories are framed and mediated in Portuguese media. We will examine whether and
how hierarchies of privilege and discrimination regarding class, gender, race and nationality
inform Portuguese media coverage of sexual violence and explore its implications con-
cerning the (re)production of patriarchal imaginaries in today’s neo-liberal age.1

Sexual violence in Portugal: Law, media training and media coverage

Portuguese authorities have committed to tackling violence against women in tandem with
efforts to promote equality between women and men, especially following the country’s
ratification of the Istanbul Convention in 2013 (GREVIO, 2019). The Portuguese legislative
framework to address sexual violence from the approach of the Istanbul Convention has
been built and improved, but essential gaps remain. A critical area is the definition of the
crime of rape, punished with a penalty of one to six years (article 164 from the Portuguese
Penal Code). Despite the successive amendments (1995, 1998, 2007, 2015 and 2019) that this

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-16 145

 Júlia Garraio et al.

crime has undergone, before and after the entry into force of the Convention, the definition
of rape continues to be based on the absence of freely given consent and requires the use of
“constraint”. Likewise, only some limited forms of sexual harassment are addressed by
the criminal legislation. In 2015, some types of verbal sexual abuse were included in Article
170 of the Penal Code (on “Importunação Sexual”), but, as Simões and Silveirinha (2022,
p. 623) contend, “there is still no specific street-harassment legislation that would create
more targeted provisions to address and acknowledge the abuse that women and girls
disproportionately face in public spaces”.
The responses by law-enforcement institutions and the criminal justice sector are another
area of concern. For scholars, “inertia and resistance are still felt at the level of social norms
and organisational cultures of those applying the law” (Torres et al., 2018, pp. 69–70). Thus,
the legal discourse often considers that the victims of sexual violence are co-responsible for
the (circumstances leading to the) violence inflicted on them and creates narratives that do
not communicate the way victims experience rape (Ventura, 2018). One of the landmarks of
the (criticism of the) sexism in the Portuguese judiciary, and society more broadly, dates
back to 1989 when the verdict involving the rape of two foreign tourists visiting Portugal
prompted strong feminist criticism and gained considerable media visibility. The judge
considered that the women were co-responsible for the rape because they must have been
aware of the risks of hitchhiking in the “hunt area of the Iberian male” (Ventura, 2015). The
case is still remembered as a landmark to check the advances and setbacks in the prose-
cution of rape and in women’s struggles (Câncio, 2014). Indeed, the prosecution of sexual
crimes in Portuguese courts exposes the continued pervasiveness of entrenched rape myths
and scripts which obfuscate sexual violence as a social phenomenon embedded in traditional
notions of sexuality and gender inequality (Simões, 2016; Ventura, 2014, 2017, 2018).
Hence, Simões argues (2016, p. 276) that this is the reason why it is so important to feminist
analysis to remove sex from rape. This would allow intervening in a positive way, namely in
the legal treatment of female victims. For Simões, as long as a discursivity marked by a
phallocentric culture predominates, victims will continue to be seen, at least in part, as co-
responsible for their victimisation.
Patriarchal conceptions of masculinity, femininity and sexual morality and the enacting
of traditional hierarchies of privilege and discrimination regarding class, gender, race and
nationality continue to determine who is perceived as a sexual offender and who is credible
as a rape victim. As Silveirinha, Simões and Santos (2020, p. 212) argue, “women can face
rape’s ‘double jeopardy’. This means the victim is ‘scrutinized for the veracity of her story,
in terms of her perceived character, her sexual history, mode of dress or attitudes which may
be seen as contextual to rape’”. Using intersectional lenses, on the victim’s side, women
whose accusations are validated in court tend to conform to a specific pattern: modesty
regarding dress code and social attitudes, no signs of “sexual promiscuity”, the exhibition of
marks of inflicted violence proving physical resistance, a social status that is superior to the
rapist’s. On the perpetrator’s side, men convicted of sexual crimes tend to be associated with
marginality, deviancy and/or social subalternity (unemployed, low-paid jobs, single, without
sexual appeal, from minorities, psychotic and/or uneducated) (Ventura, 2014, 2017, 2018).
The two patterns converge in the validation of expectations regarding sexuality that pervade
Portuguese society: the assumption that a particular type of woman would not engage in sex
voluntarily with a particular type of man is central to the credibility of a rape allegation.
Therefore, accusations targeting men with considerable social, economic and sexual capital
tend to be met with suspicion.

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Journalism validates many of these rape myths and scripts. A study based on a sample of
news from the period 2007–2014 (Ventura, 2014) observed the following trends in
Portuguese newspapers: tendency to mediate rape stories as police cases and individual
dramas derived from the sexual aggressor’s dysfunctionality and/or monstrosity; predom-
inance of short texts which do not include inputs from specialists and scientific literature nor
a discussion of legal procedures to prosecute rape; absence of information regarding
institutions that offer support services for victims. Sexual violence as a social phenomenon
related to other forms of violence against women hence remains largely unarticulated.
Perceived as single events, sex crimes are mostly relegated to sections devoted to crime in
sensationalist media with voyeuristic perspectives. Titles are aimed at catching the reader’s
attention through shock and awe: “Obliges her daughter to live with the rapist after the
assaults” (Fonseca, 2016), “Predator rapes girlfriend’s disabled granddaughter for seven
years” (Curado, 2021). As Benedict (1992) observed elsewhere, sexual aggressors tend to be
depicted as deviant masculinities and imbued with traits of monstrosity. Rape stories with
particular gruesome details involving physical violence and/or the transgression of (family)
morals (incest, paedophilia) are therefore more likely to catch media attention. Sexual
violence is rendered visible as a social and/or pathological deviancy, especially among
deprived classes, and commodified as a spectacle of horrors, which ultimately recomforts
society and its social norms: the rapist is the Other among us, who may have succeeded in
hiding his monstrosity for a long period, but who ultimately does not represent “our”
models of sexuality and masculinity.
Some of the reasons for this phenomenon lie in the fact that journalism is only con-
ventionally perceived as “good journalism” when unbiased with different terms sustaining
this claim – neutrality, objectivity, accuracy. As some of us have argued elsewhere, “if
today’s societies are based upon generalised (even if at times shifting) patriarchal struc-
tures, ‘objective-based’ sexual violence coverage is more prone to choose the side of the
perpetrator” (Santos et al., 2022, p. 3). Furthermore, in Portugal, journalism education
and the employment conditions of journalists have tended to reproduce these structures,
with limited opportunities for critical reflection. Additionally, journalism activity was,
for decades, subordinated to a dictatorial regime (Cascais, 2004), delaying all sorts of
initiatives of formal education when compared to the rest of Europe. The first higher
education programmes in communication were created in the 1970s and 1980s and only in
the following decade did we witness the progressive emergence of journalism as an
autonomous area of education, with the launch of the first Journalism degree at the
University of Coimbra. At the end of the 1990s, the formative offer at the national level in
the public and private sectors increased substantially. Nevertheless, approaches to critical
issues in contemporary societies such as civic and critical literacy, gender, racism, xeno-
phobia or the different dimensions of violence are practically invisible in the curriculum of
undergraduate degrees in journalism. Some non-formal learning programmes have been
able to “compensate for the gaps” in integrating gender mainstreaming in undergraduate
degrees, such as the Gender Observatory, created under the scope of the Global Media
Monitoring Project (Simões, Amaral and Santos, 2021). Still, in general, the integration of
gender issues in programmes results solely from the research interests of particular lec-
turers. Basically, the above-mentioned quest for objectivity (Santos et al., 2022) has
deprived journalism training of critical perspectives of inclusion, diversity and non-
discrimination (Cerqueira et al., 2014), as well as the promotion of critical and civic lit-
eracies that articulate journalism and democracy in its broad aspects, namely a “diversified

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reflection on civic contexts” that impact on societies (Brites, Amaral and Silva, 2019,
p. 11). Our analysis of the media coverage of four rape stories signals precisely some
effects of the absence of the promotion of civic literacies in dominant journalist training
and practices.
The reproduction of rape scripts and myths in Portuguese media is not unchallenged
though. There are many examples of media practices that frame rape as a social problem
related to broader cultural practices, gender inequality and patriarchal thinking. Fernanda
Câncio (born 1964) (Diário de Notícias), Paula Cosme Pinto (born 1984) (Expresso) and
Aline Flor (born 1990) (Público), to name just a few, are respected well-known journalists
who work for the most important national newspapers contributing with their investigative
journalism and their columns to the informed discussion of gender-based violence and the
deconstruction of rape myths. Their prominence in Portuguese media results from the evo-
lution of democratic Portugal, namely the increasing participation of women in the labour
market, the fact that female students outnumber male students in journalism courses
(Miranda and Camponez, 2021), a situation which changed the gender (in)balance in news-
rooms and paved the way for women with feminist sensibilities to reach positions where their
voices could be heard. The process was met with some resistance. For instance, Cosme Pinto
reports that her initial work on sexualities and gender-based violence was perceived by some
colleagues as a “bit slutty”. She notes though that the mood in newsrooms has changed in the
last decade and now there is more openness to address gender-based violence through feminist
lenses. However, the kind of verbal abuse and body shaming that she faces in the section for
readers persists.2
The analysis of four of the most mediatic cases of rape (allegations) of the first two
decades of twenty-first century Portugal exposes precisely these tensions. The Casa Pia
investigation and the Telheiras’s rapist reveal the strength of the monstrosity/deviancy script
even when the (alleged) aggressors do not conform to the dominant imaginary of rapist. The
comparative examination of two highly mediatised 2018 cases, the Gaia verdict and the rape
allegation against Cristiano Ronaldo, signal the instability of rape in Portuguese media
coverage, i.e., how the reproduction of rape myths co-exists with journalism’s practices that
challenge these assumptions.

The Casa Pia case

Sexual violence gained great attention in Portuguese media when, in 2002, allegations of a
ring of sexual abuse and trafficking of minors run by employees of Casa Pia, a state-run
institution for orphans and poor children, led to an investigation and a highly mediatic trial
that lasted more than five years and culminated in the conviction in 2010 of, among others,
a media celebrity and a former ambassador. A former minister was detained in the course of
the investigation, but the charges against him were dropped. Since the case involved
powerful and famous men, the media had to deconstruct the perception of the paedophile as
a monster who could be identified on the streets while depicting the suspected paedophiles
as sneaky monsters (Ventura, 2014). However, precisely because the media focussed the
most mediatic personalities involved in the investigation, public opinion remained deeply
polarised and absorbed by the political meaning of the trial: on the one hand, those who
downplayed the allegations as a trap or as being instrumentalised to attack powerful pol-
iticians and, on the other, those who assumed that the case was the tip of an iceberg ex-
posing the impunity of national (political) elites.

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The Telheiras case

The coverage of the Telheiras rapist exemplifies the difficulty in imagining sexual offenders
beyond the above-mentioned profile identified by Ventura (2014, 2017, 2018). This serial
rapist admitted having committed around 40 rapes at knife-point in the Great Lisbon area
in 2008–2009; most victims were underage girls. Though the media had reported on the
crimes before his arrest on 5 March 2010, the peak of the coverage occurred afterwards
and in association with the bewilderment triggered by the disclosure of his identity. He was
a 30-year-old data analyst who was studying the chemical industry and who was living in a
recently purchased flat with his long-term girlfriend, whom he was planning to marry.
“Henrique Sotero: ID, life, interests, crimes, evidence, investigation and punishment”, a
piece published in the mainstream newspaper Diário de Notícias (2010), juxtaposes a
detailed portrait of him as a respectable and well-integrated “normal man” (job, good
grades, hobbies, healthy habits, long term relationship, etc.) with the violence of his crimes.
The reference to what might have been experienced in his childhood as the traumatic
divorce of his parents, alongside the reference to his schizophrenic mother, offers readers a
way of making sense of that discursive dissonance through pathologisation. Indeed, the
media coverage focused, on the one hand, on the shock experienced by his family and
acquaintances and, on the other, on the explanation of his deeds through psychology. The
fact that he himself had sought a psychologist in 2009 to try to control his sexual urges
reinforced this narrative. By not inquiring about the (long-term) effects on his victims, the
reasons why many of them did not even file a police report, nor critically discussing the
widespread bewilderment caused by the revelation of his identity, the media did not chal-
lenge the rape myths which exclude successful and integrated men like him from the
imaginary of the rapist. The Telheiras rapist gave considerable media visibility to sexual
violence; however, since the media framed the story as a tragedy falling upon his inner circle
and himself as a victim of his pathology, sexual violence as a social phenomenon entangled
in constructions of masculinity and sexuality remained largely unarticulated.

The Gaia case

On 20 September 2018, the centre-left daily newspaper Público reported that a barkeeper
and a bouncer in a disco in Vila Nova de Gaia, a city near Oporto, were sentenced for
sexual abuse, instead of rape, for having had “sex” with a woman in an alcoholic coma. The
title “They raped her when she was unconscious, but the court understood that wrongdoing
is not ‘high’” (Viana, 2018) signals that the piece challenges the verdict, which referred as
mitigating factors the fact that the woman did not suffer serious physical injuries, there had
been a climate of seduction before the crime and the aggressors were well integrated with
society. The verdict seemed to echo the broad understandings of much of the national
culture of gender relations. At the same time, it was met with widespread anger and criticism
of the judiciary. The media coverage, especially if we consider quality media outlets such as
Público, reveals that there were efforts to discuss the implications of the verdict and raise
awareness of the problem of sexual violence. The case was used to scrutinise prevailing legal
practices and a significant part of the coverage focused on feminist protests, reproducing
activists’ criticism and understandings of rape (Santos et al., 2022). Our interviews con-
ducted in 2020 with 31 journalists3 suggest that media professionals have an extremely
negative perception of the main judge involved in the case, associating him with outdated

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morals. The wording to describe him included “mediaeval”, “cavernous”, “outdated”, “out
of step with reality”, “ignorant”, “sexist” and “what we have to change”.

The Mayorga/Ronaldo case

Nine days after the first news about the Gaia verdict, the German magazine Spiegel pub-
lished an investigative report based on documents disclosed by football leaks and on an
interview with Kathryn Mayorga, an American woman who accused Cristiano Ronaldo of
having raped her in 2009. Portuguese coverage and discussion of the allegation were
accompanied by a strong wave of support for the national icon in social media and among
personalities from the most diverse areas and political spectrum. The President, government
members, politicians, celebrities and sports personalities were asked to comment on the
case. Many avoided discussing the rape allegation, and preferred to stress Ronaldo’s talent,
accomplishments and status as a national hero, while others openly expressed their support
for the footballer. A study based on a sample of 140 news stories and opinion columns from
mainstream newspapers concluded that, given the high-profile of the case and “its capacity
to generate considerable awareness”, the Portuguese media coverage “seems to have lost a
good opportunity to highlight rape allegations as a serious matter”. On the contrary, media
coverage “mostly stressed the improbability of the allegations” (Silveirinha, Simões and
Santos, 2020). Support for Ronaldo resulted in the (re)enactment of rape myths such as “a
man like him does not need to rape” and “a woman who follows a man to his place wants
sex”; and of what has been coined as narrative immunity, i.e., the construction of narratives
“that shift blame away from footballers and onto the women involved, frequently ascribing
sole agency for anything that occurred to the women” (Waterhouse-Watson, 2013, p. 4). As
we argued before (Garraio et al., 2020), it operated through three intertwined strategies: the
construction of Ronaldo as a positive model of masculinity (the hero of a “rags to riches”
story; the good son, the good father, the sexy athlete and the generous charity spender); the
depiction of #MeToo, the context framing Mayorga’s interview, as a platform for oppor-
tunists, false allegations and American puritanism; and the discrediting of Mayorga as an
unreliable woman.
Support for Mayorga was rare, but several feminists, though refraining from com-
menting on the rape allegation, denounced the activation, dissemination and normalisation
of rape myths through the discussion of the case. Ana Sá Lopes, for instance, entitled her
Público editorial “Saint Ronaldo and the prostitutes” (Lopes, 2018) to denounce the sexism
pervading the debate. With her piece “Only 3%, 4% of the reported situations are simula-
tions” (Flor, 2018), journalist Aline Flor tried to rebuke the myth of the “false allegations”
which pervaded the debate about Ronaldo/Mayorga, i.e., the assumption that a significant
part of police investigations for rape are triggered by forged claims.
In sum, while the coverage of the Gaia verdict denoted openness towards feminist un-
derstandings of sexual violence, refrained from activating rape myths and tended to frame the
global #MeToo as a moment of a deeper awareness of violence against women, the inverse
situation can be observed with Ronaldo/Mayorga’s case. This comparative analysis suggests
that rape myths function as a repository which can be activated on specific occasions, in
accordance with the symbolic power of the (alleged) aggressors, because the understanding of
rape remains unstable. Both cases occurred in a broader context of the negotiation of gender
and sexual norms in Portugal, a country that continues to be framed by sexism and pervasive
patriarchal structures and practices, but where legislation for gender equality and justice has

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been consistently implemented for the last decades and where international media’s feminist
mainstreaming is now disseminated. The tensions resulting from these aspects make sexual
violence a contested space for the negotiation of meanings concerning what is “real rape”,
with the concomitant contestation or activation of ingrained rape myths. The comparative
analysis of the divergent reactions to the Gaia verdict and the allegation against Ronaldo
emblematically expose these tensions. In this unstable context, what makes a situation per-
ceived as sexual violence and a man as a rapist has to do not only with the credibility of the
evidence but also with the (credibility of the) identities at stake. The Gaia verdict echoes the
dominant rape script identified by Ventura: though both men were apparently working class,
the fact that they knew the victim and had jobs worked decisively in their favour. The vitality
of the protests and the media visibility granted to feminist voices signals, however, that this
script was being contested in some sectors of society at least as long as it did not involve men in
positions of power and/or with strong symbolic capital.
That was precisely the case with Ronaldo. Whannel observed that it “is in relation to the
nation that sport-related morality is most conspicuously determined by positionality”, i.e.,
by our national identity (2002, p. 163). Pedro Almeida Sande’s op-ed in the conservative
newspaper Observador echoed the mood among large sectors of Portuguese society:
“Cristiano Ronaldo is one of Portugal’s modern heroes, perhaps his greatest name, and
that’s why the Portuguese, more than any other people, should make a profession of faith in
his innocence” (Sande, 2018). In a country pervaded by imaginaries of past colonial
grandeur (Cardina, 2016), which contrast with the country’s reality as a poor peripheric EU
member, Ronaldo embodies nationalist aspirations as well as dreams of social mobility and
(sexual) consumerism. In an extremely unequal Portuguese society, he embodies aspirations
of enrichment through professional success and a world of glamour (cars, yachts, villas and
beautiful women) which are practically unattainable for the people who share his origins,
the working classes, as well as the middle classes. His popularity emblematically mobilises
the intersection of banal nationalism (Billig, 1995) with vortextuality (how celebrities rep-
resent our fantasies of lifestyle, luxury, conspicuous consumption and display) (Whannel,
2002). In sum, his status as a national icon, world celebrity and sex symbol, is incompatible
with the dominant imaginary of the rapist, making the rape allegation inconceivable for
wider sectors of Portuguese society. Our 2020 interviews with journalists highlight precisely
Ronaldo’s enduring good reputation. The majority praised Ronaldo: “an example”,
“intelligent”, “perfectionist”, “talent”, “genius”, “national hero”, “super-hero”, “cham-
pion”, “dedication”, “tenacity”, “work”. Criticism was rare and subtle: “super-manly”
(while laughing) and “too much self-esteem”. Only one woman journalist known for her
work in gender equality alluded to the rape allegation by describing him as “the one who got
away with that situation”.

Final remarks
A broader analysis of sexual violence news coverage in Portugal exposes a heterogenous
picture marked by the co-existence of divergent and contradictory practices: On the one
hand, sensationalism, voyeurism, reproduction of ingrained rape myths and lack of com-
mitment to social change; on the other, efforts to mediate rape through feminist lenses as a
social problem related to gender inequality and broader forms of violence against women.
Deficient and/or absent training of the majority of media professionals in reporting on
gender-based violence, contingencies concerning the political economy of the media (labour

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precarity, immediacy in the production of news, commercial impositions), lack of gender-

sensitive public regulation and editorial policies, the sensationalism and voyeurism of the
popular press and the pervasiveness of sexism in Portuguese society underpin the perpetuation
of deficient practices of producing news about sexual violence. However, the increasing
participation of women journalists in newsrooms, greater opposition to gender inequality and
gender-based violence in Portuguese society and feminist mainstreaming have been con-
tributing to the adoption and dissemination of practices aimed at combating sexual violence
as a social problem. This is the outcome of social contingencies (women with feminist sen-
sibilities have been getting access to newsrooms) and often of the “good will” of editors, who
are aware that social norms and perceptions of gender-based violence are changing in
Portugal and therefore accept/welcome innovation in the coverage of sexual violence. Scholars
and journalists have already produced material in Portuguese that can be used in the training
of professionals (Ventura, 2014; Ventura and Ferreira, 2017). What is missing though is the
systematic introduction of gender mainstreaming in journalism practices and the thorough
adoption of international norms and recommendations by newsrooms.

Notes
1 This chapter is informed by our research at the project “DeCodeM (De)Coding Masculinities:
Towards an enhanced understanding of media’s role in shaping perceptions of masculinities in
Portugal”, Grant PTDC/COM-CSS/31740/2017, Foundation for Science and Technology
(Portugal). This project included a thematic area which explored how pervasive conceptions and
ideals of masculinities in the Portuguese mediascape contributed to include, refrain or exclude the
debates on masculinities, sexual violence and sexual harassment generated around #MeToo. We
also draw on the 31 interviews with journalists that Júlia Garraio conducted in 2020 in the course
of the project. The selection of the interviewees was gender-balanced and aimed at including
professionals covering areas such as politics, economics, society, culture and sports. Interviewees
were mostly from Portuguese mainstream newspapers and TV channels. There were also free-
lancers and journalists working for investigative information sites.
2 Interview conducted by Júlia Garraio for the project DeCodeM on 16 June 2020.
3 Our interviews with journalists included a section with a list of Portuguese public figures.
Interviewees, with the guarantee of confidentiality, were asked to say a word or sentence expressing
their perceptions of each personality.

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154
 14
REPRESENTATIONS OF
GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE
AGAINST CHILDREN
IN NIGERIA
Onyinyechi Nancy Nwaolikpe

Introduction
Gender-based violence (GBV) against children occurs everywhere, including in and around
schools, in homes, communities, religious groups and gatherings, neighbourhoods and on
social media platforms (UNESCO, 2020). This affects millions of children in different
countries around the world and can include verbal abuse, bullying, sexual abuse, harass-
ment, coercion, assault and rape which are “perpetrated as a result of gender norms and
stereotypes and enforced by unequal power dynamics” (UNESCO, 2016, p. 13). Harmful
social and gender norms, household poverty and weak infrastructure are part of what drives
gender-based violence against children (Alexander-Scott, Bell and Holden, 2016). Although
national actions address violence against children and adolescents, they often give
inadequate attention to gender-based violence against children and adolescents (and against
girls in particular) (UNICEF, 2020).
According to studies by UNICEF (2015, 2022), Nigeria is considered to have the largest
number of child brides in Africa and one of the highest prevalence rates in the world, with
more than 23 million girls married off as children. UN Women (2016) showed that 43.5% of
girls in Nigeria are married by the age of 15. Similarly, Nigeria has the third highest absolute
number of women and girls (19.9 million) who have undergone Female Genital Mutilation/
Cutting (FGM/C). The same studies also found that six out of every ten children in Nigeria
experience some form of violence. One in four girls and 10% of boys have been victims of
sexual violence (and this figure does not include child marriage or FGM/C) and of the children
who reported violence, fewer than five out of 100 received any form of support. Furthermore,
of children that experienced physical violence in childhood, over half had their first experience
between the ages of six and 11. Approximately, one in ten children first experience gender-
based violence under the age of five (UNICEF, 2015). Intrastate and interstate conflicts in
Nigeria have increased gender-based violence against children. Children are abducted, kid-
napped, raped and forced into marriage, especially in the North-East (UNODC, 2022).
Whilst, in Nigeria as elsewhere, gender-based violence against children is dis-
proportionately – and sometimes exclusively – aimed at girls (e.g. dowry-related violence,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-17 155

 Onyinyechi Nancy Nwaolikpe

child marriage, female genital mutilation), there are some forms of violence that dis-
proportionately impact boy children worldwide, most notably child soldiering. Gender-
based violence against children has negative short-term and long-term consequences,
including some forms of harm that are specific to children, such as reduced school academic
performance and impaired brain development (UNICEF, 2017).
Understanding these forms of violence against children as gender-based requires an
analysis that considers gender violence as part and parcel of gendered inequalities more
generally. Social and cultural expectations and norms define the different and unequal roles
men and women play in Nigeria. Studies of gender-based violence against girls in Nigeria
both echo what is known about the abuse of adult women and highlight specificities in girl
children’s experiences. For example, Esere, Idowu and Omotosho’s (2009) study on gender-
based domestic violence against children in Nigeria found that the majority of girl children
experienced more physical and psychological violence than sexual abuse in their homes. In
addition to detailing the kinds of violence experienced, the study found that the reasons
given for abusing girl children highlighted their gendered and generational subordination:
girl children are beaten and humiliated for refusing to allow their genitals to be cut or
mutilated and physically abused when they report that the man of the house raped them or
wanted to rape them. Nnadi’s (2014) work on child marriage – practised especially in the
Northern region of Nigeria – details some of the physical harms of this violation, including
early pregnancies which lead to vesicovaginal fistula sickness. This traditional practice
violates the girl-child and it is also a violation of child rights and human rights.
Existing research has also pointed to widespread acceptance of some forms of gender-
based violence, including on the part of victims, because it is seen to reinforce family
structures (Odimegwu, Okemgbo and Ayila, 2010). Similarly, mothers of raped girls are
blamed for not training their girl children to be morally sound and strongly resist sexual
advances. Instead, the raped girls are blamed for behaving immorally and causing the abuse
(Odimegwu, Okemgbo and Ayila, 2010).
In 2015, Nigeria enacted the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act to eliminate
violence in private and public life, prohibit all forms of violence against persons and provide
maximum protection and effective remedies for victims and punishments of offenders.
Relatedly, the Trafficking in Persons (Prohibition Enforcement and Administration) Act,
enacted into law in 2003 and amended in 2005 and 2015, was designed to provide an
effective and comprehensive legal and institutional framework for the prohibition, pre-
vention, detection, prosecution and punishment of human trafficking and related offences in
Nigeria, to protect victims of human trafficking and to promote and facilitate national and
international cooperation. These Acts were enacted to stop violence against children,
especially sexual exploitation, domestic and physical violence, and the use of rape and
forced marriage in the context of armed conflict. Despite these legislative changes, gender-
based violence against children continues to be pervasive, demonstrating the importance of
tackling the issue on multiple fronts.
As observed by Heise (1998), male dominance is the foundation for any realistic theory of
violence anywhere in the world. This is by no means unique to Nigeria, though it is also
important to understand the specificities of the Nigerian context in order to effect change. This
chapter contributes to this effort by exploring the role of the national media in supporting – or
challenging – norms relating to gendered inequalities and gender-based violence against
children. It presents a content analysis of stories about gender-based violence against girls in
two of Nigeria’s leading newspapers –The Punch and The Guardian – throughout 2021. It

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 Gender‐based violence against children in Nigeria

seeks to determine the volume of news stories on gender-based violence against children
published by the selected newspapers; ascertain the prominence given to these stories; and
explore if and how these news stories engage with gender stereotypes and victim-blaming
through the content and language usage.

Methodology
In Nigeria, there are over a hundred local and national newspapers and publications. Some
of the daily Nigerian newspapers, about 20 of them, have national coverage, circulation and
readership (Okwori and Adeyanju, 2006) including The Punch and The Guardian which are
the focus of this study. These two papers are privately owned, both have been in existence
for more than 20 years and have professional staff who report and provide in-depth analysis
of national issues ranging from education, health, politics, arts and sports (Okidu, 2013).
There is no accurate and reliable statistical data on newspaper circulation in Nigeria and it
is recognised that more people now read the leading titles online than in print (Patrick,
2015). However, The Guardian and The Punch are recognised to be among the country’s
most widely-circulated titles, with The Guardian circulating 217,000 copies a day (Olaniyan,
2019) and The Punch over 80,000 copies daily (Ahmed and Jimoh, n.d).
This study examined representations of gender-based violence against children in The
Guardian and The Punch from January to December 2021. The twelve months were strat-
ified into four subgroups of three months each. One month was selected from each of the
groups using a simple random sampling technique: the selected months were January, May,
July and November, giving 123 editions of each paper for analysis. All articles focusing on
gender-based violence against children were then selected: this included articles on rape,
sexual, physical and psychological violence, trafficking, child soldiering, child maltreatment
and physical/cyberbullying; however, articles on female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C)
and the Boko Haram abductions and kidnappings were excluded. Although (as noted
above), FGM/C and gender-based violence in the context of armed conflict (specifically in
relation to Boko Haram’s abductions of girls) are significant aspects of gender-based vio-
lence in Nigeria, I have excluded reports on these issues from my sample as these are not
typically reported as forms of interpersonal violence, but rather as violence perpetuated by
communities and/or organised groups.
For each of the stories in the sample, I coded key information about the placement of the
story (size, prominence) before moving on to code the kind of GBV reported on and the
gender of the victim/survivor. I then considered evidence of gender-stereotyping (for ex-
ample, victim-blaming language usage portraying girls as those that triggered the abuse
done to them, gender-based violence content showing gender discriminatory stories and
contents displaying female subordination); whether the story took a survivor-centred
approach (focusing on victim/survivors); whether there was a call-to-action issued (e.g. for
readers to challenge gender-based violence against children); and whether the article
included information about local support services.

Discussion of findings
The first thing to note about the sample is the relative lack of attention devoted to gender-
based violence against children in these papers. A total of 75 stories on GBV against
children were analysed: 40 in Punch and 35 in The Guardian. These stories were typically

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relatively short: 56% (n = 42) took up a quarter of a page or less, though 16% (n=12) were
full-page stories and 28% (n = 21) were half-page. The majority of the stories were reported
on inside pages (52%, n = 38), though gender-based violence against children did make the
front (25.3%, n = 19) and back (16%, n = 12) pages and there was a small number of
centerspreads (6.7%, n = 5).
In terms of the kinds of gender-based violence against children reported: sexual
harassment/violence/rape was reported most (29.3% of all stories, n = 22), followed by
trafficking (16%, n = 12), physical abuse (14.6%, n = 11), physical/cyberbullying (13.3%, n =
10), child marriage (12%, n=9), child maltreatment (9.3%, n = 7) and child soldiering (5.3%,
n = 4). The stories given the most prominence were those on bullying (all ten stories about
bullying made the front page) and trafficking (nine stories – or three-quarters of the articles
on trafficking – made the front page). Stories about human trafficking were also among
those reported in the most detail, with three stories taking up a full page.1 Other stories
explored in depth over a full-page article included five articles on sexual harassment/vio-
lence (reported on the inside pages) and two articles on child maltreatment.
A significant number of the articles offered general accounts of gender-based violence –
for instance, in relation to the release of statistical information or reports from relevant
agencies – or linked a number of different cases together. Given the high rates of gender-
based violence in Nigeria discussed above, it is perhaps not surprising that prevalence should
be a recurring concern in the reports and that the overwhelming emphasis (in 89.3% of
stories) was on men’s violence towards girls. One of the interesting effects of this style of
reporting is that the abuse of adult women and girl children are at times linked together, as
in a report in The Punch on the “rape pandemic” (George, 2021). Although this article leads
with details of a number of individual cases of rape and murder of girls and women between
the ages of 13 and 26, it situates these in a wider context, citing the Minister of Women
Affairs (who “said that over two million Nigerians were raped every year”), a national
survey by the Women at Risk International Foundation (which “showed that 24.8 per cent
of females from ages 18 to 24 experienced sexual abuse prior to the age of 18”), and a recent
World Population Review which declared Nigeria “the seventh most dangerous country for
women to live in” (George, 2021). This is by no means an isolated report. Another example
includes a report on recorded rape cases in Enugu in which the manager of the Tamar
Sexual Assault Referral Centre describes cases with victims ranging in age from five to 88
(NAN, 2021a). Similarly, an interview with politician Professor Remi Soniaya is headlined
“50% of secondary school girls I interacted with last year had been raped – Kowa presi-
dential candidate, Sonaiya”, but the article deals with men’s violence against women more
broadly (Edema, 2020). This is in notable contrast to studies of child sexual abuse reporting
in other contexts, including the UK (Boyle, 2018a, 2018b; Kelly, 1996), where the “pae-
dophile” is constructed as a distinct and notably non-gendered category.
Nevertheless, it is notable that the reports in my sample tend to focus on the abuse –
including sexual abuse – of girl children outside of the family. Indeed, where a domestic
context is indicated – as, for instance, in a report on the arrest of a male professor on child
sexual abuse charges (Oshodi, 2021) – the relationship of the perpetrator to their victim is
not a familial one. In this report, the perpetrator’s professional standing is emphasised in the
opening paragraph, where we are told his subject (Geophysics) as well as his place of work
(Alex Ekwueme Federal University). Only later is it implied that the victim had been living
with him: “The practice of child workers in the homes of non-biological parents because
that child comes from a needy family must stop as it keeps child sexual predators in

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‘business’” (Oshodi, 2021). Interestingly, this report is entitled “Stop Child Abuse” and it is
attentive to the social conditions which create vulnerability, as well as being critical of the
ineffectiveness of police and courts: “This is not surprising in a society like Nigeria where
the police and the courts have not been known for being aggressive and applying protective
measures in their moves against criminal sexual offences” (Oshodi, 2021).
As suggested by the “Stop Child Abuse” headline, there was a call to action evident in a
significant minority (23.3%) of stories. However, the calls to action tended to be framed in
very general terms – challenging attitudes, encouraging reporting – rather than offering any
concrete solutions or suggested interventions. Although a range of support agencies was
mentioned, no direct links to those organisations were provided in any of the reports.
Nevertheless, some stories did address survivors in the audience, for instance, by suggesting
that people who have been sexually abused speak to therapists to avoid depression and post-
traumatic stress disorder (George, 2021). They were also encouraged to seek justice and
some suggestions were provided as to which organisations can support this, including the
Ministry of Women Affairs, Ministry of Justice and the Police Force (Ayeni, 2021).
Such stories are not unproblematic from a feminist perspective particularly because of
the emphasis placed on the “innocence” of victims and the way that girls are presented as
objects of the stories and not the subjects, with an emphasis on girls as perpetual victims,
not survivors. Although there was an emphasis on the experiences of girls and women in a
majority of the stories, it would be a stretch to describe these as survivor-centred as they
typically focused on moments of victimisation and the effects on victims and their loved
ones. Perhaps because of an emphasis on extreme cases, resulting in the death of the victim,
as well as because of the enduring stigma associated with sexual assault (which is indeed
acknowledged in some of the reports – see George, 2021), survivors are not typically quoted
directly. Of course, engaging with child survivors would be ethically problematic, but it is
notable that the voices of adult survivors of child abuse are not included. Instead, the
testimony of family members is set alongside commentary from social media users and other
members of the public. These non-expert voices demonstrate that victim-blaming attitudes
remain very much in evidence, with the onus placed on women to stop men’s violence. For
instance, the “rape pandemic” article discussed above included a quote from a Twitter user
which suggested that the murder of Iniubong Umoren may have been prevented if other
women had spoken up:

“Other ladies who had experienced and escaped these guys could have saved Ini if they
had come out with their stories. She wouldn’t have gone to the same place if she was
aware others had spoken against it. Learn to speak up to save others”.
(George, 2021)

However, victim-blaming attitudes were less evidenced in the words of the journalists.
Finally, reports on the abuse of boy children – which focused on child soldiering, sexual
abuse and bullying – were less likely to be framed in gendered terms. Here it is worth noting
that one of the highest profile cases reported in Nigeria in 2020–2021 involved the sexualised
bullying of a boy child – Don Davies – and that this case was more often used to discuss
bullying, particularly in relation to schools, rather than focusing on the gendered and
sexualised aspects of the case (Odey, 2021). Nevertheless, there were reports which men-
tioned this case in the context of broader reports. For instance, a story in The Guardian
entitled “Taming menace of sexual abuse in schools” (Adebumit, 2021) leads with statistics

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about the prevalence of sexual abuse of children in educational settings from reports by
UNICEF and Positive Action for Treatment Access. It does mention the Davies case, but
this ensures it is seen in a broader context both nationally and locally: for instance, the
report also mentions that the centre where Davies was taken for medical examination stated
that they had treated ten sexually abused boys in the last three years.

Conclusion
The study concludes that gender-based violence against children by the two national
newspapers was underreported and not representative of the number of cases of gender-
based violence against children as reported by the Police, the Ministry of Women Affairs
and Social Development and State Sexual Assault Referral Centre. The stories which did
make it into these national newspapers were, interestingly, likely to focus on gender-based
violence against girls as part of a wider pattern of men’s violence against women of all ages.
Many of the reports included statistical information to put references to individual cases
into context – highlighting the alarming prevalence of gender-based violence in Nigeria
more broadly – and drew upon a range of expert organisations working on gender-based
violence with no clear distinction made between services for adult women and girl (and boy)
children. At times, there was a tension observed in the articles between reporting on wider
attitudes towards men’s violence against women and reinforcing those attitudes, through
victim-blaming strategies such as focusing on girls’ clothing and behaviour, but, overall, the
stories were sympathetic to victim/survivors even if they did not – typically – centre indi-
vidual survivors. The articles included some calls to action but missed the opportunity to
provide information about locally available support and protective services.
The picture which emerges from this study then is a contradictory one where the reporting
which does exist is broadly critical of gender-based violence against children and willing to see
it as a structural, societal problem. However, at the same time, given the prevalence of gender-
based violence against children in Nigeria, the relative lack of attention devoted to these issues
is a significant concern and some problematic victim blaming persists.

Note
1 These figures are based on a study of the print copies of the papers. In what follows, where I give
specific examples from individual stories I have used the online version of these stories where
possible to facilitate access for international readers.

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 15
MEDIA, COURTS AND
“#RICEBUNNY” TESTIMONIES
IN CHINA
Li Jun

On 23 April 2019, Southern Metropolis Daily (
, SMD), a local media outlet in
Guangdong, China, posted a story on its WeChat media platform about Liu Qiangdong (
 , AKA Richard Liu), the tycoon and owner of China’s largest e-commerce company
Jingdong (JD.com), who had been charged with rape in the United States. The charge was
related to the August 2018 sexual assault of a female student from China named “Jingyao”,
following a business dinner. Although the Minneapolis City Attorney’s Office decided not
to prosecute Liu because of evidentiary issues, “Jingyao” filed a civil lawsuit in April 2019
alleging rape by Liu and naming Jingdong as a defendant. It was at that point that SMD
picked up the story, publishing a heavily edited, anonymously received audio recording of a
conversation between “Jingyao” and Liu’s attorney, giving the impression “Jingyao” was
blackmailing Liu. No fact-checking was done prior to the release of the recording by SMD
and no response from either party was sought. The post was removed after it drew public
criticism, nevertheless, its impact remains.
Once one of China’s most economically successful localised media outlets, SMD was
known for its bold investigative reporting, pointed commentary and stance on pushing for
social reform. SMD’s release of the edited “Jingyao” recording reflects the degradation of
social responsibility, professionalism and ethical standards of mainstream Chinese news
organisations in just a few years. It is also a quintessential moment that reflects the complex
role that news organisations have played in the mixed media environment and political
dynamics in which the MeToo movement is embedded.
The inter-relationships of news and social media in relation to #MeToo have been well
documented. This research has typically identified the possibilities of mainstream news cov-
erage for hashtag feminism, whilst also pointing to the limitations of that coverage, partic-
ularly in relation to whose stories are amplified in mainstream spaces (e.g. Pollack, 2019; De
Benedictis, Orgad and Rottenberg, 2019; Tambe, 2018). The backlash against – or suspicion
of – #MeToo in mainstream media is also well documented. For instance, in a study of
broadcast media in India, Sambaraju (2020) found that attributing reports of harassment and
abuse to #MeToo raised concerns that complainants had been unduly influenced by the
movement, resulting in untrue allegations and pile ons.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-18 163

 Li Jun

As in other parts of the world, China’s version of #MeToo – #RiceBunny – demonstrates

the immense power of social media, but also the interdependence of news and social media.
Also inherent in #RiceBunny is an acknowledgement of the risk of speaking out about sexual
harassment and abuse: Rice Bunny( ) is pronounced the same as MeToo in English and
this localised version of #MeToo was adopted by Chinese feminists to evade censorship. Yet,
as this chapter will demonstrate, women speaking out against privileged abusers have borne
significant risks which have been compounded by their differential access to media platforms
and limited ability to control how their stories were shared and used.

#RiceBunny in court
#RiceBunny began in 2018 with victims speaking out to expose sexual assault through
social media platforms such as Weibo and WeChat. In its first four years, #RiceBunny has
exposed perpetrators in four main fields: media, non-profit, education and business. In
education, the mobilisation of more than 10,000 people at 80 universities, led university
authorities to take disciplinary action in some cases involving multiple complainants. In the
media, non-profit and business sectors, on the other hand, few alleged perpetrators were
disciplined by their employers and civil litigation was concentrated in these areas.
Since 2018, there have been public accusations against approximately 80 men. Fourteen
cases have reached the courts: with nine civil lawsuits and five criminal cases. In criminal cases
(Johnson, 2018; Zhang, 2020; BBC, 2022; Tor, 2022; Associated Press in Beijing, 2021) the
involvement of police and criminal justice and relatively high standard of evidence has, to an
extent, legitimated the victim/survivors’ accounts and this is reflected in public responses.
This chapter focuses on the nine civil lawsuits, six of which were filed by the alleged
perpetrators. The use of civil law by alleged perpetrators is not new: according to
Yuanzhong Women’s Law Center ) between 2010 and 2017
34 sexual harassment-related civil cases were filed in China; 55.9% of these were reputation
infringement suits or wrongful discharge suits lodged by alleged perpetrators; in only two
cases were the plaintiffs the alleged victims. In the nine #RiceBunny suits, only one victim
has won so far, when Liu Meng, the head of a social work organisation, was recognised by
the court for sexual harassment and ordered to apologise to the victim. In addition, the case
of Guangzhou sanitation worker Huang Wei ended in a settlement which saw the perpe-
trator removed from his employment. This case is somewhat exceptional: not only was the
sexual harassment initially exposed through the news media rather than social media, but
the survivor was also a working-class woman.
While all the #RiceBunny cases that made it to court have received some attention, three
cases involving celebrities are more high-profile. The first of these is the case against Liu
Qiangdong in the US, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. Discussion of his US-
based case has never been prohibited by the Chinese government. However, as this article
was being finalised, Liu settled with his accuser out of court, meaning the transparency in
reporting which had been anticipated will not now come to pass (Davidson, 2022). Even so,
media discussion surrounding this case is most indicative of the extent to which the Chinese
media is influenced by commercial interests and how the rape culture framework is used
against silence breakers.
The second case involves Zhu Jun, one of China’s most famous state television presenters,
who was accused by a then-intern (given the nickname Xianzi on social media) who had a long
chain of evidence against him. Xianzi soon reported the harassment to the police in 2014,

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 Media, courts and “#RiceBunny” testimonies in China

when the incident occurred, with the support of a female professor and one of her classmates.
However, the police illegally put pressure on Xianzi’s parents to coerce her to withdraw the
accusation. Four years later, Xianzi told the story in a post in her private WeChat Moments to
comfort a friend who had been sexually assaulted. Unexpectedly, an enthusiastic former
journalist (with the Weibo account “MaiShao Tongxue” ) posted it to the public
Twitter-like platform Weibo, causing the story to go viral. In September 2018, Zhu filed a civil
lawsuit in a Beijing court for “infringement of reputation”, naming Xianzi and “MaiShao
Tongxue” as defendants. Xianzi later sued him for sexual harassment in the same court.
Xianzi’s Weibo account “Xianzi and her friends” ( !") has gradually
accumulated over 300,000 followers and became an opinion leader for #RiceBunny, as well as
commenting on other social issues. She also became the core of an extensive support network
for victim/survivors associated with #RiceBunny. In late 2020, when Xianzi’s case first came
to court, hundreds of supporters gathered in front of the courthouse (Figure 15.1). The
unprecedented mobilisation around her case, the involvement of human rights lawyers and
the prominence of the alleged perpetrator in the propaganda system politicised the matter.
Her Weibo account was banned for a whole year and a large number of Weibo accounts that
supported her and retweeted information about her trial were also banned or cancelled.
Deng Fei (#$), the plaintiff in the third celebrity lawsuit, is a well-known former journalist
and a celebrity philanthropist with millions of Weibo followers. In 2018, when several of his
former volunteers and peers accused him of sexual harassment, He Qian (%&), a professor in
the US and former intern at the magazine Phoenix Weekly ('()*) where Deng used to
work, wrote a long article about how Deng took her to a hotel and tried to sexually assault her.

Figure 15.1 Xianzi and her supporters before the first trial. Her placard reads “Must Win”.
Photography: Zhang Yiyi

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 Li Jun

Figure 15.2 Xianzi and other feminists show support for He Qian and Zou Sicong during the Deng
Fei trial. Photo provided by Xianzi

Several former journalists and editors published open letters in support of He Qian, but she and
the journalist Zou Sicong (who helped disseminate the article) were sued by Deng for in-
fringement of his right to reputation. Although Deng made false statements in court (his claim
that he did not know the victim was disproven), the court ruled that He’s statements were
“insufficient to establish beyond a reasonable doubt” that sexual harassment had occurred and
ruled that He and Zou must apologise to Deng; he was also awarded compensation.
The victims in all three cases were members of a victim network centred on Xianzi and
supporters of this feminist network were frequently present in the courthouse, passing on
information about the progress of the cases through social media (Figure 15.2).

Censorship, professional codes and interpersonal networks

To better understand the interrelationships of social media and news it is first necessary to
sketch the wider news media context in China. In China, the collection and reporting of
news require authorisation from the General Administration of Press, Publication, Radio,
Film and Television and the Internet Information Office. The media organisations with
rights to “news gathering and editing” are almost exclusively affiliated with party com-
mittees and government departments: in this chapter, I refer to them as “news media/
organisations”. Organisations that would be called (internet) news providers in other
contexts are, in China, more commonly referred to as “nonfiction writing platforms”:

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 Media, courts and “#RiceBunny” testimonies in China

because they do not have “news gathering and editing rights”, they cannot be called “news
media” and their staff cannot be called “journalists” – even though it has become the norm for
journalists to change jobs between recognised and unrecognised (news) media outlets. These
nonfiction writing platforms usually follow journalistic norms and have generous editorial
budgets, albeit without news gathering and editing rights. To avoid regulatory violations,
nonfiction writing platforms mainly produce softer content, such as feature-type stories.
Citizen media are run by NGOs or volunteer groups. Their human and financial
resources are weak compared to news media and nonfiction platforms, but they can report
in-depth on the issues they are involved in. In addition, hundreds of millions of social media
accounts of companies, NGOs and individuals have been involved in the dissemination and
discussion of #RiceBunny.
The Zhu Jun case has been one of the most heavily censored cases. Caixin Media (+,-
.), known for its bold investigative reporting, was the first media outlet to report on Zhu’s
case, interviewing all news sources related to the case reported to the police back in 2014
and seeking a response from the police and Zhu. Five hours after publication, they were
commanded by the propaganda department to delete the article; the relevant content on
Xianzi and “MaiShao Tongxue”’s Weibo accounts was also hidden by the platform.
After Zhu issued a lawyer’s statement and sued Xianzi and “MaiShao Tongxue”, there
were signs of relaxed censorship regarding the story: their social media content was un-
blocked and there was a wave of coverage by news outlets that amplified Xianzi’s story.
However, as the case became increasingly sensitive, news outlets became more cautious,
deleting previous reports and not covering developments regularly. Despite this, Xianzi
won the support of journalists. A journalist of the New Beijing News (,/)1 told the
author that when the case finally went to trial after two years, all news organisations were
notified of the ban on reporting, but “almost every journalist I know was there (in front
of the court)”.
That Zhu’s reputation was so closely linked to state media was the main reason the case
could not be reported. Deng Fei, in contrast, worked largely outside this system and did not
have the same institutional status or state protection. Even so, very few news organisations
reported on Deng’s case. Despite the fact that several female journalists have complained
that he sexually harassed them, Deng is well networked in the industry. His tactics were to
find (male) acquaintances at news organisations and demand that the story not be reported;
for non-fictional media and social media posts, he constantly pressured for deletion by
threatening to sue.2 These demands were often successful, as one editor-in-chief of a Beijing-
based news outlet told the author, news organisations complied “for the sake of fellowship”.
The same editor added: “Besides, we really can’t confirm that what is claimed to have
happened 10 years ago really happened”.3
Caixin Media’s legal reporting team set up a special group to collect #RiceBunny leads.
But the principle of objectivity still discouraged journalists. A journalist who interviewed
Deng’s complainant He explained her reasons for not eventually reporting on the case:

… I was, I’m not saying I didn’t believe her, I was sensing an (emotional) unusual …
anyway, I was very confused at the time and I probably just wanted to get a
deposition-type thing
… We must write out both sides of the argument in the driest language possible0 and
send out one of the driest pieces, no emotions, no tendencies, that kind of thing.4

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 Li Jun

Reports of acquaintance sexual assault are not traditionally a mainstream area of investi-
gative reporting and the cases uncovered in #RiceBunny often lack evidence beyond the
victims’ oral accounts. The views expressed by the journalist in the quote above are rep-
resentative of many I have spoken with who are troubled by the question of “proof” in
reporting sexual harassment. The problem, then, lies not only in government censorship but
also in wider journalistic cultures (see also Thorsen and Sreedharan, this volume). For
instance, Zou, the young journalist who helped share the reports of Deng’s alleged beha-
viour, described pressure from male “seniors” in the industry (who claimed to believe He’s
account) to delete articles exposing Deng’s alleged wrongdoing.5 This reflects the other side
of China’s “golden age” of media – a culture of gender and hierarchy in journalism that is
still male-dominated. With at least seven prominent journalists and editors accused in
#RiceBunny sexual harassment is as prevalent in the media as it is in any other industry,
and the alliance of powerful men is part of the backlash against those who speak out.

Disinformation becomes a weapon for the accused

Beyond censorship, information manipulation becomes a tactic for privileged men to
respond to accusations. This is very prominent in the Liu Qiangdong case (the civil case was
launched in the US), where a social media “water army” (so called, because they are ready
and willing to “flood” the internet for whoever is willing to pay), news agencies, portals and
Weibo platforms worked together. Before the release of the audio recording by Southern
Metropolis Daily mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, a newly registered Weibo
account, State of Minnesota Chronicle (1234, SMC) posted two edited and misleading
videos edited from surveillance footage of the three-hour business dinner and of Liu
accompanying the student back to her apartment. These videos created the impression that
the woman proactively approached Liu and invited him into her apartment. Initially, the
information war was fought on social-media accounts of news-oriented organisations,
including International Student Daily North America (56789) as well as SMD and
SMC. These outlets consistently used victim-blaming rhetoric and strategies.
In April 2019, Caixin Media’s US correspondent conducted an exclusive interview with
Jingyao and published the article “Exclusive: The female subject of the Liu Qiangdong case
responds: ‘I have been in denial’” (Zhang, 2019). This was tampered with by Phoenix Net
Technology ('(:;<, PNT) and Weibo Push to become “Liu Qiangdong case girl ad-
mits to having consensual relationship”, leading to an anti-infringement announcement
from Caixin Media’s legal department (Legal Department of Caixin Media Co., 2019).
However, the PNT post had already been widely shared, including by Sina Technology (,
=;<) and American Overseas Chinese Daily (6>?:).
After the release of the SMD audio, other mainstream news organisations continued to
publish distorted reports. On 26 June 2022, a video was posted on the Weibo account of the
Peninsula Metropolis Daily (@A) (PMD) – a market-oriented newspaper under
Shandong Provincial Committee of the CCP focusing on the latest hearing in the case,
which had taken place on 24 June. The video was tagged with two hashtags which translate
as #The woman in the case of Liu Qiangdong repeatedly said voluntary relationship, #The
woman in the case of Liu Qiangdong multiple contradictory testimony (# 3B
CDEFGH8IJ#; # 3BCKLMNO#). The video does not cite facts or
opinions from the female party’s side and all news sources come from Liu’s lawyers. The
thumbnail for the video, however, featured a photo of the woman’s face, making her

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identity public. The News Morning Post (,PQ) based in Shanghai and Zhengzhou
Evening News (R2S) based in the capital of Henan Province, both reposted this video
with commentary favourable to Liu. The social media account of White Deer Video,
affiliated with Shaanxi Net based in Shaanxi Province, produced a similar video. Until the
parties announced their settlement the night before the trial on 2 October 2022, the heavily
distorted reporting framework continued: the news media highlighted the case as a
“misunderstanding” and emphasised Liu’s reunification with his wife.
China’s once prosperous investigative reporting and media-driven public deliberation
have gradually declined amid tougher media regulations, depriving market-oriented media
of its readership, while the impact of the mobile Internet and social media has also con-
tributed to its downward spiral. Both together have led to a decline in profits due to
newspaper readership loss. For example, SMD once the highest-grossing market newspaper
in the country has had to make a strategic adjustment to become a “think tank” media
outlet, reorganising its editorial staff so that the editorial team can develop holistic strategic
communications plans for government and business. The new strategy means that jour-
nalists’ ability to report is diminished and original news in the mainstream media is reduced.
Despite the declining influence of mainstream media on audiences, governments and large
corporations continue to invest resources in legitimate mainstream media and this has had
concrete repercussions in journalism practice. A PR person from an internet company with
a similar status to Jingdong told the author: “As a corporation, we have no interest in those
communication plans (customised by news organisations), we just need a name to pay so
they can show mercy or help us when we have some negative news.”6 And a current SMD
employee told the author that offering a dissemination plan is just “collecting protection
money”,7 which means the opportunity to collect funds and use legitimate editorial rights to
defend the reputation of the company or government institution involved.
Considering that multiple local news organisations have taken roughly the same
approach, abandoning fact-checking, neutrality and ethical codes and even becoming tools
to harm #RiceBunny’s silence-breakers, it’s hard to believe that no commercial interests are
involved. The marketing expenses of Jingdong (where Liu remained CEO until April 2022)
increased by 42.7% from RMB27,156 million in 2020 to RMB38,743 million in 2021, pri-
marily due to increased advertising expenditures on both online and offline channels
(Jingdong, 2022). Considering that the general revenue of the newspaper industry in China
was RMB53,945 million in 2020 (All China Journalists Association, 2022), big clients like
Jingdong are an essential source of revenue for all the media.
In Zhu Jun’s case, it was mainly news-oriented social media accounts operated by
commercial companies that spread malicious information and disinformation. Zhu refused
all requests for a response from the mainstream media but in December 2020, after the first
hearing, he reposted on his personal Weibo account a long article, “Pushing open the door
of Rm. K127, the truth investigation of Zhu Jun’s sexual harassment case” (Initium China
Group, 2020) and said that he had “talked to a friend” about the content. The “truth
investigation” was posted by a Weibo user “a journalist with some ideals TUVWXY
4Z)” who is not affiliated with a news organisation and has long been engaged in helping
organisations or powerful individuals embroiled in legal and ethical controversies to publish
their version of the “facts”. The article claims that Xianzi’s account does not match the
police transcript and implies that Xianzi and “MaiShao Tongxue” have close ties to “for-
eign media” or “developed country NGOs”. This strategy accompanied the first and second
trials. Many bloggers on social media platforms continued to post videos and posts

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asserting Zhu’s innocence and Xianzi’s “complicated background” – evidence of which was
her interviews with overseas media.

Nonfiction platforms: fragile but important

In the #RiceBunny movement, some of the most influential stories were produced by
nonfiction reporting platforms, including People/Daily People ([\/]9[\), Tencent
Grain Rain (^_`a), Sohu Polar Day (bcde), NetEase World (:f[g), All Now/
Aquarius Era (hij/klmn), Hardcore Stories (o3pq) and Combustible Ice Studio
(rstuvw), as well as Tencent News’ Video section A Day in the Life of Chinese People
(>[Tx) and Baidu Video (yz{|).
As female users on social media platforms become active content consumers, producing
content that is meaningful to them is very important to the Internet companies’ key per-
formance indicators. For example, the editor-in-chief of one of these platforms told me that
70% of their readers on the WeChat media platform are women which is an important
reason for them to keep producing relevant content in the #RiceBunny movement8 by, for
example, collecting readers’ stories of sexual assault. At the same time, most of the writers
and editors on these platforms are women and many of them are sensitive to women’s rights
issues. Often, to avoid violating regulations, they resort to the tactic of telling personal
stories when both news organisations and social media have encountered serious censor-
ship. For example, at Zhu’s first hearing, hundreds of people showed up to support Xianzi,
resulting in a rally in front of the courthouse. This made the case even more sensitive and
news outlets were banned from reporting on it. The final published stories were from
nonfiction platforms. Feature articles were published by a WeChat media account affiliated
with People and by the feminist in-depth reporting platform Aquarius Era focusing on the
stories of the people who supported each other in the case. Soft stories are also often widely
disseminated when information is heavily censored. Because of the depth of coverage, they
can also have an accountability effect. When the sanitation worker Huang Wei’s lawsuit was
stalled and the grassroots administration reinstated the perpetrator, All Now published an in-
depth report exposing the cronyism surrounding the sanitation station (Yao, 2020). The day
after the report was published, a series of meetings were initiated by community cadres and the
sanitation station’s hardline attitude toward the lawsuit took a turn and began to demand a
settlement with Huang. Eventually, the station manager’s position was removed.
However, because of their fragile legitimacy, these pieces do not survive for long. For
example, a detailed report on the outcome of the second trial of Deng Fei’s case in the Daily
People (]9[\) had to be deleted following requests from the alleged perpetrator’s side as
a possible court case or a report to the Internet information authority could cause signifi-
cant problems for the editorial office. To give another example, All Now’s WeChat account,
with hundreds of thousands of followers, was deleted because of a tip-off from a
government-backed anti-feminist nationalist blogger.

Citizen media: report to change

For the reasons mentioned above, the amount of Chinese media coverage of #RiceBunny is
disproportionate to its newsworthiness: the coverage lacks continuity and is difficult to
accumulate and retain. It is even difficult to search news databases to find stories that have
never been published. Given these difficulties, it is mainly the survivors’ and their supporters’

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social media and citizen media that maintain the momentum of #RiceBunny. In the case of
Zhu Jun and Deng Fei, the most detailed accounts of the cases’ progress came from Xianzi’s,
He Qian’s and Zou Sicong’s social media posts. Xianzi used her Weibo account to support
many of the silence breakers in #RiceBunny.
However, the role of citizen media is even more critical for those silence breakers who are
relatively less culturally capitalised or “newsworthy”. The case of Liu Meng, the head of a
social work organisation, initially attracted little attention and no mainstream media cov-
erage. It was the feminist citizen media Women Awakening Network ,.}~) (WAN)
which helped to give survivors a voice and provide updates on the lawsuit. The influence of
citizen media is not only its better communication power in feminist and NGO circles but
also its role as an intermediary between the silence breakers and the mainstream media.
The power of citizen media also comes from the network of activists behind it – not just
reporting, but more importantly, intervening for change. The case of sanitation worker
Huang Wei is typical. She was able to get help from pro bono lawyers because of the long-
standing local action network focused on sanitation workers’ rights and anti-discrimination.
News about her case was disseminated in a traditional way: the lawyers helped her contact
the media for coverage after she sued. The All Now reporter who published the investigative
story that led to the employer’s compromise was previously a reporter for the citizen media
NGOCN, whose network of information on workers’ rights issues and action networks
enabled her to produce the most influential story on the case.
Citizen media also plays a major role in the fight against disinformation. When infor-
mation manipulation against Jingyao emerged, the pro-Jingyao Presenting Team (i€
) released a full video and translated US court documents to counter the malicious
information and WAN clarified how the audio recording released by SMD was edited
(Women Awakening Network, 2019). Coverage of the civil court case against Liu
Qiangdong has been provided primarily by WeSupport Jingyao (‚"ƒ„ Jingyao), a
Weibo account run by feminist volunteers among Chinese students in North America,
which has provided video and written reports and analyses of the court proceedings.
In the case of Xianzi and Jingyao, Echo ( ††††) – the successor to the citizen media
Feminist Voices (‡ˆ†) which had been removed from the internet by the internet
information department – played an important role. Echo’s work includes reporting on the
progress of the case, combating disinformation and mobilising public support and en-
couragement for silence breakers.

Conclusion
In the Chinese Me Too movement, we see the strengths and weaknesses of social media.
#RiceBunny has seen women breaking through cultural norms that silence victims of sexual
violence to speak out and organise. But the Chinese context is complicated. Journalism has
continued to weaken under censorship, and technological and commercial shifts, while at the
same time facing information manipulation in the social media environment. Mainstream
news organisations have largely supported accused perpetrators, reflecting not only the
presence of censorship but also the influence of networks of people within news organisations.
In contrast, Internet content-producing organisations and citizen media that do not have the
legitimacy to report, are leading more positive developments. Citizen participation seems to
be more important in the Chinese case than the cooperation between news media and social
media which has been identified in other national contexts (Guha, 2015). It was citizen media,

171
 Li Jun

not news organisations, that helped survivors get greater visibility and counter the dis-
information imposed by powerful perpetrators. However, as this chapter has also demon-
strated, this is not an equally-resourced battle.

Notes
1 Interview conducted 8 October 2021, Beijing. All translations by the author.
2 Sources: Staff from NEW Beijing News We Video (,/‚"{|), All Now (hij), Women
Awakening Network (,.}~), and blogger “Dangpu”.
3 Personal communication, 29 December 2021, Beijing.
4 Interview conducted 19 July 2022, via WeChat Voice Call.
5 Interview conducted 29 December 2021; via WeChat Voice Call.
6 Personal communication, 29 July 2022, Guangzhou.
7 Personal communication, 29 July 2022, Guangzhou.
8 Interview conducted 2 December 2020; via WeChat Voice Call.

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 16
JOURNALISM, SEXUAL
VIOLENCE AND SOCIAL
RESPONSIBILITY
Einar Thorsen and Chindu Sreedharan

Introduction
In 2021, statistics from the National Crime Records Bureau showed an 8.3% decline in crimes
against women in India. Even so, the incidence of sexual violence remains high: in 2020, one
rape was reported approximately every 19 minutes. When one considers that in India, as in
many other countries, such incidents are heavily under-reported, this statistic becomes starker.
In previous works, we have evidenced the prevalence of sexual violence in national and
regional newsrooms across India and how this challenge, along with others, shapes news
content on sexual violence (Sreedharan and Thorsen, 2021; Sreedharan, Thorsen and
Gouthi, 2020). We build on those inquiries in this chapter, presenting a more holistic
consideration of the attitudes, beliefs and conventions that shape journalistic practices in
relation to sexual violence. In this, we are prompted by our experiences of working with
news professionals in India, many of whom see their reportage as a tool for social inter-
vention. Yet, as we demonstrate, they face considerable constraints. Drawing on interview
data, we identify two key issues: the absence of formal editorial guidelines within news
institutions and the absence of a felt need among journalists for codified policies and pro-
cesses beyond the legal framework or their own lived experience. We deploy the notion of
journalistic doxa (Bourdieu, 2005, 1998 [1996]; Schultz, 2007) and argue that India draws
liberally from patriarchal attitudes and structures within and without newsrooms. We
conclude by analysing the proverbial slip between the cup and the lip – in effect, the change
that journalists want to engender and the gulf that needs to be bridged to effect that change.

“Bad” journalism from good people

News coverage has the potential to shape people’s knowledge, beliefs and attitudes sur-
rounding sexual violence. “Good” news coverage — that negates attitudes and beliefs
supportive of sexual violence, challenges social and cultural norms and seeks solutions — is
hence critical in preventing sexual violence. Yet, historically and universally, the news re-
porting of sexual violence has been anything but “good”, as many other chapters in this
collection also evidence. News of sexual violence is criticised for being sensationalist and

174 DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-19

 Journalism, sexual violence and social responsibility

superficial. News coverage of rape is often – and openly – sexualised, explicit in detail, lurid
in presentation, capable of causing moral panics amongst news audiences; and perpetuates
rape myths, from victim-blaming to monsterising perpetrators. These problems are deeply
imprinted in the news reporting of sexual violence in India.
In 2010, Sameera Khan underlined the “moralising tones” that journalists take on when
discussing sexual violence and how such stories revolve around common rape myths and
stereotypical images of women. One persistent myth that underlies much of the reporting in
the Indian print media, according to Khan, is that the victim is lying and the crime is
“false”. Similar critiques, delivered with increasing urgency, have shadowed the news
coverage in India in recent years, particularly after the 2012 Delhi gangrape, which pre-
sented a troubling picture of sensationalistic and stereotypical representation underwritten
by patriarchal values. Sandhur (2014, p. 43) notes that while the number of news reports
picked up substantially after the Delhi gangrape, the media resorted to the “symbolic
annihilation” of women, “implicitly propagating the notion … of a secondary sex by
repetitively relegating them to the private sphere and covertly perpetuating patriarchal
ideology”. Arya (2015) argues that journalists allowed themselves to be susceptible to the
widespread stereotypes of “real rape” and “true victims”. Pal (2018: n. p.), in a similar vein,
highlights how news stories devoted “unwarranted attention to [the victim’s] actions and
relationship history” and portrayed her as “a fallen woman … who had transgressed social
and cultural norms”. There is evidence, thus, to suggest that news media continue to cover
“rape in shame culture” (Rao, 2014, p. 153).
That is not all. Ammu Joseph underscores another practice that plagues journalism: the
tendency to direct media outrage selectively, to cases that feature violence against “people
like us”, involving victims of “our” strata, in “our” cities, by perpetrators from the socio-
economic underclasses. What happens elsewhere, outside “our” world, to “others” in the
small towns and villages that make up most of India, is less deserving of attention: “Today
the media often determine, directly or indirectly, which cases ‘outrage the nation’ and which
sink without a trace in public consciousness” (Joseph, 2014, p. 63). She adds:

[M]edia coverage of rape […] generally conforms to a predictable, episodic pattern:

long spells of routine reports regularly, if randomly culled from police hand-outs,
broken by brief periods of intensive and extensive coverage catalysed by one or more
cases that happen to grab the imagination of the media and public — usually in that
order (ibid.).

Causes often cited as responsible for such episodic framing and sensationalistic journalism
include the skewed gender balance and patriarchal attitudes that pervade Indian newsrooms
and the increasing competition for eyeballs among the nation’s news outlets, burgeoning in
numbers but faltering of finance. If we were to take a more philosophical view, looking
through the prism of “news values”, the responsibility could equally well rest on the very
nature of news itself. News, after all, is about timeliness, drama, proximity, conflict, human
interest – and the victimhood perpetrated on one of “our women” ostensibly by someone
unlike “us”, that usually evokes outrage in the news media. In our own study, we found a
heavy reliance on police sources underpinning the coverage of sexual violence (Sreedharan
and Thorsen, 2021). Although several journalists said they “always begin with the victim”, it
emerged in their responses that this was in fact only after the survivor had been identified
via police sources. Survivors were rarely given a direct voice, mainly because of laws

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 Einar Thorsen and Chindu Sreedharan

protecting their identity and also the reluctance of survivors or their families to speak on the
record. There was little representation of sources who could provide context – not just
about the specific crime, but sexual violence in general – such as medical experts and NGOs/
civic advocacy groups. Those who did “speak up” for the survivors included legal re-
presentatives and sometimes family members but whilst these sources are often mentioned,
their active voices – to explain the context, the trauma and the medical or legal processes –
are missing. Indeed, where journalists spoke of consulting medical sources, it was typically
to corroborate the nature of the assault or if it was rape – thus emphasising suspicion about
facticity of crime rather than the lasting impact on the survivor.
All this suggests a certain naivety – even implicit villainy – on the part of news narrators.
But the truth is, while we know much about what appears in the news, we know less about
what goes behind the production of such content. Most journalists are good, well-
intentioned people: many, in fact, see themselves as agents of change and view their work as
a service to society. Why, then, do these professionals contribute to the problematic nar-
rative outlined above?
Our earlier inquiry pointed to a plethora of operational reasons in the Indian context –
among others, difficulty accessing key sources, safety issues while newsgathering and dis-
tress from the requirements of the assignment – but underlying that is the macho culture
that pervades most newsrooms, and allows masculine values to masquerade as journalistic
norms (van Zoonen cited in Ross, 2017, p. 37). This culture is absorbed by even female
journalists (Fadnis, 2018), which is perhaps unsurprising as the gender balance in Indian
newsrooms is heavily skewed: 25% of the workforce is female (IWMF, 2011); news orga-
nisations and processes are fashioned to the advantage of male journalists (Joseph, 2005);
women are paid less, significantly less represented in managerial positions (IWMF, 2011)
and largely left out of “power” beats such as political reporting (Joshi, Pahad and Maniar,
2006; Priyadarshan, 2013). Such an environment, understandably, influences the potential
for change-making, both in limiting news workers in their agency and in the way they
perceive themselves as change-makers. In this chapter, we focus on two aspects that help
define the journalistic potential to effect change: editorial guidance that shapes news
coverage on sexual violence, and how journalists view their own contribution in this
regard. For our analysis, we draw on a larger multi-lingual research project, Media Action
Against Rape, that included a content analysis of 10 newspapers and semi-structured
interviews with 257 journalists (Sreedharan and Thorsen, 2021). Our interviewees included
journalists working in 14 languages, across all six administrative regions of India, repre-
senting print, television, radio and online news, including both female (41%) and male
journalists (59%).1

Guidelines and codes of conduct

We sought to identify the codified principles that Indian journalists relied upon when re-
porting on sexual violence, exploring with them the availability of editorial guidelines issued
by their news organisations, codes of conduct and personal principles.
We found a pervasive lack of formal editorial guidelines across newsrooms in India, with
only a few exceptions. Most reporters – nearly 61% – generally interpreted editorial guidelines
to be legal guidelines. Others spoke of verbal briefings from superiors (41%) and of developing
their own informal guidelines based on experience (15%). Only 13% of respondents said they
had access to written guidelines, while 14% said they did not have any guidelines at all.

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Reporters spoke of “following the law”, “not naming the victim”, or referred to the
Supreme Court when asked about editorial guidelines. A Vijaywada-based crime reporter
for an English daily said:

[W]e follow one important guideline: not providing the details of the victim, not
disclosing. So the identity will not be revealed. Other than that I strongly believe there
are no other guidelines for the reporter while reporting the rape cases.

This emphasis on legal restrictions, particularly around withholding victim identities, was
mentioned by multiple interviewees and impacted the use of images as well as text, though
there was disagreement on whether victim images could be used if manipulated to disguise
identity. Whether the victim was alive or not was sometimes factored into such decisions. A
Bhubaneswar-based Odia journalist, for instance, said, “If she has been raped and then
murdered, then we might print it. But we blur the face”.
Notably, one print journalist from Maharashtra said though representative images were
preferred, in “exceptional” cases, photographs of living victims were used.

There was this case of a 10-year-old being raped and getting pregnant. I remember we
used a photo of her sitting in the hospital and her mother caressing her head. We took
a back shot, we didn’t show their faces.

Some respondents were sensitive to the possibility that revealing the accused’s identity could
compromise the victim’s privacy, or that revealing the perpetrator’s identity could harm the
legal case. This was not universally the case, however, and some viewed the exposé as an
important part of their journalistic duty. A reporter working for an online publication in
Assam, for example, spoke passionately about publishing the identity of the accused,
complete with photographs: “We boldly carry images. We are never scared”. He elaborated
on an instance when an accused called up his correspondent and cited his political con-
nections to apply pressure. However, the publication did not budge: “We carried his images
… we sourced [images] from his Facebook account and we carried those”.
Several reporters who spoke of having editorial guidelines, when pressed, said they were
not aware of any “official” or organisational policies other than the Supreme Court order
around victim anonymity. A relatively small section (13.2%) spoke of having written pol-
icies or guidelines relating specifically to reporting on sexual violence. However, we found
there was little coherence or consistency in the form of codified editorial practices.
Approaches ranged from email updates from the editor, style guides, notes about legal
frameworks or rulings and guidelines provided by NGOs. For instance, a Mumbai-based
reporter working for a national English-language publication spoke of “internal policies on
the matter”, which drew from the legal guidance and were “circulated in writing”. A few
other respondents said guidelines were embedded in the newspaper stylesheet, which pro-
vided clarity on “which terms to use”. A Tamil journalist, who worked for a national radio
station, spoke of a section within his organisation’s style book “which clearly mentions the
dos and don’ts”. A Hindi print journalist based in Lucknow spoke of “an entire sheet of
guidelines”. While a few journalists spoke of guidelines specific to rape and sexual violence,
many appeared to lack clarity when they were probed further. Some referred broadly to
“general guidelines” from NGOs which were circulated by their editors. A TV journalist
working for an Odia channel referred to guidelines provided by Breakthrough, a human

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rights organisation working to prevent violence and discrimination against women and girls
in India:

We follow their guidelines [for using images]. I have a booklet of them. The major
things are, no image that looks very violent, [or] revealing the identity of the victim or
her family.

Overall, we found that journalists who responded that they relied on “legal guidance” were
less likely to consult or even feel the need for any other guidelines on reporting sexual
violence. As a result, many journalists were focused on what they could not do in their
reporting (such as naming the victim or writing about sub judice cases) rather than what
they could or should do. The only guidelines outside this included standard verification and
cross checking, sensitive image use, or more generic statements that “our content should not
hurt anybody”, or not broadcasting “anything that reduce the dignity of the victim”.

Journalistic doxa and habitus: direction, experience, and principles

Whilst the journalists we interviewed seemed acutely aware of basic legal parameters, there were
no codified editorial guidelines on reporting sexual violence adopted cross-organisationally by
news outlets. Instead, journalists relied on journalistic doxa (Bourdieu, 2005, 1998 [1996];
Schultz, 2007). These come as a verbal direction from editors or senior colleagues that forms
part of their habitus (Bourdieu, 2005, 1998 [1996]) and personal experience or principles that
underpin professional practices and presuppositions in relation to covering rape and sexual
violence.
Many journalists (41%) interpreted verbal directions from senior colleagues as editorial
guidelines. A Bengaluru-based reporter for an English national daily said that directions
from editors came for “big” stories:

Normally, when it is something big, the editor tells us that certain points should be
covered. Or, after filing the story, if they feel like giving any inputs related to the data,
they inform us.

A New Delhi-based broadcast reporter said there were few organisations that had specific
guidelines. She said she took advice from editors as needed, and that this was a common
practice for when reporters were “confused”:

I speak to my editor before [going into the field]. I ask my boss what exactly you need
from this. For print, the story works differently. It’s more like get us everything,
whatever you have, and we will publish what should be published. But news on TV is
different, because it depends on what the other channels are getting. If the competitor
managed to get the parents, then you also have to … I sometimes feel like I don’t get
enough space to follow my own voice. I have to navigate through my bosses, because,
at the end of the day, I work for him. So I have to do it.

Here we get a very clear sense of the power structures that exist within the newsroom, which are
based on the editorial habitus (Schultz, 2007) and journalists’ deference to editorial direction.

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This power is concentrated largely in the hands of male journalists, which considerably shape
the sensibilities around both the what and the how of the coverage.
Overall, many reporters said they received “guidance”. But this seemed to be on an ad
hoc basis and limited to technical aspects (such as what angle to focus on and who to speak
to) and legal directives. Some newsrooms did verbally “train” younger journalists on the
basics of covering sexual violence responsibly and with sensitivity, but there were no
comprehensive resources on how this could be accomplished.
Nearly 15% of journalists said that their lived experience was their best teacher and they
relied on what they learnt by trial and error. This, again, reflects the importance placed on
journalistic doxa as a guiding principle. One reporter spoke of arriving at her “own code of
conduct”, whilst another pointed out that “most of the reporters become experienced and
when they see such cases they know what sort of reporting needs to be done”. A journalist
in Kerala who also spoke of relying on experience felt “editorial directions are not necessary
for this kind of news”. He added:

It is simple. We should not report anything that harms society or the readers. We
should not create a situation that blocks the victim from having a proper social life. So
we take care of these things.

An experienced journalist working for a national radio station spoke of “not going by the
book”, since there usually isn’t one, but learning from experience.
To better understand what constitutes this journalistic doxa, the lived experience that
informs routinised reporting, we asked what personal principles guide journalists’ work on
sexual violence cases. Many respondents emphasised “sensitivity” (38.2%), with women
reporters (54.3%) giving it considerably greater importance than men (29.9%).
An independent journalist from Chhattisgarh said she prioritised a survivor’s wellbeing
when covering sexual violence: “I try as much as possible to not sort of cause trauma again”.
Several women journalists spoke of “backing off” and not “pressurising” survivors if they felt
they were causing harm. A Srinagar-based journalist put it thus: “I understand that she is
harassed and is almost soulless”. A male journalist, also based in Srinagar, said his personal
rule is not to approach the victim for “at least three days” after the rape. A woman journalist
from the same city said she never asks the “rape victim to recall whatever has happened”.
Reporters also spoke about steering clear of sensationalism, including being careful with
their choice of words, and avoiding “going into details like what she was wearing and what
she was doing or where”. A TV journalist from Assam said: “You have to show what is
necessary for the audience. Not show her belongings or her clothes scattered –– anything of
that nature should be cut”.
Factuality and accuracy were emphasised by several respondents. Reporters spoke of this
as “making sure my report was based on truth” and avoiding “hearsay”, as well as “sticking
to facts and figures”. A Tamil TV journalist said, “I don’t rush to telecast it first. Since I
work in the visual medium, bringing [a story] out first is more important. But in these cases,
I make sure the facts are right even if I telecast it late.”
Similar to the codified principles of guidelines or legal frameworks, the everyday routi-
nised practices reflected conventional professional values — protecting the identities of
victims, verification, and facticity. Whilst there was some recognition that sexual violence
requires sensitivity, there was little within current practices that signalled journalists were
actively seeking to effect societal changes through changes to their own reporting.

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However, those who sought to change journalism did so conscious of how their approach
countered the prevailing habitus. One New Delhi-based woman journalist, for example,
spoke of the insensitivity with which many reporters approach survivors and how she tries
to avoid accentuating the victims’ hurt, talking about them “through a larger prism of
socio-economics rather than just calling them victims of sexual violence”.

Journalistic deontology and sexual violence

Standaert, Hanitzsch and Dedonder (2021) note how Indian journalists reportedly ex-
pressed a commitment to social intervention as their normative duty. In so doing, they “not
only report on social grievances but they also actively promote measures to remedy social
problems and thus drive political and social reform” (Standaert, Hanitzsch and Dedonder,
2021, p. 932). Whilst this suggests a change agent role, countries that reported this emphasis
also highlighted the importance of the facilitator role that “approach foregrounding the
media’s constructive support of the government’s efforts to achieve commonly shared social
goals” (ibid, p.2).
Other studies on Indian news cultures echo these findings, underlining tensions in the
commitment to the public good and the quantity vs quality of journalism produced across a
very buoyant media landscape (Sonwalkar, 2013, 2015). Paradoxically, India has experi-
enced a growth in the change agent role – or advocacy media – alongside an expanding
corporate power over news media (Rao and Mudgal, 2015; Maheshwari and Sparks, 2021).
In scholarly circles, most of this work has been analysing intersections of corporate or
political power with news cultures, with relatively little attention placed on the dynamics
of journalistic deontology in relation to sexual violence. That is, the sense of moral duty or
obligation a journalist feels to act on a given issue or scenario. Of concern here is not solely
the existence of guidelines or the operationalisation of these within the journalistic doxa, but
the extent to which the habitus includes a sense of deontologic duty towards promoting
and remedying sexual violence as a social problem. This is important to understand the
capacity within the journalistic community to not simply observe legal guidelines, but alter
the journalistic doxa.
To this end, we queried journalists on how they perceived their own role when reporting
on sexual violence and whether they felt a sense of responsibility to combat it as a societal
problem. The majority of journalists (78%) said they had the responsibility to effect change,
with a similar proportion of women and men expressing such sentiments.
It is worth noting, too, that the Indian news landscape is not one homogenous jour-
nalistic doxa; there are multiple regional and vernacular variations across the country.
Looking across languages we found a lower sense of duty to effect change in Hindi, Urdu
and Punjabi. It is possible that these journalists may be more resistant to pursuing proactive
solutions. Telugu and Gujarati are the only languages where some journalists explicitly
stated they did not feel responsible for change (7.7% each).
Such differences also potentially influence the capacity for – and willingness to – change
within those newsrooms. In particular, the extent to which those journalists have a lower
propensity to consider adopting reporting styles that proactively seek to identify solutions
and avoid perpetuating the status quo. Indeed, those who felt a high sense of responsibility
often referenced broader journalistic ideals, speaking of “trying to bring out the truth …
bringing about justice in society”, or a determination “to raise the issues that are concerning
women, who make up for 50% of the population”. An Urdu journalist said:

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I want to help women by giving them their dignity back and stop such injustices. This
newspaper is not printed merely for the sake of publishing. It’s a mission. It’s a voice
against injustices and excesses.

Some journalists spoke more specifically about their responsibility to tackle sexual violence.
A Gujarati TV reporter said journalists have a major role to play in engendering change and
combating sexual violence. A woman Telugu journalist echoed the sentiment. Women
journalists, she said, “particularly have to take more responsibility”.
A Mumbai-based woman journalist for a national TV channel said journalists have a
small but important role in change-making and that it starts with “asking the right ques-
tions to the law enforcement agencies and not laughing at the sexist jokes the police or the
prosecutor make at times”.
Several respondents said that reporting accurately and creating public awareness was
how change could be effected, but others spoke of more actively seeking to get “justice” for
the victim. A Tamil journalist said, “We have to ensure there is awareness among people by
writing about these issues. It is our duty to ensure that the victim gets support and justice”.
A smaller segment said reporting on the trial and punishment and highlighting the conse-
quences of committing sexual violence would act as a deterrent.
Although the majority of respondents agreed that journalists should strive for change,
9.3% thought that they could only have a limited impact. Several journalists pointed out
that while journalism could help, sexual violence was too pervasive a societal problem for
them to make a significant change. One radio journalist told us:

There should be many people fighting in this battle. In this battle, I can’t substitute for
an activist or police official or a doctor. But I should certainly do my bit. I think
journalists do have a responsibility.

Another made a similar point, saying that journalists were among the many “different levels of
people” such as “pastors, teachers, police, politicians” who could help bring about change:

We can only be part of the campaign. That’s all we can do. There are a lot many
journalists writing against rape for more than 40 years. We can’t see any significant
change. The world is like that.

This balancing of responsibility and fatalism was evident in many responses. The magnitude
of the problem was too great for them to make a significant impact, even as a community.
As one reporter said, after all, journalists “can’t really change the world”. Another said:

I think we have a job in reporting sexual crimes. We have a role in finding out the
psychological status of the person, we have a role in enlightening others that these
types of people are there in the society, and you should be more careful in sending
your children out, while getting involved with a person. We can give information to
millions of people. That’s all we can do.

The response above, from an experienced TV journalist who said he was initially idealistic
about effecting change, points to the fatalism that can creep into Indian journalistic habitus –
the sense of inevitability surrounding sexual violence, irrespective of journalistic practices.

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Such pessimism is in our view detrimental, arguably pushing journalistic doxa away from
idealism, into less solution-oriented terrains. Though engendering societal change may seem
out of reach, we argue it is important for journalists to see the opportunity to re-imagine
newswork, allowing deontology to shape their journalistic doxa. There is, fortunately, evi-
dence that such an approach too is present, though limited to a minority. A senior online
journalist indicated as such:

My editors share a lot of information around [it] … [So] it’s not just us who are trying
to re-imagine the journalism and trying to work in a certain manner which hopefully is
not patriarchal and hopefully is sensitive in its readership because we believe in it.

What comes to the fore here is the extent to which the journalistic habitus reproduces and
reinforces patriarchal social structures antithetical to effecting social change. However, the
fact that these duties are imbued within the Indian journalistic community means there is a
foundation on which practical interventions can build to shape a different journalistic doxa.

Conclusion
Journalism that negates patriarchal attitudes, challenges social and cultural norms and
seeks holistic, societal solutions is critical in addressing sexual violence. Activists and
scholars have for decades defined normative ideals for what constitutes such “good jour-
nalism”. Indeed, guidelines produced are cyclical, recommending similar actions, typically
nuanced with the local context or specific emphasis of event(s) they were published in
response to. But we also know that the routinised newswork perpetuates practices that fall
short of, or fail to reference, such normative ideals.
The professional habitus of journalists, we argue, is largely responsive to legal frame-
works, with journalists mostly focused on what they could not do in their reporting (such as
naming the victim or writing about sub judice cases), rather than what they should.
Deference in this way absolves the habitus from the need to develop any further ethical
codes to enhance or even change news reporting. This is problematic as the habitus re-
produces and reinforces patriarchal social structures, which leads to cyclical inequalities –
despite the stated good intentions of journalists in our study.
These challenges notwithstanding, Indian journalists clearly feel a sense of duty to effect
social change. This deontology illustrates there is a foundation on which practical inter-
ventions can be built, to help shape a different habitus, a different doxa. As we have argued
elsewhere, such an approach requires intersectional interventions beyond editorial guide-
lines (Sreedharan and Thorsen, 2021). Whilst reporting guidelines are integral to positive
reporting, they stand little chance of being embedded without challenging the status quo in
the institutional structures and power relations both within the news industry and the
professional habitus it interacts with. And, indeed, the educational habitus that feeds these.
Whilst journalists and news outlets can effect change within, more holistic solutions are
required to address sexual violence societally. Attitudinal changes, particularly among
the key actors that journalists need to collaborate with, are fundamental in strengthening
the news reporting of sexual violence. Unfortunately, such actors – political powers, law
enforcers, judiciary, health officials and so forth – display the same patriarchal habitus in
India as the news industry. Transforming journalism is therefore intertwined with a broader
necessity to release society from its patriarchal moorings, which, in our view, requires

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holistic, intersectional approaches that address structural inequalities within a society.

Changing the journalistic habitus and doxa can only happen through persistent interven-
tions over time; systemic changes grow from a multiplicity of interrelations and actions
rather than any single intervention. Just as journalists need to be trained in the complexities
of law enforcement procedures and medical processes of documenting sexual assault, those
professions, too, need to evolve to better intersect with, and understand, the role of jour-
nalists as agents of social change.

Notes
1 The interviews were conducted between September 2018 and July 2019, and our questions spanned
newsroom practices, newsgathering and sourcing, editorial gatekeeping, as well as news narration,
follow-ups and investigations vis-a-vis the journalism on sexual violence.

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 PART 2

Representing reality
 REPRESENTING REALITY
Introduction to Part 2
Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge

In Part 2, we turn away from news, to consider questions of voice, believability and genre in
a range of non-fictional media. Survivor testimony plays a more central role in Part 2 as
contributors interrogate the possibilities – and limitations – that different media and generic
forms offer to and for survivors. Importantly, for many of the authors in this section, there
are related questions around the representational politics of our own writing as well as
ethical considerations in working with survivor speech. This anticipates concerns we return
to in different ways in Part 3 (in relation to the importance of naming) and Part 4 (in
relation to pedagogy).
A recurring concern in this section is the degree of control survivors – and, in the case of
femicide, their loved ones – are able to exercise over their testimony. Chapters in Part 2
consider how survivor testimony is mobilised in media forms over which survivors have
little creative control (including popular magazines, true crime television and podcasts and
documentary film) as well as in memoirs, social media posts and videos over which they
ostensibly have greater control. Yet even in those cases where survivors retain a degree of
editorial control, there are complex ethical questions to reflect on, especially when survivors
may decide to remove or restrict content that was formerly publicly available (see
Harrington and Gerrard, Chapter 19). We have explained the editorial stance taken in the
collection in the Introduction but it is worth reiterating here that we do not include iden-
tifying details (such as usernames) for private individuals. However, it is arguable that by
removing social media usernames, we compound the marginalisation of survivor voices. We
have encouraged contributors to address this as best they can (for instance, by discussing
how private individuals choose to represent themselves and the tools they use to do so)
without identifying individuals whose speech about violence in one context cannot be taken
as perpetual consent to being publicly identified as a survivor.
The tensions and risks of being identified as a public survivor are central to the chapters
which open Part 2. Jilly Boyce Kay and Tanya Serisier are cautious of the ways in which
critiques of the political uses to which survivor speech are put can be mobilised against
individual survivors rather than seen as a function of media logics and algorithms. In the
opening chapter, Kay sets up a number of the key concerns of Part 2 by introducing
the concept of communicative injustice which she defines as the denial of meaningful voice.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-21 187

 Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge

The word “meaningful” is key. Whilst “speaking out” about men’s violence against women
has become fetishised in recent years (Serisier, 2018), for speech to communicate requires
someone to listen and to engage. Kay’s chapter unpicks precisely how “speaking out” can
be(come) a form of compromised communication, as the meaning of survivor speech is
contested along with the right of survivors (particularly if they are multiply marginalised) to
take up public space at all. To be clear, Kay’s critique is not a critique of public survivor
speech in itself and she is attentive to the policing of survivor speech not only by anti-
feminist forces but also by some feminists, particularly in the context of #MeToo. Rather
she – like many other contributors – is centrally concerned with the relationship between
individual testimonials and shared understandings. For Kay, emotion – its legibility and
legitimacy – is central to this relationship as she demonstrates through an analysis of
responses to testimonial statements from US Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez
and comedian Hannah Gadsby.
Whilst both Ocasio-Cortez and Gadsby were public figures before they publicly identified
themselves as survivors, for others it is their speech about victimisation which makes them
public figures. In Chapter 18, Tanya Serisier focuses on the emergence of the “public sur-
vivor” as a cultural and political figure, examining the conditions under which experience is
translated into expertise. There is a long tradition of the epistemological privileging of
survivors within feminist spaces, but Serisier questions what happens when survivors are
given more mainstream platforms to speak of their experiences and to represent survivors
more broadly. She is concerned with the costs of becoming a public survivor given the
requirement to endlessly recount moments of vulnerability as the condition of their entry into
the public sphere and the way this subsumes other aspects of their identity. Like Kay, she is
attentive to the ways in which public survivors’ stories become the focus of interrogation and
doubt, noting that whilst the language for expressing that doubt may not be as nakedly victim-
blaming as in previous decades, it is the way these stories are held up as potentially offering
universal truths that enable new forms of doubt and disbelief to take hold.
Part of what is at stake across both of these chapters, then, is the tension between the
individual and collective. Where survivors are endlessly required to retell their personal
victimisation, the process of translating experience into broader expertise is lost. Ironically,
where the exhortation to “listen to survivors” is translated into a mediated engagement with
this (one) survivor, the work that survivor is undertaking as an advocate can be reframed in
reductively personal terms (bravery, inspiration) which frustrate attempts at structural
analysis and change. The further irony here is that such advocacy is often built on the
process of having listened to other survivors, so the fetishisation of the individual narrative
can be a form of silencing in relation to that polyvocal context (Burke, 2021; also Towers,
Chapter 47). Given what we know about the relatively narrow range of victim/survivors
(white, cis, well educated, sexually “respectable”), perpetrators (minoritised men) and as-
saults (stranger rape, assaults resulting in physical injury) that achieve enhanced visibility in
mainstream spaces, this is particularly concerning. Unsurprisingly, many of the chapters in
Part 2 highlight the same gendered, racialised and classed economies of attention which
were discussed in relation to newsworthiness in Part 1 and a number of authors (Falkof,
Chapter 24; Palmer, Chapter 28) are also centrally concerned with how stories of victimi-
sation and survival can be mobilised in nationalist projects.
In their conclusions, both Kay and Serisier demand that critiques of “speaking out” are
properly attentive to media logics and structures. Without this, critiques of survivor speech
as a mode can too easily tip into (or be re-appropriated as) criticism of individual survivors,

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increasing the already heavy burden on public survivors by expecting them to somehow rise
above these structures to achieve feminist ends. This is not to make Ocasio-Cortez’s tweets
or Gadsby’s comedy out-of-bounds for critique but rather to insist that they are situated in
the media spaces which shape them and that judgement is reserved for these systems and not
the individual speech acts of survivors, no matter how prominent they are.
Carol Harrington and MacKenzie Gerrard explore similar concerns in their chapter
focused on #MeToo videos shared by micro-influencers on YouTube. The micro-
influencers Harrington and Gerrard focus on sit somewhere between the celebrity survivors
discussed by Kay and the public survivors of Serisier’s chapter. Their celebrity may be
specific to the platform, however, their #MeToo videos are part of a flow of self-generated
content that is not primarily focused on sexual violence. Their YouTube channels thus offer
representations of survivors which extend beyond the narrowly-constructed stories of vic-
timisation and recovery in which public survivors are too often discursively trapped and
embed sexual violence more firmly in the everyday. As videos positioned specifically in
relation to #MeToo, they are also inserted into a stream of cross-platform content united
under the hashtag (the feminist potential of the hashtag as a collectivising force is explored
in Part 4). One of the distinctive aspects of the videos Harrington and Gerrard examine is
the explicitly educative tone they adopt. The role of influencers is by definition to influence
and whilst they may step outside the spheres in which they more commonly offer tips,
demonstrations or reviews, the address to viewers is continuous with other content on their
channels. As Harrington and Gerrard illustrate, in relation to sexual violence the influence
they want to exert is certainly feminist-inflected although the term is not necessarily em-
braced, rather what emerges is a kind of “anti-sexist common sense”.
Chapters 20, 21 and 22 are concerned with different manifestations of true crime.
Jennifer O’Meara focuses on true crime podcasts about missing and/or murdered women.
O’Meara’s interest in voice extends beyond questions around who speaks and under what
conditions they can be heard, to consider the affective qualities of voice. She begins with a
discussion of the use of sensationalist mental images of women’s violation which has
characterised many of the most successful true crime podcasts, injecting a note of caution
into more optimistic feminist accounts of the potential of audio forms to disrupt the
attention to bodily injury and pain which characterise visual forms. This is not to be entirely
pessimistic about the feminist potential of the true crime podcast. O’Meara notes, for
instance, that the emphasis on survivors’, witnesses’ and loved ones’ voices – and, in par-
ticular, the sounds of their distress – provide a counterpoint to these sensationalist mental
images which create possibilities for empathy, not least as a result of the sustained and
attentive listening these series demand. Whilst the emphasis of the genre remains on victi-
mised white women, there are exceptions – like Finding Cleo, which O’Meara discusses at
some length, and is focused on the disappearance of an Indigenous girl from Saskatchewan.
In its ambivalence, O’Meara’s analysis of this relatively new media form echoes feminist
critiques of more well-established genres which – as we saw in Part 1 and as the chapters by
Tanya Horeck and Hannah Hamad also demonstrate – similarly identify both possibility
and constraint in the commercial representation of men’s violence against women. In
Chapter 21, Horeck turns her attention to what she terms “#MeToo documentaries” – a
group of television documentaries focused on wealthy, celebrity men accused of sexually
abusing girls and women. Like O’Meara, Horeck situates these documentaries in relation
both to the explosion of true crime programming associated with streaming services
(Horeck, 2019) and the contemporary #MeToo moment. In doing so, she too recognises

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their uneven feminist potential. On the one hand, they centre women’s voices and experi-
ences, including – on occasion – those of experts who can provide a feminist analysis to
contextualise survivor testimony. The longer form of the documentary series allows for an
exploration of some of the stories missing from the mainstream media’s initial coverage of
#MeToo, a welcome development given true crime’s traditional emphasis on victimised
white women noted above. In the sustained engagement over time that these series demand,
they provide an interesting counterpoint to the 280-character genre of survivor testimony
which went viral following Alyssa Milano’s 2017 #MeToo tweet. On the other hand, given
the emphasis on celebrity perpetrators, narratives of exceptionalism are difficult to avoid.
Thinking of the broader social and cultural questions these series have generated also
prompts a useful discussion about how the documentaries envisage justice for the victim/
survivors and align this to thinking about different kinds of transformative projects beyond
the criminal justice system.
Building on Horeck’s (2019) work, in Chapter 22 Hannah Hamad explores the feminist
potential of the Netflix series The Ripper (2020). It is notable that in her discussion of the
series and related representations, Hamad does not, herself, name the perpetrator of the
sexual murder of 13 women in the North of England between 1975 and 1980 but, rather,
refers to the “Yorkshire Ripper event”. In doing so, Hamad invites us to reflect on our roles
as media scholars in potentially perpetuating some of the representational patterns we set
out to critique: in this case, the celebrification of perpetrators of serial violence. Echoing
aspects of Horeck’s argument, Hamad argues that The Ripper is part of a feminist true
crime trend which seeks to decentre perpetrators by, for instance, paying attention to the
broader social context, centring the voices of seldom-heard-from survivors as well as family
members, and providing evidence of feminist resistance and expertise – which, as chapters in
Part 1 attest, is too rarely evidenced in news reporting. Here, true crime achieves what news
often does not, seeing sexual murder not as an aberration but, rather, as situated in a wider
context of misogyny and structural sexism. Even so, Hamad is left with the paradox that
many other contributors also discuss (particularly in Part 3), that for this critique to be
legible involves using the recognisable (and problematic) terms through which we know
male violence against women: here, in relation to the figure of the “(Yorkshire) Ripper”.
In Chapter 23, Helen Wood extends the generic range of Part 2 by considering how real
crime cases have been dramatised in two award-winning series, the BBC’s Three Girls (2017)
and Netflix’s Unbelievable (2019). The two series share a concern with “inappropriate”
victims whose class and social marginalisation shaped the initially inadequate responses by
the police and news media to the sexual abuse committed against them (see also Gill,
Chapter 9). Wood is concerned with the possibilities the drama series offer for re-centring
these narratives around survivor speech even as they expose how the victim/survivors’ speech
was deemed “unbelievable” in the initial investigations. Whilst both series offer important
critiques of policing and criminal justice, Wood argues that there are also limitations in the
process of dramatisation in terms of which victim/survivors’ stories are centred (with Three
Girls being particularly selective) and their “happy” endings which emphasise criminal justice
and social transformation. In this way, despite their very different contexts, both series ulti-
mately downplay the class inequalities which continue to structure access to believability both
within and outside of the criminal justice system, instead emphasising the successful, class-
based transformations their central survivor figures undergo.
The next three chapters – by Nicky Falkof, Jennifer Musial and Rafaela Orphanides –
are all concerned with how the gendered racialisation of violence creates, or disrupts,

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possibilities for empathy and identification for readers. Setting her analysis against a
mainstream media landscape in South Africa which largely erases the disproportionate
victimisation of poor black women and demonises black men, Falkof examines how social
media spaces aimed at white South Africans weaponise white women’s victimisation. By
emphasising white women’s victimisation and seeing it as entirely distinct from other wo-
men’s experiences, Falkof argues that these stories entrench beliefs about the specialness,
uniqueness, importance and value of whites in South Africa. Here – as in chapters in Part 1
focused on the US (Bhaman and Kuo), Australia (Higgins), Canada (Parker et al.) and the
UK (Gill and Käkelä) – we can see how stories about men’s violence against women can be
reframed as stories primarily about race to serve political ends, whether that is in relation to
immigration policy, policing or criminal justice.
Musial and Orphanides both focus on magazines aimed primarily, or exclusively, at
women and, like Falkof, are concerned with the exceptionalism accorded to white women’s
experiences. Musial’s chapter focuses on how gendered and racialised notions of innocence,
vulnerability and value are mobilised in US magazine stories focused on pregnant white
women who are missing and presumed murdered. Reporting on missing people functions
rather differently than crime reporting in that media attention can be crucial to actually
finding the missing person (whether alive or dead). In this context, that white women are
positioned as particularly grievable – even though black people are disproportionately
represented among actual missing people cases – may have concrete repercussions for which
missing people stay missing. But this also suggests that these women do not necessarily
matter in themselves but, rather, it is who grieves that has primary importance. In tracing
the evolution and popularisation of the term “Missing White Woman Syndrome” Musial
interestingly points to the ways in which critiques of media representations can emerge in
the media whilst those representational patterns are still routinely mobilised in different
kinds of reporting. In her conclusion, she points to the ways in which newer media forms –
social media and podcasts – have been used to heighten the visibility of missing minoritised
women shut out of the racialised celebrity logics of magazine coverage.
Orphanides focuses on the representation of gender-based violence in the Greek editions
of two women’s magazines, Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire. She identifies two central
repertoires in operation in these stories which she labels the “women-ology” and “discourses
of exclusion” repertoires. The “women-ology” repertoire is used in stories focused on
women in “western” contexts and allows for the discussion of personal experience (often in
the first person) of commonly experienced forms of violence, such as domestic abuse.
Notably, whilst these stories are largely sympathetic to survivors, Orphanides echoes
Wood’s critique of the rather linear stories they tell: here, too, the emphasis is on moving
from a victimised position to one of survival, ignoring the more complex relationship
between victimisation and survival which emerges in empirical work with victim/survivors
(Kelly, Burton and Regan, 1996; Jordan, 2013). In contrast with these survivor-oriented
accounts, “discourses of exclusion” work to keep the suffering of women outside the “west”
at a distance from readers, both through the mode of telling – with an emphasis on third-
party reporting – and the focus on forms of violence which are assumed to be less commonly
experienced by readers and, so, are described in at times gruesome detail. This emphasis on
detailed, distanced description is something Emmaleena Käkelä (Chapter 10) also discusses
in relation to western campaigns, policy discourse and reporting around female genital
mutilation and cutting and these chapters jointly highlight how the “spectatorship of suf-
fering” (Chouliaraki, 2006) is gendered and racialised.

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Whilst many of the chapters in Part 2 focus on texts which have specifically targeted
women listeners, viewers or readers, Maria Garner and Fiona Vera-Gray focus on por-
nography – a genre more typically associated with male consumers. Drawing on findings
from their studies of consumers, Garner and Vera-Gray explore how discourses of fantasy
are deployed in their gendered accounts of porn consumption. Specifically, Garner and
Vera-Gray consider how fantasy functions in relation to understandings of pornography
and/as violence against women, both in relation to explicitly violent content and potentially
abusive production contexts. Recognising that the fraught relationship between pornog-
raphy, reality and fantasy has been at the centre of much of the academic debate on por-
nography, Garner and Vera-Gray point to the different stakes this raises for male and
female consumers. For women, the discourse of fantasy allows something they would not
want to experience in real-life to be imagined as pleasurable by emphasising its fantastical
elements. However, this is compromised by any identification with the performers who really
experience the physical acts on screen (even if they do not necessarily share their character’s
fantastical interpretations of those acts). For men, the conflict hinges not on identification
with the on-screen performer, but on how reality and fantasy blur in their consumption
practices and their broader sexual and social lives. Although the role of fantasy is specific to
resolving the ontological contradictions posed by pornography, there are broader questions
raised here about gendered patterns of spectatorship in relation to the images of women’s
violated bodies which populate many of the texts discussed in Part 1 and Part 2.
Where most of the chapters in this collection focus on interpersonal violence, Lucia M.
Palmer and Lisa DiGiovanni are centrally concerned with aspects of state-sanctioned vio-
lence: border control and militarisation respectively. Palmer’s focus is how the US/Mexico
border is imagined as a space of gendered, racialised and sexualised threat as a means of
legitimating different forms of border control. Situating her argument in relation to
scholarship on border imaginaries, Palmer examines examples from right-wing “nativist”
media alongside public relations material produced by the Customs and Border Protection
agency, to demonstrate their shared investments in the tropes of the savage “Other”, vic-
timised women and children, and patriarchal protectors. There are connections here with
chapters in Part 1 by Gill, Parker et al and Käkelä which similarly point to how both the
violences of minoritised men and the spectacular victimisation of minoritised women and
children can be discursively and politically deployed in ways that may be antithetical to the
actual needs of vulnerable women and children. Perhaps because of their heavily institu-
tional character, these border imaginaries appear to have no room for survivor discourse
which – as other chapters in Part 2 demonstrate – is still too often understood in individ-
ualistic terms in media representations.
Although Palmer does not use the notion of the continuum explicitly, her analysis
demonstrates the importance of understanding connections between different kinds of
violence and differently-positioned violent actors, insisting on the importance of a gendered
analysis to an understanding of all forms of border violence. DiGiovanni is also centrally
concerned with making these kinds of connections and deploys Cynthia Cockburn’s (2004)
work on the continuum of violence in two suggestive ways: most centrally to explore the
relationship between “normal” and military masculinity in the Chilean context; and sec-
ondly to think about a historical continuum, noting the legacies of historical moments and
interpretations of violence in the present. DiGiovanni’s objects of study are two docu-
mentary films by women filmmakers which, she argues, powerfully animate these concerns
by focusing on the personal, domestic manifestations of militarised masculinity. With their

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shared emphasis on the family, these films also open up important questions about how
women can be complicit in militarised masculinity and support militarised atrocities both
directly (as agents of the regime) and indirectly (through the perpetuation of its ideals).
In the final chapter in Part 2, Rahat Imran is also concerned with women’s filmmaking,
focusing on documentary filmmaking and/as activism in relation to men’s violence against
women in Pakistan. This chapter contains some detailed descriptions of violence which help
demonstrate the hard-hitting approach taken by the filmmakers. Although other chapters
wrestle with the potentially dehumanising implications of graphic depictions (e.g. Käkelä,
O’Meara, Orphanides), Imran suggests such depictions can raise awareness of abusive
practices which have not traditionally been understood as violence and reminds us of the
importance of context in determining what approaches to representation are most effective.
With her emphasis on the activist potential of film, Imran also anticipates Eylem Atakav’s
(Chapter 55) consideration of scholarly filmmaking practices in Part 4.

References
Burke, T. (2021) Unbound: My story of liberation and the birth of the Me Too movement. London:
Headline.
Chouliaraki, L. (2006) The spectatorship of suffering. London: Sage.
Cockburn, C. (2004) ‘The continuum of violence: A gender perspective on war and peace’, in Giles, W. and
Hyndman, J. (eds.) Sites of violence: Gender and conflict zones. Berkeley: University of California
Press, pp. 24–44.
Horeck, T. (2019) Justice on demand: True crime in the digital streaming era. Detroit: Wayne State
University Press.
Jordan, J. (2013) ‘From victim to survivor – and from survivor to victim reconceptualising the survivor
journey’, Sexual Abuse in Australia and New Zealand, 5 (2), pp. 48–56.
Kelly, L., Burton, S. and Regan, L. (1996) ‘Beyond victim or survivor: Sexual violence, identity and
feminist theory and practice’, in Adkins, L. and Merchant, V. (eds.) Sexualizing the social:
Power and the organization of sexuality. Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 77–101.
Serisier, T. (2018) Speaking out: Feminism, rape and narrative politics. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

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 17
THE POLITICS OF THE
TRAUMATISED VOICE
Communicative injustice and structural
silencing in contemporary media culture
Jilly Boyce Kay

Introduction
In this chapter, I argue that contemporary media culture is characterised by communicative
injustice. I define this as the denial of meaningful voice and I am particularly concerned in this
chapter with how this pertains to women’s public speech about gendered violence and trauma,
specifically in an Anglo-American context. Building on my existing work on voice (Kay,
2020a) and that of other feminist media scholars, I argue that since the 1990s, and particularly
in the wake of #MeToo, contemporary media culture has provided a highly ambivalent
communicative terrain through which to “speak out” about such violence, abuse and trauma.
On the one hand, the chapter argues that it is vital that feminist scholars and activists draw
attention to the profound problems that ensue from “speaking out” through the communi-
cative architectures of late capitalist media culture – with their logics of cooptation, depoli-
ticisation, spectacularisation and commodification. However, it argues that we must also
critique and resist the countervailing logic – that which assumes that any kind of “traumatised
voice” that speaks through these communicative architectures is complicit in neoliberal
hegemony and the undermining of collective voice. It makes connections in this regard with
debates about identity politics and trauma, problematising some of the critiques of #MeToo
which imply that it is a movement motivated and driven by forms of vengeful anger, and that
personally-experienced trauma, woundedness and rage have no place in movements for justice
and radical liberation. The chapter then turns to consider two high-profile women who
have made disclosures about sexual assault through the architectures of mass media culture –
the politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the comedian Hannah Gadsby – and the ways
they have been accused of emotionally manipulating their audiences, exploiting their trauma
for personal gain, and thus of helping to foreclose the possibility of more radical democratic
futures and social solidarity. It argues that such suggestions of complicity and culpability
constitute another, insidious form of communicative injustice.

Histories of communicative injustice: from ducking stools to doxxing

In order to apprehend the scale and power of gendered communicative injustice, it is
necessary to recognise how very deeply its historical roots run; indeed, the exclusion and

194 DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-22

 The politics of the traumatised voice

trivialisation of women’s voices are not an accident or aberration, but rather are “baked in”
to the western public sphere. Mary Beard (2017) traces this history back to classical anti-
quity: in Ancient Greece, women and slaves were formally excluded from public-speech-
making, so that the very practice was culturally constituted as exclusively masculine;
similarly, in Ancient Rome, a “woman speaking in public was, in most circumstances, by
definition not a woman” (p. 17). These ancient forms of exclusion, and the legitimacy that
has been unequally accorded to public speakers on the basis of their gender, continue to
shape contemporary culture, and we are still living with the legacies of these gendered
communicative norms.
Anne Karpf writes that throughout most of history, the idealised mode of speech for
women has, in fact, been not to speak – but rather to be silent (Karpf, 2006, p. 156). A whole
category of words in the English language both reflect and perpetuate a misogynistic
devaluation – even disgust – of women’s voices: Mary Talbot points to the astonishing
variety of derogatory names for vocal women in the English language, such as scold, bitch,
nag, shrew, virago and many more (Talbot, 2010, p. 185). Tellingly, there is no such genre of
condemnatory words that are applied to vocal men. Nancy Fraser (1990, p. 60) notes the
etymological connection between “testicle” and “testimony”, underscoring again how the
exclusion and discrediting of women’s public testimony are deeply bound up in language
and culture. There is a long and deep history in which women’s speech has been castigated,
despised, trivialised, feared and punished, from Aristotle’s proclamation that “Silence is a
woman’s glory” in Ancient Greece (Karpf, 2006, p. 156), through to brutal punishments of
the witch hunts and the ducking stool and scold’s bridle in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries (Federici, 2014, 2018; Kay, 2020a), to the misogynistic trolling and doxxing of
contemporary digital culture (Madden et al., 2018; Mendes Ringrose and Keller, 2018; Jane
2016). Through a broad, deep devaluing of their public speech, women have been persist-
ently figured as unreliable narrators and testifiers, which has significant consequences for
those who speak out about sexual and gendered violence. As Banet-Weiser and Higgins
note, “believing women who accuse men of sexual assault endures as an uphill cultural
struggle” (2022, p. 128). In short, to speak in public as a woman remains, for most, pro-
foundly difficult; and this injustice is further compounded by racism, ableism and classism.
However, these forms of communicative injustice are now increasingly ideologically
obscured by a prevailing sense that digital media culture has democratised voice, as well as
the postfeminist myth that gender equality has been won (Tasker and Negra, 2007; Gill,
2007, 2017; McRobbie, 2009). While historically, the idealised mode of communication for
women has been silence, in contemporary neoliberal culture there appears to have been a
radical break, so that women are now impelled to speak up, to speak out and to “find their
voice”. As Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad (2015, 2022) argue, we are living in a historical
moment of a “confidence cult(ure)”, in which being “empowered” and “resilient” are now
culturally mandated for women. Following Orgad and Gill, and other scholars such as Sara
Ahmed and Jackie Stacey (2001) who have critiqued what they term “testimonial culture” –
the intensifying ways in which women, in particular, are impelled to “speak out”, “testify”
and “share” – I have cautioned against any straightforward celebration of this shift. While
the increasing encouragement of women to “lean in”, “come forwards” and “find their
voice” in contemporary culture may appear to align with longstanding feminist aims of
equality and recognition, these particular incitements to be individually “confident” and
“empowered” actually work against the possibility of collective voice and movements for
structural transformation.

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In this way, the hegemonic understandings and mobilisations of “voice” in contemporary

culture align with the hyper-individualised forms of subjectivity produced in contexts of
neoliberal feminism (Rottenberg, 2018) and popular feminism (Banet-Weiser, 2018) which
valorise “choice” and “empowerment” but disavow and disarticulate the possibility of
collective feminist resistance (see also Gill, 2007, 2017; Gill and Orgad, 2015, 2018;
McRobbie, 2009, 2020). At the same time, the spectacular promise of voice for women is so
often met by the brute realities of misogynistic backlash in a culture that is still substantially
shaped by its communicative ideal of silence for women. This, then, is a conjuncturally
specific form of the structural silencing of women, which is both continuous with and yet
also distinctive from previous forms of communicative injustice. I particularly want to
explore how contemporary Anglo-American media culture – through which there is a
prevailing sense that women’s rage has been “unleashed” and that they are now much freer
to “speak out” angrily about gendered violence, abuse and trauma – is still characterised by
communicative injustice and structural silencing, albeit in particular and insidious ways.

#MeToo, trauma narratives and “wounded identity”

Since the #MeToo movement came to mass public visibility in 2017/18, there has been an
increasing sense that women are “speaking out” and that hitherto hidden or suppressed
narratives of gendered abuse are coming to light, particularly through the communicative
architectures of social media and television drama. The misogynistic backlash against
#MeToo, which was in fact present from its very beginnings, has been well documented (see
for example Boyle, 2019). However, certain strands of liberalism and the left also proffered
critiques of the #MeToo movement. Many of these were generally sympathetic, recognising
that #MeToo had activated an important impulse for “mass disclosure”, but also that it was
politically constrained by its tendency towards media spectacularisation over substantive
political engagement, its focus on wealthy white celebrities and its lack of engagement with
economic or materialist politics (see for example Cobb and Horeck, 2018; Boyle, 2019;
Banet-Weiser, 2018; Kay, 2020a; Rottenberg, 2019). However, others presented another
kind of critique, arguing that there is a problematic impulse of revenge and resentment
running through the #MeToo movement and that it actively participates in a vengeful
culture characterised by the “weaponisation of trauma” (Nair, 2021).
The liberal philosopher Martha Nussbaum, for example, while recognising the necessity
of #MeToo in challenging patriarchal power and sexist abuse, also identified the movement
as part of a broader culture oriented to vengeance and “payback” rather than to meaningful
justice:

[#MeToo] is also a time when some women not only ask for equal respect but seem to
take pleasure in retribution. Instead of a prophetic vision of justice and reconciliation,
these women prefer an apocalyptic vision in which the former oppressor is brought
low, and this vision parades as justice. No. Justice is something very different,
requiring nuances, distinctions, and forward-looking strategies to bring the warring
parties to the table of peace.
(Nussbaum, 2021, p. 11)

Nussbaum suggests that #MeToo has a tendency towards retributive anger that ultimately
“does not serve justice well” and actually “retards human progress” (ibid., p. 10). This

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accords with her broader philosophical assessment of anger as a political emotion, which she
characterises as “stupid”, “irrational”, “childish” and “undisciplined” (Nussbaum, 2016,
p.249). Feminist writers such as Brittney Cooper (2018), Rebecca Traister (2018) and Soraya
Chemaly (2018) have argued for the value of anger as a resource for feminism, drawing
especially on the pioneering work of Black feminist Audre Lorde (1997 [1981]), arguing that
anger can both clarify the nature of injustice and energise movements for gender justice (see
also Kay, 2019; Kay and Banet-Weiser, 2019; Srinivasan, 2018; Cossey and Martin, 2021).
However, for Nussbaum, because it is born of ultimately selfish concerns, as well as vengeful
desires pertaining to one’s status, anger must be transcended and dismissed. For her, in the
context of #MeToo, it is an unspecified but seemingly powerful group motivated by anger –
these women – who are working against “justice and reconciliation”.
The concern that #MeToo is part of a broader cultural mood of ressentiment that works
against radical justice has also been advanced from the left; a notable example is the writer
JoAnn Wypijewski (2021) who has discussed what she sees as #MeToo’s tendency towards
“poisoned solidarity” and its “unity in vengeance” – as well as its contribution to a culture
that she says is now permanently in the mode of “sex panic”. She writes: “an enthusiasm for
punishment is palpable” within #MeToo, which is built around the “presumption of guilt in
light of experience [and] the bundling of diverse behaviors under the rubric of sexual abuse”
(2021, p. 45). This spirit of vengeance and fear, she writes, works against “organic social
solidarity” and the possibility of “concerted action for the common good” (p. xxiv).
This line of argument recalls Wendy Brown’s (1993, 1995) theory of “wounded attach-
ment”, in which she identifies a problematic turn in late capitalism to the “politicisation of
identity” (or “identity politics” as this is more commonly known). The problem with politi-
cised identity, for Brown, is that it is based upon “injury” and “logics of pain” – one’s own
suffering becomes the basis of one’s politics and the subject then becomes deeply invested in
the existence of this suffering identity. This “wounded attachment”, for Brown, forecloses the
possibility of a collectively realised, democratised future in which the oppressed identity would
no longer exist (for the purposes of this chapter, an example of this might be the identity of a
woman who is sexually abused under patriarchy whose politics are organised around and
galvanised by this experience). For Brown, the politicisation of identity is a weaponisation of
powerlessness – the “moralizing revenge of the powerless”, as she puts it, following Nietzsche –
which is ultimately counter-productive and politically immobilising as it only reinscribes and
reifies “the weak as weak” (Brown, 1993, p. 400). For many on the left, the politicisation of
identity – with its amenability to cooptation by neoliberalism – is complicit in the weakening of
the labour movement and therefore in the multidimensional crises and injustices wrought by
capitalism (e.g. Fraser, 2013). In this context, to base a political movement (such as feminism)
on traumatised identities is construed as a profound mistake.
For many thinkers, including Brown, politicised identity works against radical demo-
cratic collectivity because it tends towards narcissism. Jim McGuigan follows the Marxist
historian Eric Hobsbawm in calling identity politics “selfish”, whereas socialism is defined
as “altruistic” (McGuigan, 2019, p. 145). The problem with politicised identity for such
thinkers is that it encourages turning inwards towards the self and temporally backwards at
the cause of the pain – rather than looking both outwards to society and forwards to a
liberated future in which wounded attachments can be “let go” (for Nussbaum, 2016) or
“forgotten” (for Brown – even as she equivocates and recognises that a “counsel of for-
getting” may be “cruel” [Brown 1993, p. 406]). In short, it is a fixation on trauma – what has
happened – and the desire for justice through recognition of that trauma (and not material

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transformation of the conditions that allowed the abuse to happen) that is seen to foreclose
the possibility of more radical, democratic and just futures. Brown argues that subjectivities
that are constructed around “logics of pain” are ultimately doomed to political failure,
because they essentialise, fix and trap the wounded subject in the identity she purportedly
seeks to escape and subject her to an “eternal repetition of [her] pain” (Brown, 1993, p. 408).
The debate around “identity politics”, or the role of “recognition” in movements for social
and political justice is, of course, deeply complex, contested and ongoing, and I am unable
to consider this more fully here. However, what I wish to emphasise for the purposes of this
chapter is how #MeToo has been identified as a movement precisely based on the politi-
cisation of “woundedness” and as one which tends towards narcissism, retribution and
recrimination – a conceptualisation which I will go on to problematise.

Trauma and contemporary media culture

While a fixation on personal “woundedness” and trauma has been critiqued for its prob-
lematic political implications and limitations, scholars and writers have also noted how the
commercial logics of late-capitalist media culture have put trauma to work in troubling
ways. For example, a New Yorker piece from 2021 entitled “The case against the trauma
plot” argued that (Anglo-American) film, television and fiction are increasingly char-
acterised by the tropes of trauma and the attendant narrative structure of the “backstory” –
with its problematic imaginative orientation to the past. The writer of this piece suggests
that: “Unlike the marriage plot, the trauma plot does not direct our curiosity toward the
future (Will they or won’t they?) but back into the past (What happened to her?)” (Sehgal,
2021). The piece does not specifically reference #MeToo or feminism, but we can see how
this argument has strong affinities with the aforementioned critiques of the movement,
specifically in its identification of a fixation on past injury as politically and imaginatively
foreclosing – as well as the centrality of rape and sexual violence in the fictional backstories
it focusses upon. The piece also points to the ways in which trauma narratives increasingly
have commercial value in a transnational media ecology.
Feminist media scholars have long wrestled with the contradictory and ambivalent
potentialities and problems of late-capitalist media culture for “speaking out” about sexual
violence and trauma. This is particularly so since the 1990s when “therapeutic”, “confes-
sional” and “testimonial” culture became much more prevalent through commercial media
forms such as television talk shows and women’s magazines – thereby posing urgent questions
about the liberatory, consciousness-raising potential of such discursive forms alongside their
amenability to neoliberal capitalist logics (Alcoff and Gray, 1993; Ahmed and Stacey, 2001;
Berlant, 2001; Banet-Weiser, 2018; Kay, 2015; Sobande, 2020; Wood, 2009). This is a source
of ambivalence that continues to be of concern and I have characterised what I see as pro-
found complexities and difficulties in the gender politics of the “traumatised voice” in popular
media culture – in the following way:

The enduring (irreconcilable?) tension around the traumatised voice is that, on the one
hand, it seems to heroically challenge ancient imperatives for women to be silent —
and yet on the other, the particular kinds of politics that are articulated through the
traumatised voice lend themselves all to easily to spectacle, pity, individualisation and
commodification.
(Kay, 2020a, p. 75).

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The commodification of trauma and anger is assuredly a form of communicative injustice,

and also one that places conditions on the ways in which women’s voices may be heard
within contemporary media culture. However, I want to focus here on another communi-
cative injustice born from a particular response to the commodification of trauma – that is,
the blaming of individual women for their complicity with such media logics. I want to argue
that it is the communicative context that renders “testifying” or “speaking out” problematic;
and that speaking out is not inherently an individualistic or individualising act – or indeed
one that undermines the possibility of social solidarity or the ability to imagine radical
democratic futures. As I go on to show in the following section, arguments which imply that
individual women are complicit in or even culpable for the perpetuation of problematic
“identity politics” or “trauma porn” risk buttressing right-wing and misogynistic logics.

AOC, Hannah Gadsby and the “weaponisation” of trauma

In January 2021, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (known widely as “AOC”), the American
politician and activist, a woman of colour, and youngest woman to ever serve in the US
Congress, took to her Instagram Live to discuss the recent attack on the Capitol Building in
Washington by right-wing supporters of the then-President Donald Trump (who is widely
acknowledged to have incited the action). In the video, AOC, who had been in the building
at the time of the siege, was highly critical of the Republican politicians who would not
condemn the violence in Washington or recognise its traumatic impact upon those who
experienced or witnessed it. She also explained that those who were arguing that people
needed to “move on” from the attack were minimising its impact and thus employing
“the same tactics of abusers” (cited in Diavolo, 2021). In this video, she also revealed that
she was a survivor of sexual violence and made connections between the traumatic ex-
perience of the Capitol attack and that of sexual assault: “I’m a survivor of sexual assault
[…] . And I haven’t told many people that in my life […] When we go through trauma,
trauma compounds on each other” (ibid.).
Entirely predictably, there was a swift backlash to her disclosure from the political right.
The conservative magazine The Spectator claimed that she was using a “sexual assault claim
as a political cudgel” (Athey, 2021, n.p.):

This is gross manipulation, and AOC should be ashamed. Not for sharing that she was
sexually assaulted — I have no way of knowing whether or not her story is true and,
ultimately, it’s irrelevant to the issue of the storming of the Capitol […] . The real story
here is that […] she has weaponized her alleged experience to silence anyone who
criticizes her.

The ultra-conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh approvingly quoted this Spectator article
on an episode of his talk show – the transcript of which was published as an article entitled “I’m
not making light of AOC’s trauma – but she politicized it, not me” (Limbaugh, 2021).
As I have already suggested, there was nothing surprising about this kind of response from
the conservative US media, with its established record of sexism, anti-feminism, racism and
deeply reactionary politics. However, there were also responses from the left that reproduced
similar narratives about AOC’s “manipulativeness”, in ways that recall the arguments about
politicised identity, narcissism and “wounded attachments”. Most notably, the writer Yasmin
Nair (2021) wrote a piece entitled “AOC and the weaponization of trauma”. In this article,

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Nair argued that the disclosure of sexual assault in this context – and AOC’s linking of this
experience to the Capitol riot – was emblematic of a disturbing culture in which trauma has
become a kind of currency and that women of colour, in particular, are now impelled to
“vomit” out their trauma:

Left unchecked and without any critical response, such a manipulative use of trauma
can never be empowering or revealing of human-ness: it only increases the demand
that minority groups like women of colour justify their existence through the constant
narration of their trauma […] AOC’s revelation is being widely lauded for making
women’s trauma visible, but this is a careless reading of a long, often tedious and
repetitive narrative […] We can be sympathetic to what AOC faced, acknowledge that
she must have gone through horrific experiences in the distant and near past, and also
maintain a healthy cynicism about the extent to which she is manipulating both a
larger and a personal narrative of trauma as a politician.

While Nair’s assessment is clearly far more nuanced, sympathetic and sophisticated than
those conservative commentaries previously discussed, in my view, it problematically
repeats the idea that speaking out about and “politicizing” personal trauma inevitably
works in a regressive direction and against the possibility of radical politics – as well as the
idea that it will accrue certain personal benefits for the person who is publicly disclosing.
Here, Nair suggests that AOC’s disclosure worked to her advantage as an individual, but
only added to a deeply unjust and unequal culture, especially for women of colour, in which
speaking trauma is now not a driver of social progress, but increasingly a requirement for
access to material resources. It also implicitly repeats the argument that personal
“woundedness” is deeply problematic as a basis for politics.
This line of argument aligns with the logics set out earlier in the chapter, which suggest
that the impulse to speak out in #MeToo has a “veneer of liberation” (Wypijewski, 2021
p. 45) that actually masks a conservative commitment to preserving the status quo. Put
otherwise, it suggests that AOC’s public disclosure of sexual assault is inappropriate
because it is not properly political, but merely a personal wound. It further suggests that
high-profile individuals, such as AOC, are able to reap certain rewards from this by ma-
nipulating a broader culture of “sex panic” for their own career ends.
I have previously explored similar kinds of accusations which were levelled at the comedian
Hannah Gadsby for her stand-up show Nanette, recorded as a Netflix show in 2018. In this
show, which received very warm critical acclaim as well as a predictable misogynistic back-
lash, she disclosed and articulated her own “trauma narrative” – pertaining to homophobic
abuse, assault and rape (Kay, 2020a, chapter 3; Kay 2020b). However, Yasmin Nair (2018)
wrote that Nanette was “awful” because it perpetuated the disturbing idea that women and
queers are only authenticated in the public sphere when they are partaking in a “vomitous
culture of constant revelation” and “emotional manipulation”. Nair goes on to say that
trauma has become a “passport” to citizenship and a

precondition for queers and women to enter into public discourse: there is no coming
out without providing first a narrative of having been bashed, or raped, or brutalised
in some way and women are not permitted to inhabit public spheres without having
demonstrated at least some evidence that they have been physically and emotionally
wounded (2018, n.p.).

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P.E. Moskowitz in The Outline, writing from a critical queer perspective, argued that
Nanette belongs to the “wokeness industrial complex”; they wrote that it allows straight,
white liberals to feel “comfortably woke” without being “challenged in any meaningful way
to act”, and that its focus is on individual trauma and the need for “mutual respect”, rather
than on dismantling structural forms of oppression (Moskowitz, 2018, n.p.). They disputed
the claim that Nanette is a radical text, arguing instead that Gadsby is “exploiting personal
tragedy for an audience”. Moskowitz also argued that “comedy can be radical; it’s just that
when it is, it’s not typically on Netflix”.
On the one hand, I would agree that critiques of “voice” – and the highly circumscribed,
deeply compromised forms of voice that are available to women who speak about abuse and
trauma – are essential to a feminist politics of public speech. However, I also want to argue
that it is highly problematic to apportion blame to those women who do so, or to level
accusations of “manipulation” and “exploitation” at them. In fact, to make such a claim or
implication of complicity, or that disclosure of sexual violence automatically confers priv-
ilege on a speaking subject, can constitute another layer of communicative injustice. While
speaking out through the communicative architectures of capitalist media culture is in many
ways deeply inadequate, and inevitably entangles the speaker in the cultural logics of
neoliberalism, it is also reasonable and important to ask how else a mass political movement
of gender justice might be achieved, if not through the available tools for mass communi-
cation. The cultural logic of capitalist media culture assuredly works against a collective
movement and the possibility of structural transformation, but the blame for this should be
placed on the powerful structures themselves, not upon those who must navigate and utilise
them in the absence of an alternative.

Conclusion
In this chapter, I have sought to explore some of the ways that communicative injustice
operates in and through contemporary media culture. I have done this by paying particular
attention to the ways in which women who speak out about sexual violence and trauma are
construed, explicitly or implicitly, as anti-collectivist because they are “politicising” their
personal experiences, as well as utilising the communicative architectures of neoliberal
media culture. While I agree with scholars who have pointed out how “speaking out” and
“testimonial culture” are too easily amenable to cooptation by capitalist media logics if they
are not grounded in a collective moment, it is also vital that they are not dismissed as
intrinsically linked to neoliberalism or narcissism. As scholars such as Karen Boyle (2019)
and Tanya Serisier (2018) have shown, feminist speech and consciousness raising have never
been ends in themselves, but rather have been means for creating the conditions of possi-
bility for further kinds of feminist work. Communicative justice is not about individual
empowerment and “speaking out”, but about radical democratisation of the communicative
terrain, which must involve the transformation of the ownership structures and cultural
logics of media platforms; it is only then that “voice” may realise its democratic potential.
Until such times, however, I would suggest that it is another form of symbolic violence to
wholly deny or discredit the imperfect forms of voice that currently exist.

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 18
PUBLIC SURVIVORS
The burdens and possibilities of speaking
as a survivor
Tanya Serisier

In November 2021, Saxon Mullins published an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning
Herald titled, “To my fellow survivors, you are more than your worst moment” (Mullins,
2021). In her tweet about the piece, she described it in the following way: “Wrote some
thoughts for @smh about being a public survivor: kinda hard, mostly rewarding, 100%
worth it” (@SaxonAdair, 27 November 2021). Mullins had become a public figure in
Australia, and a public survivor particularly, in 2018 when she participated in an hour-long
interview on Four Corners, the flagship current affairs show of Australia’s national public
broadcaster, the ABC (Four Corners, 2018). Mullins publicly identified herself as the
complainant in a highly publicised rape case in Australia that had led to significant debates
about the consent standard in law and how it was applied in practice. Since appearing on
the programme, Mullins has remained in the public sphere, becoming a prominent advocate
of legal, social and cultural reform around sexual violence. She is widely seen as the fig-
urehead of the ultimately successful campaign to introduce an “enthusiastic consent”
standard into law in New South Wales, the Australian state in which Mullin lives.
As a self-described “public survivor”, Mullins is part of a transnational cultural phe-
nomenon that has occurred in the aftermath of second-wave feminism and its focus on
“speaking out” about sexual violence to enact social change. As a practice, speaking out, or
telling personal narratives of sexual violence publicly, has been a key focus of second-wave
and post-second-wave feminist politics, first in the US and then in many other countries
(Serisier, 2018b). Speaking out can occur collectively, through public protests such as Reclaim
the Night rallies or hashtag movements such as #MeToo. Most commonly, however, ex-
periential narratives of sexual violence enter the public sphere through individual survivors,
such as Mullins, who claim a platform to speak about rape on the basis of their experience. It
is my contention here that these public survivors have become increasingly central to the
cultural politics of sexual violence in recent decades.
In this chapter, I draw on the reflections of public survivors such as Mullins to think
about the emergence of the public survivor as a cultural and political figure and the indi-
vidual experiences and impacts of occupying this position. I also consider the processes by
which survivors of sexual violence seek authority to speak as experts on sexual violence and
the ways in which this authority is selectively granted and denied. I conclude by offering

204 DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-23

 Public survivors

some brief reflections on the social forces that contribute to and limit the possibilities for
public survivors to successfully intervene in the cultural politics of sexual violence.

Going public: the emergence of the public survivor

In her tweet, Mullins uses the term “public survivor” with the expectation that its meaning is
straightforward and easily understood. While this may be true in 2021, that usage perhaps
deflects attention from the fact that, as a self-evident phrase to describe rape survivors, it is
highly historically specific. The term emerges from feminist and survivor activism which has
produced an increasingly strong association of the word “survivor” with gendered, and
especially sexual, violence (Orgad, 2009). This activism has also seen increasing recognition of
the prominent role of survivors such as Mullins in reform, advocacy and political movements
around sexual violence, in Australia and elsewhere internationally, particularly with the
growth of social media and online feminist campaigning (Mendes, Ringrose and Keller, 2018).
All of this has enabled the public survivor to become a recognised figure. I define the term as
denoting someone who constructs a recognised persona as a survivor of sexual violence
through speaking publicly about their experiences and is granted, at least to some extent, the
authority to speak as an expert on sexual and gendered violence on that basis.
Importantly, the emergence of the public survivor is not coterminous with the history of
political testimony about sexual violence. Women’s testimony about sexual violence has been
part of testimonial political traditions in the history of the fight against slavery, civil rights
movements and anti-colonial struggles, through the testimony of women such as Harriet
Jacobs (2000), Recy Taylor (McGuire, 2010), and Rigoberta Menchú (1984). Testimony of
sexual violence has also, infamously been used to enhance racist and colonialist discourses
(Davis, 1983), and further racially biased “law and order politics” (Bumiller, 2008).
The emergence of public survivors as a more specific example of political testimony
about rape is strongly tied to the history of feminism, and particularly Anglo-US feminism,
from the 1960s onwards. In this period, feminists identified rape as a key aspect of women’s
oppression, defined famously by Susan Brownmiller (1976, p. 15) as “nothing more or less
than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of
fear”. Fighting against the minimisation and normalisation of this violence led to dominant
understandings in the mainstream, white feminist movements in the US, and countries like
Australia, of sexual violence as an exceptional harm, uniquely linked to women’s oppression
(Bumiller, 2008).
This conception of rape allows survivors to be seen as standing in for the wider universal
category of women, with access to special insights around the condition of gendered
oppression. It also allows survivors to be seen as a category in themselves, because there is a
belief that rape has a shared and singular meaning. Survivors, therefore, occupy a privileged
epistemological position in feminist understandings of sexual violence, as encapsulated by
Susan Griffin (1979, p. 53): “one of the untold burdens of the survivor of rape is what she
has come to know. She has been left holding the truth … . For her the world has changed.
And in this understanding she is isolated, because for us who have not been raped the world
remains the same. We keep the fact of rape at the periphery of consciousness and do not let
it bear on our vision”. Griffin also speaks to the historical “tainting” of women who speak
about sexual violence as liars, fantasists who are not to be granted the authority of speaking
truthfully about either their own experiences or the broader social realities they reflect
(Gilmore, 2017). In this understanding, it is not only misogyny but ignorance that keeps

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survivor knowledge and authority marginalised. There is a social will not to know and to
refuse the “truth” that is carried by survivors. A key part of the feminist project in the last
half century has been to assert this truth and the authority that it should grant to survivors.
The epistemological privileging of survivors occurs most clearly within what Michael
Salter (2013) describes as “feminist counter-publics” who affirm their authority to speak the
truth of rape. These counter-public spaces range from Take Back the Night Marches of the
1970s to online communities built around hashtags such as #YesAllWomen and #MeToo.
Importantly, however, more mainstream culture has accepted, at least superficially, the
notion that public survivor speech should be heard. This process began in the 1980s, with
the growth of media formats aimed at women, such as television talk shows, and early public
survivors, such as Nancy Ziegenmeyer in the US (Serisier, 2018a). In 1989, Ziegenmeyer was
so frustrated by her treatment in the legal system and media reporting on sexual violence, that
she agreed to tell her story in a five-page newspaper serial in the Des Moines Register. The
serial was syndicated internationally, resulting in Ziegenmeyer making numerous appearances
and testifying before the US Senate as part of its deliberations on the Violence Against Women
Act (1994) (Ziegenmeyer, 1992). Since this time, and especially in the last decade, an
increasing number of survivors have been granted a platform to speak about sexual violence,
with several achieving some form of celebrity status. Glamour magazine has, for instance,
included two public survivors among their “Women of the Year”, Pakistani survivor and
advocate Mukhtar Mai in 2005 and American survivor and author, Chanel Miller, formerly
known under the pseudonym, Emily Doe, in 2016 (Serisier, 2018b). This public recognition,
however, remains clearly bounded and contingent, as I discuss below.

The burdens of public survivors

The burden of public survivorhood includes but goes beyond overcoming taboo, silence and
overt victim-blaming. Public survivors such as Mullins do face these things, but they also
receive significant public acclaim and support. Public survivors have been profiled in
popular magazines, received open letters of support from the US Vice President and, in the
case of Mullins’ fellow Australian public survivor, Grace Tame, been named “Australian of
the Year”. Reflecting on this complexity, Mullins (2021) describes being a public survivor
both as “100% worth it” and as a “heavy burden”. She writes that public survivors
“inadvertently become the face of something, are subjected to abuse and ridicule, to doubt
and suspicion. Everyone is ready to poke holes in their story and question their motives, to
find that piece of information that proves our society isn’t really that bad, so we don’t need
to fix anything”. Survivors pay a heavy price for the authority they receive to speak to the
problem of the sexual violence: “To make real change, we ask survivors to open their
wounds, so we can see them bleed, to show us their deepest hurt again and again, so we
know it’s real” (see also Kay, this volume).
Alcoff and Gray-Rosendale (1993), writing about the experiences of survivors on tele-
vision talk shows in the 1980s, refer to a tension between “transgression” and “recupera-
tion” in survivors’ public speech in these forums. Echoing Mullins, they argue that survivors
are exhorted to speak affectively to their pain, trauma and damage, but they are not granted
the authority to interpret that experience. Speaking to the social causes and meanings of
sexual violence is reserved for experts, such as psychologists. Reflecting on the same period,
Louise Armstrong (1994, p. 77), an early public survivor of incest, wrote of her disillu-
sionment of the “incest industry” that had grown up around public survivors such as

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herself. For Armstrong, media, psychology and other powerful institutions and discourses
operated a new form of silencing, “a filter, blocking out the political” and reducing public
survivor interventions to the “merely personal”. She describes this as “a silence more
powerful than suppression precisely because it could be posed to us that the telling of stories
was change” (p. 76). Leigh Gilmore (2017, p. 17) has similarly drawn attention to the
changing nature of doubt and disbelief directed at survivor stories, cautioning that with
increasing visibility of and support for feminist principles around sexual violence, older
forms of negation of women’s stories have been supplanted or enhanced by new modes of
“doubting women in public”. For Gilmore, these newer tropes emphasise the impossibility
of public knowledge about the private realities of sexual violence, implicitly, again, refusing
the public, or political, authority of survivor speech and seeking to relegate it to the private
sphere of the merely personal.
To speak as a public survivor, can, however, also mean that the public identity of “rape
survivor” subsumes other elements of one’s personality, at least publicly. As Mullins (2021)
explains, everyone has ideas of how they “think you should act– sad, but not too sad, brave,
but not too brave”. The “story” of surviving rape, and the generic expectations around that
story, can feel suffocating. The effects of this were laid out by Australian public survivor
and activist Brittany Higgins in a tweet in February 2022 when she wrote: “Am I wrong or is
it weirdly dehumanising to be constantly referred to as a ‘story’ – as opposed to a human
being – all the time?” (@BrittHiggins, 22 February 2022). Each of these women speaks to
the contingent nature of the hearing given to public survivors. The price for being heard is
to have this element of identity subsume all others, so that survivors struggle to assert, as
Mullins does, that “you are more than your worst moment”.
This is in part due to the representative role that public survivors are asked to play,
speaking not only for themselves but as an archetypal figure, able to speak for “survivors”.
As Mullins (2021) writes, the “burden I carry is more than simply my own story”. There is a
longstanding tension in feminist thought between understanding rape as a universal, and
universalising, experience of gendered power and the exceptional courage that is attributed
to individuals who speak publicly of their experience, despite the stigma and backlash this
speech can attract. This conception has, arguably, extended from the feminist counter-
publics that first fostered it to wider public discourse, so that public survivors are considered
both exceptional and representative, individual instantiations of general feminist principles
that recognise both the difficulty and the significance of survivor speech. Public survivors
are important in part because speaking about rape continues to be a difficult and risky
endeavour, forcing public survivors to take on a representative function.

The limits of public recognition

Part of the burden of public survivorhood is, therefore, to do with the continuing restrictions
and limits placed on survivor speech. As Mullins (2021) notes, her public intervention is,
necessarily, “an acknowledgement of my own privilege of being able to speak at all”. She
continues: “Some survivors don’t want to come forward. Some can’t. While we fix the systems
that keep them silent, I carry their stories with me. I feel the love and pain and camaraderie of
every survivor who can’t tell their story, and I’ll be here waiting for them when they are
ready”. While Mullins acknowledges that not all survivors may want to tell their story, it is, as
she indicates, difficult to separate desire and ability, given the burdens and difficulties of
speaking publicly about sexual violence, particularly for more marginalised survivors.

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Put differently, the identity of a public survivor is not equally available to all who ex-
perience sexual violence. In my overview of published rape memoirs from 1970 to 2015, for
example, I found that of a sample of 50 texts, only two were authored or edited by women
of colour and there was an over-representation of narratives of white, cis-gendered women
assaulted by men of colour and particularly black men. The dominance of sexual assaults
involving strangers or near-strangers in this genre is also striking (Serisier, 2018b). These
representational patterns do not reflect the demographics of actual sexual violence. Rather,
they reflect and reinforce the dominant ways in which the meaning of rape as a form of
criminal male violence against women has been constructed. These patterns of represen-
tation can also reveal and participate in racialised forms of injustice, such as in the case of
author Alice Sebold, who published a best-selling memoir of her experience of rape. In the
memoir, Sebold (1999, p. 172) discusses the ways that she, a young white woman, mobilised
tropes of innocent whiteness by constructing herself in the trial as “an an eighteen-year-old
virgin coed … dressed in red, white and blue”, in order to highlight the contrast between
herself and her assailant, a young, poorly-educated black man. However, the memoir was
withdrawn from publication and a planned film adaptation was cancelled in 2021 when the
1982 conviction was overturned on the basis of mistaken identity (Flood, 2021). While
Sebold has apologised, the case demonstrates the powerful impacts of race and class on
public narratives of rape, perceptions of survivors and potential assailants, and the potential
implications of these narratives.
As feminists have long-established, the “ideal” victim of rape who is most likely to
receive sympathetic media coverage is a white cis-gendered woman with a respectable job
and who is seen to be “innocent”, in the sense of not having taken unnecessary risks or
engaged in allegedly irresponsible behaviour (Bumiller, 2008). This is also the archetypal
figure of the public survivor, although there are some indications that the boundaries
around “innocence” may have shifted slightly. Mullins, for instance, was at a nightclub and
had been drinking the night that she was assaulted, although she has asserted her innocence
in other ways, making clear, for instance, that she did not regularly go out drinking, and
that this was her first sexual encounter (Four Corners, 2018). So, the boundaries are not
absolute. They have been contested by survivors, but it remains the case that survivors who
do not embody these criteria are far less likely to be given a platform, and public respect,
when speaking out, while those who do are far more likely to have their story believed.
Ultimately, these processes produce distorted understandings of what representative ex-
periences of sexual violence look like and how they are understood (Phipps, 2020).
The risks faced by survivors who are not able to mobilise tropes of innocence and
respectability are, in contrast, heightened as they are more easily “tainted” by victim-
blaming tropes (Gilmore, 2017). This is spoken to by many of the survivors who featured in
the two seasons of the documentary series, Surviving R. Kelly where numerous women
testify to violence and abuse at the hands of the musician (Lifetime, 2019). Almost all of the
featured survivors discuss the additional burdens that black women and girls face both in
being believed around sexual violence and having their stories matter. Given ongoing legal
disputes, both seasons issue repeated acknowledgements of Kelly’s denial of the allegations
in the form of white text on a black screen. In the second season, which documents the
effects of the first, the series notes that Kelly’s lawyer has not only accused the women of
lying, but uses their attempts to assert themselves as public survivors to discredit them.
According to the lawyer, “the women have not acted like victims at all” because “they have
used their accusations to promote contemporaneous books, albums, and speaking tours”.

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In addition to these direct attacks, the women testify to the difficulties of speaking within a
community that has historically been over-policed and in which black men have been de-
monised as sexual predators, and within a wider society which does not extend the same
value to the words and bodies of black women as to white women (Richie, 2012).
In white-dominated societies such as the US and Australia, it is rare for women of colour
to be granted the authority to speak about sexual violence as a general phenomenon, in the
same way as white survivors. An exception to this is the case of Chanel Miller, an Asian-
American woman who is perhaps the most well-known of all public survivors, following her
viral Victim Impact Statement published anonymously by Buzzfeed media. In it, Miller,
then known only by the pseudonym “Emily Doe” wrote eloquently of the pain and anger
caused by the actions of Brock Turner who sexually assaulted her, and by her experience of
the legal system (Baker, 2016; Doe, 2016). Miller, who publicly identified herself in 2019
with the publication of her memoir, has been granted this authority, and has subsequently
used it to speak about sexual violence alongside issues of racism and other structural harms.
However, it is important to note that this platform was initially given to her prior to her
publicly identifying as a woman of colour. As the then Vice President of the United States,
Joe Biden wrote, in an open letter, her anonymity enabled her to “so eloquently represent
‘every woman’” (Namako, 2016).
Miller’s success in asserting her authority as able to speak generally for women and
survivors is exceptional for women of colour. Generally, the expertise and authority they are
granted tend to be parochialised. This is particularly the case for survivors who speak from
non-Western contexts, such as Mukhtar Mai, a Pakistani survivor and activist. Mai came to
international prominence in the early 2000s for speaking publicly about being gang raped as
part of a conflict between her family and a higher-status family in her village (Mai, 2006).
After failing to achieve justice in the legal system, Mai spoke out publicly and became a
campaigner around sexual violence and associated issues such as girls’ education. She has
received international support for her story from figures such as the influential New York
Times journalist, Nicholas Kristof, who describes her as “the bravest woman on earth”
(Kristof, 2005). Mai has achieved a significant level of public acclaim, including awards
from the US State Department, Glamour magazine and the Council of Europe’s North-
South Prize. She is also one of the women featured in the play Seven (2008) which celebrates
women’s global activism. Despite this acclaim, Mai’s story is framed by Western supporters
as being about the problems of gender oppression in Pakistan rather than as about sexual
violence generally. She is lauded by Western commentators such as Kristof but not seen as
having knowledge or authority that might apply to their own societies. For instance, Kristof
frequently refers to Mai as his “hero” but makes clear that this is in the context of her status
as the true “mother of the nation” and a leader in the fight against violence against women
and girls “in the third world” (Kristof, 2005). In this context, he compares her to civil rights
leader Rosa Parks, a potentially revealing comparison given that Parks’ own work com-
bating sexual violence as a tool of white supremacy in the US south is frequently
unacknowledged in public memorialisation of her (McGuire, 2010).
In other words, non-Western women and women of colour are rarely granted the
authority to speak about rape or sexual violence in general terms in media such as the New
York Times. Rather, their knowledge and experience are cast as particular and limited to
their own communities and contexts. This tendency is exacerbated by the fact that many of
these survivors speak about sexual violence in relation to other issues such as education or
policing, locating it within wider structures of harm, rather than speaking to it as a singular

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or exceptional issue. Survivor and philosopher, Susan Brison (2002, p. 110), critiques this
tendency as, at its worst, producing what she describes as a “reverse conversion narrative”,
where a “perfectly good, intact, life was destroyed, then painstakingly pieced back together
again”. As she points out, such a narrative model has no space for understanding the effects
on lives already or otherwise affected by structural violence and trauma or for considering
the wider social causes of sexual violence. The fact that more marginalised survivors are
more likely to speak of these issues limits their legibility, casting them as outside the ex-
ceptional epistemology of sexual violence promoted by second-wave feminist figures such as
Griffin and embodied by survivors such as Mullins.

Conclusion: public survivors and social change

As I noted above, public survivors emerge out of a feminist politics which uses survivor
narratives to launch social, epistemological and legal contestations of the meaning and
inevitability of sexual violence. Feminist analysis has shown how dominant social institu-
tions such as the law and media determine the truth of rape by affirming and amplifying
masculine sexual prerogatives and denying women’s sexual autonomy (see, for instance,
Garraio et al, this volume). Rather than a neutral arbiter, the law particularly has worked to
delegitimise survivors, casting them and their stories as “tainted” in the words of Leigh
Gilmore (2017) with doubt and suspicion. Feminists and survivors have sought to change
the way the law functions through direct strategies of legal reform. But also through
speaking publicly in other forums to expose the injustice of legal outcomes and the
inadequacy of the law as an arbiter of truth, and the ways in which other institutions such as
the media participate in and perpetuate the epistemic injustices of the legal system.
However, just as feminist critics have drawn attention to the limits of law reform, and
particularly what Rose Corrigan (2013) has referred to as the “failure of success” in that
forum, so too have some feminist critics attempted to draw attention to the need to think
beyond the promotion of public survivors and other forms of narrative politics towards
transformative change. This is often lacking from the mediatised interventions of public
survivors. For instance, Mullins’ (2021) article speaks about “waiting” for other survivors
to go public when they are ready and about reclaiming aspects of identity beyond the to-
talising and constraining identity of “survivor”. But she does not consider how these two
impulses may be in tension or whether and how the political work of public survivors might
lead to a situation in which survivors do not need to speak and in which survival of sexual
violence is transformed into a less meaningful political identity.
There are long-standing concerns among feminists and survivors about the risks of a
spectacular politics of survivorhood and the tendency for the transgressive elements of
survivor speech to be recuperated. At its most extreme, this has led survivors such as Louise
Armstrong (1994, p. 1) to essentially declare the project of public survivors a political
failure. Satirising her own celebrity as the “world’s first Walking Talking Incest Victim”,
Armstrong argued that the purpose of women’s public identification as survivors, to create
systemic change to eliminate sexual violence, had been subsumed into a project of simply
valorising individual survivors for being willing to speak publicly and encouraging more to
do so. The concerns about survivor politics as a spectacle and the recuperation of survivor
speech by Armstrong and other critics resonate with contemporary feminist critiques of
individualised neoliberal empowerment discourse, with an emphasis on individual trans-
formation rather than structural change (Banet-Weiser, 2018).

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It is, however, too simplistic to cast public survivors as merely another example of
collective action frustrated by cultural tendencies to focus on inspirational individual sto-
ries. Many survivors, like Mullins, mobilise their identities as survivors alongside com-
munity activism and reform work, undertaken in the name of their experiences of violence.
Following Alcoff and Gray’s (1993) influential contribution, the question of transgression
and/or recuperation is not a straightforward or simple binary. Rather, public survivors
embody the complexities of feminist activism and politics in a mediatised and neoliberal
world, where structural forces tend to co-optation and individualisation. It is only
increasing the already heavy burden on public survivors to expect them to avoid or over-
come these social tendencies. But it is worthwhile placing these individual cultural inter-
ventions in a broader context and thinking of them in relation to collective feminist histories
and politics.

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 19
TELLING AN AUTHENTIC,
RELATABLE #METOO
STORY ON YOUTUBE
Carol Harrington and MacKenzie Gerrard

Introduction
African American anti-sexual violence activist Tarana Burke (2022) coined the phrase “Me
Too” in 2006 to signal the ubiquity of sexual violence in women’s lives. When US actor Alyssa
Milano tweeted “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this
tweet” in October 2017 she sparked an unprecedented public sharing of personal sexual
violence stories on digital media from women around the world (Ghadery, 2019; Blumell and
Mulupi, 2020; Sambaraju, 2020; Wessel and Ortega, 2020). An analysis of Twitter by UN
Women showed the hashtag’s reach across wealthy and poor states and states that rank high
and low in UN gender equality rankings, prompting a spokesperson to comment that the
“world has changed because of the #MeToo movement” (Sen, 2021, p. 249). While feminists
have offered critical commentary, they have also hailed #MeToo as “an unprecedented and
historic event,” and even as a “revolution” (Chandra and Erlingsdóttir, 2021, p. 13).
Public storytelling about sexual violence has a longer tradition, emerging as an important
part of the 1970s “speak-outs” on sexual violence, a cornerstone of late twentieth-century
feminist anti-sexual violence activism in the Anglophone world (Brownmiller, 1975). The
feminist chant “break the silence, end the violence” encapsulates the feminist theory that telling
real-life stories of sexual violence will undermine stigma and myths about sexual victimisation.
However, public stories of sexual violence quickly became framed within the therapeutic dis-
course on trauma, recovery, and self-realisation common in day-time talk shows and print
media marketed to women since the 1980s (Alcoff and Gray, 1993; Cuklanz, 2000; Davis, 2005).
Thus, feminism took a back seat in practices of speaking out about sexual violence by the
turn of the century. Tanya Serisier (2018, p. 42) analysed narratives published by sexual
violence survivors since the late twentieth century, finding that those “able to access dis-
courses other than feminism to validate their stories and legitimise their speaking authority,
are more likely to be heard and granted the cultural authority to speak about their ex-
periences of rape”. She shows how public stories of sexual violence adopt the hero narrative
genre in which the victim endures horrendous suffering but recovers agency by telling the
truth about their experience to benefit other victims. Similarly, Eva Illouz (2007) shows how
in therapeutic narratives narrators learn from their suffering by reflecting upon themselves

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-24 213

 Carol Harrington and MacKenzie Gerrard

and becoming stronger and more self-reliant. As Illouz (2007, p. 57) argues, “the demand to
express and perform one’s suffering whether in support groups, talk shows, therapy, legal
courts, and intimate relations” has become a cultural imperative in the context of neo-
liberal social transformations since the late twentieth century. Such storytelling highlights
the narrators’ resilience and self-reliance in the face of victimisation and suffering.
Sexual violence narratives have thus become somewhat severed from feminist efforts to
highlight gendered oppression. Rather, they have been mobilised in service of the neoliberal
propagation of personal responsibility and individualised solutions to social problems.
Rebecca Stringer (2014) points out that neoliberal discourse problematises victimisation as
a subjective state of passivity. Nevertheless, it enjoins individuals to narrate past experiences
of victimisation in terms of how they took back control of their lives and now take
responsibility for their past and present fortunes. Such narrations neatly allow for a pro-
liferation of talk about victimisation while offering those victimised the socially valued
status of self-reliant survivor. Thus, sexual victimisation narratives often exemplify Gill’s
(2017, p. 607) analysis of a post-feminist sensibility that includes “calls to work on, monitor
and discipline the self” and “a ‘makeover paradigm’ that extends beyond the surface of the
body to an incitement to ‘makeover’ one’s interior life, developing a new, ‘upgraded’
postfeminist subjectivity”. This subjectivity tacitly acknowledges male domination by cel-
ebrating women’s resilience, independence and success despite it.
However, #MeToo stories arguably represent a new departure in public storytelling
about sexual violence insofar as they have been firmly linked to broader gender inequality.
Furthermore, the logic of the hashtag highlights links between women’s experiences, thus
deindividualising the problem. To some degree, #MeToo also appears to have destigma-
tised sexual victimisation as victims increasingly eschew anonymity and attach their names
and faces to their stories.
To explore these shifts further, this chapter analyses the #MeToo stories of women micro-
influencers on YouTube. Micro-influencers make money on social media by engaging a sub-
stantial following and promoting products, content and services to them. They attract adver-
tisers, according to marketing experts, because “brands can bank on their followers being
interested in whatever made the micro-influencer ‘internet famous’”, for example, people who
watch travel bloggers are likely to buy travel products (Ismail, 2018, n.p.). Experts suggest that
micro-influencers are more “accessible” than celebrities because followers “tend to see them-
selves as peers of the influencer rather than fans” (Anderson, 2019, n.p.). Marketing research
shows that consumers trust recommendations from peers rather than celebrities, thus the
“everyday person” micro-influencer who interacts with their audience frequently by responding
to their comments provides a cost-effective advertising investment (Anderson, 2019, n.p.).
Thus, micro-influencers’ success depends on appearing authentic and relatable. One way
of achieving this lies in what Brook Duffy and Emily Hund (2015, p. 7) call “carefully
curated personal sharing”, something exemplified by micro-influencers’ #MeToo stories. In
making themselves vulnerable by revealing a private trauma, influencers foster a sense of
intimacy with their followers. Since micro-influencers need to present an authentic and
relatable online persona, their videos provide a window into the sorts of sexual violence
stories that count as authentic and relatable in the #MeToo moment. The themes of their
stories will point to what can and cannot be said about sexual violence in this moment.
We thus selected a sample of YouTube videos in English tagged #MeToo posted by
adult women micro-influencers who told a first-hand story of sexual violence and had large
followings (between 5,500 and 650,000 subscribers, except for one, included in the interests

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 Telling an authentic, relatable #MeToo story on YouTube

of diversity, with only 450 subscribers but more than 42,000 views). We focused on those
with large followings and viewer numbers for ethical reasons since these influencers have
every reason to expect their video would be widely viewed and discussed. However, this
selection criteria probably skewed the sample toward white women from the United States.
Our final sample contained 19 videos ranging from around four and a half minutes to an
hour; most were in the 20–30-minute range. The videos were posted between 2017 and 2021,
around half clustered between October 2017 and February 2018 when #MeToo exploded
across social media, while the rest spread across subsequent years (we did not collect data
beyond 2021). The majority (14) were from US-based influencers, while others were based in
the United Kingdom, South Asia and Central America. Fifteen influencers were white
women, three were black and one was Asian; one of the women identified herself as trans.
While YouTube is a public platform that can be cited according to regular scholarly
norms, given the sensitive nature of #MeToo stories the lead author emailed the influencers
asking to cite them by name and offering them the chance to opt out of the research. The
email said that if no response was received their story would be included in the research
without identifying information. Around half responded, agreeing to citation by name. We
use pseudonyms for the other half. This research received approval from the Victoria
University of Wellington Human Ethics Committee.
We familiarised ourselves with the data by watching the videos, producing transcripts for
each and repeatedly reading them. We also explored influencers’ channels for context. Their
videos typically mimicked the experience of catching up with a friend and chatting about
her latest relationship dramas, health problems, holiday or skincare regime. They filmed
themselves speaking to the camera, thus appearing to speak directly to the viewer. They
spoke about fashion, beauty, fitness, travel and lifestyle topics and narrated dramatic,
traumatic or funny events in their lives. Thus, their #MeToo videos fit well within the
broader genre of videos they regularly made. We coded the transcripts thematically and also
analysed them as narrative accounts that seek to explain events and outcomes (Orbuch,
1997; Davis, 2005). Below, we first discuss three major themes from the videos: that victims
do not always recognise or report sexual violence when it happens, that institutions,
communities and families often make things worse for victims when they do disclose, and
the understanding of sexual violence that influencers want to communicate. Following this,
we consider the extent to which the post-feminist hero’s journey characterises these nar-
ratives. Finally, we discuss the silences in our data and what these may tell us about what
characterises believable #MeToo stories.

Recognising and not recognising sexual violence when it happens

Influencers addressed their viewers as potentially affected by popular misconceptions about
sexual violence and used their stories to correct them. For example, some whose stories
involved acquaintance rape when they were too drunk to physically resist explained why
their experiences still counted as rape or sexual assault. Hannah Forcier (2020) describes
how an acquaintance had sex with her despite her objections while she was drunk and half
asleep at a party, unpacking her own uncertainty about whether this counted as rape at the
time because “it’s not like I was scared necessarily, it’s not like I was crying, but I didn’t
want to have sex with him, like I didn’t want to sleep with him. I didn’t like him, and I knew
that would hurt my best friend [who fancied the perpetrator] and it happened anyway”. She
also describes thinking “if my story isn’t me kicking and screaming then is it really rape? But

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yeah, it is … rape doesn’t have to happen with you kicking and screaming or completely
unconscious. It’s just you not saying ‘yes’, okay?” Anastasia Marie (2017) says “If somebody
does things with you while you’re unconscious and without your consent, that’s sexual assault,
and if somebody tries to force you to do things or hold you down that’s also sexual assault …
Please learn to understand and identify what that is”. Thus, these influencers’ concern was not
only to defend their definition of their own experience but to ensure that their viewers are able
to recognise sexual violence if it happens to them or someone they know.
Some who described childhood sexual abuse explained that they did not report it because
of similar doubts about their own culpability, because they did not want to disrupt their
family, or were manipulated by the perpetrator. Olivia-May describes how an adult family
friend flirted with her when she was 13, subsequently raping her, she says “I am honestly
ashamed that I felt ashamed. I am so sad that I spent so many years of my life feeling like it
was my fault, like I had led him on”. Aliyah kept silent for years when her mother’s boy-
friend began raping her at age 6 because she enjoyed the “little happy family” they had with
him and his daughters of a similar age. Dakota Cross (2021) describes how the man who
abused her for years as a child convinced her nobody would believe her if she told. These
influencers assure their viewers with similar childhood secrets that they are “not alone”.
Several influencers reflected upon the ubiquity of sexual harassment in public and how
women themselves often normalised it. Raya (2017) says of her university days: “every
single night that I went out, I was touched inappropriately. Someone would grab my butt or
my boobs or try to kiss me, like literally push themselves on me”. She describes how her
friends had the same experiences and they all tended to brush it off, whereas now she sees
“how much of what happened to us was messed up”. She regrets that she did not have the
knowledge to label it sexual harassment and complain at the time. Satya tells of “so many
instances” of harassment by strangers in public, noting one when she was propositioned in
her own street while wearing her school uniform, aged just 15. She reflects that although she
was scared and ran home, she did not tell her parents because she did not want them to
forbid her from going out alone. She says, “The punishment comes to the victim right and
that is a major reason why a lot of girls don’t talk about it because then we get restricted
from doing what we love doing”.
Thus, these influencers told complex stories of sexual violence that anticipated victim-
blaming rape myths and invoked the authority of first-hand experience to debunk them.
They built stigma management into their storytelling by revealing, unpacking and rejecting
their own self-blame and shame. They also explain why in so many cases people do not tell
others about sexual violation for many years, if at all.

Reasons for not reporting. How institutions, communities, and families respond
Many influencers described a lack of social and institutional support when they did disclose
sexual assault, including five who reported it to the police. Samantha Ann (2017) says, “I’m
very lucky that the actual assault wasn’t as bad as a lot of other people, but I think that for
me and my situation what was more traumatic was the following hours and days, and
weeks”. Samantha Ann was sexually assaulted in her college dorm room bed after an
evening of drinking with friends. One of her friends came to check on her and the perpe-
trator ran off, later denying he had done anything. Her friends persuaded her to report to
the college, an experience that required her to repeatedly tell her story and answer campus
police questions daily. When she learned that she would have to give evidence to a school

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board of up to 50 people she tried to withdraw from the process, however, the campus
police still pursued the case. She says they violated her privacy by sending out a campus
crime alert about the case with identifying details. She says the college also violated her
privacy by telling her mother and sister without her permission.
Samantha Ann also suffered social stigma and disbelief among her wider social circle at
college. Many who knew both her and the perpetrator refused to believe he would do such a
thing and accused her of lying. Some of the perpetrator’s friends changed their Facebook
profile pictures to one calling for the perpetrator to be “freed” (although he had not been
arrested). Leah tells a similar story, two boys from her high-school friend circle raped her
after she took an unknown pill and got drunk at a party; a video of the rape circulated at
her school. Following this, she endured years of bullying from friends of the perpetrators
along with her schoolmates gossiping about it behind her back and making jokes about it
to her face.
Some influencers described disclosing to friends and family hoping for support but not
finding it. Hannah Forcier (2020) told a close friend that she never consented to sex with
their mutual acquaintance, but the friend did not believe her, causing Hannah to assume
nobody else would either. At age 10, Aliyah told her mother that her mother’s now ex-
boyfriend had raped her. Her mother responded by reporting it to the police. Aliyah
describes having to give a statement and have a physical examination, she heard the man
was arrested and went to jail but was later released. However, Aliyah was not kept informed
about this process and her mother refused to discuss it, insisting it should stay “in the past”.
Aliyah describes how her mother’s lack of compassion or concern made her feel worse; she
eventually went to live with an aunt and uncle.
In a final example of reporting to police, Zoë Klopfer (2019) had moved in with a vi-
deographer friend and colleague, but within three weeks found a hidden camera in her
bathroom with intimate footage of herself and numerous other women on the camera’s
memory card. She immediately took the memory card to the police who had her call the
videographer and get him to confirm the device she had found in her bathroom was his
while they listened in. Nevertheless, she was told it could be months or even years before
any charges would be brought against him. Zoë took matters into her own hands by
warning others about this videographer through social media and consequently received
threats from his attorney. She notes that she had been unable to take civil action against
him because lawyers seemed uninterested in such a small-scale case.
These stories highlight social and institutional failures to support sexual violence victims or
deliver them justice. Both Samantha Ann and Zoë provided police with the name and address
of the men who violated them only to find law enforcement inexplicably unable to act on the
information in a timely manner. Zoë expressed ongoing distress that in the meantime the
videographer continued to work with models and presumably had ample opportunity to add
to his voyeuristic pornography collection. Samantha Ann found the ongoing police investi-
gation exposed her to bullying and took over her life. None of the influencers represented law
enforcement and justice institutions as offering an effective response to sexual violence.
Furthermore, many had stories of bullying, silencing, and victim-blaming when their friends,
family and community learned of what happened that echoed their self-blame and validated
their instinct to stay silent. Thus, they mounted a critique of both institutional and social
norms in responses to sexual violence. Interestingly, none mentioned engaging with support
services such as crisis centres, although four include (US) hotline numbers or links to
(European) support organisations in their video description.

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Current more correct understanding of sexual violence

Most influencers noted that #MeToo had revealed sexual violence as a widespread problem.
Raya (2017) says that “countless women are sharing their own experiences of sexual
harassment and assault on social media, with the hashtag MeToo. And the point of this is
… to show how common it is, and just what a huge, huge problem it really is”. Some cited
statistics to support such claims, for example, Dakota Cross (2021) says “One in three girls
get sexually abused by the time they’re 18, did you know that? … Every one in five boys gets
sexually abused by the time that they’re 18”, although it is not clear where these statistics
come from. Fleur tells her viewers that one in eight women from her home country ex-
periences sexual abuse every year.
Many of these influencers represented sexual violence as a mundane but deeply wrong
experience all too common in women’s lives that can be attributed to gendered social
structures and institutions. For example, Emma tells of four incidents of sexual violation, in
one she discovered her ex-boyfriend had secretly taken pictures of her undressing, in the
second her head was forced into the crotch of a drunk man in a pub, in the third a man in a
nightclub put his hand up her skirt, in the fourth a successful male influencer she had met to
make a YouTube video with instead took her to his bedroom and suggested they lay
together on the bed. Emma does not speak of these incidents as deeply impactful for her life
narrative but rather frames them as part of a larger pattern linked to women’s inequality
and urges women to “educate yourself on feminism and what it means to be equal to men
and also on what is and what isn’t acceptable” and to make sure the men in their life are
aware of problems like sexual harassment and gendered income inequality.
Fleur points to women’s lesser social authority as making it difficult for them to say no or
to be taken seriously when they do. In reflecting upon why she never challenged men who
groped her in nightclubs or a taxi driver who tried to flirt with her when she was fourteen or
fifteen, she references feminist theories of social authority. She says, “Even though a woman
can say ‘no’, society will not take her ‘no’ seriously and will actually make it a ‘yes’ … I mean
how often does it happen when a girl says ‘no I don’t want to do this with you’ to a guy … and
he will still try to get it on with her … women are just not being taken seriously by society”.
Others point to problematic patterns of men’s socialisation and education, for example,
Melody describes an encounter where a man “tried very, very, very hard to get me to sleep
with him” she attributes this to how “men are raised to believe that they have to somehow
convince women to get sex from them, that we’re not going to give it up willingly and so …
they’re gonna need to do everything within their power to convince us”. Samantha Ann
points out that US high schools do not teach “whoever’s committing the sexual assault not
to do it” while Leah says, “someone could have taught these boys consent, someone could
have taught them to put their fucking hands to themselves”.
Thus, these influencers deindividualise their stories by situating their experience within the
broader patterns of sexual violence revealed by #MeToo and sexual violence research. By
aligning their stories with those uncovered by activists and scholars they claim the “signifi-
cance, credibility, and validation” that comes with being part of a “collective story” (Serisier,
2018, p. 103). As Serisier (2018) points out, the denial and disbelief that often meets stories of
sexual violence by acquaintances or supposedly respectable men can be overcome when an
individual story is contextualised within an accumulation of similar stories that lend each
other believability. The influencers’ stories emphasise shared experiences of injustice, insti-
tutional failures, a lack of social support and the need for solidarity and change. However, for

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the most part, they do not align themselves with specific campaigns or political philosophies
but rather with a more amorphous anti-sexist common sense.

The post-feminist hero’s journey

Running alongside this insight into collective experience and social patterns, the in-
dividualised post-feminist “hero’s journey” narrative discussed in previous scholarship was
present to varying degrees. Only two videos exemplified this narrative. Olivia-May’s YouTube
channel advertises her services as a business mentor who specialises in coaching women to
be confident and successful. Her #MeToo video describes her feelings following her rape at
age 13: “I felt like I was a slut, I felt like I was a victim, I felt like I was beaten down, I felt like I
was broken”. She describes how she transformed when she “fell in love with fitness and with
being strong and with putting myself first and not being the victim to anybody else”. She
advises her viewers who have experienced sexual violence, that “it’s your job to pick yourself
back up, it’s your job to make yourself strong and empowered and feel like you are
unstoppable, because you are and you are in charge of your life and your body and how you
feel and how you look”. Thus, her #MeToo story serves her brand as a woman able to inspire
other women on how to succeed in a male-dominated world. Similarly, Dakota Cross’ (2021)
#MeToo story fits her YouTube channel’s purpose that she describes as “to inspire &
influence others through my story” and “to help others learn about self-love, self-care, and
self-worth!” Her video describes how she survived childhood sexual, emotional and physical
abuse. She concludes by expressing hope that viewers suffering similar abuse will find inspi-
ration in her example, saying “I’m realizing, I’m understanding as I get older that I was given
this mountain so I can teach others that they can climb it.”
Four others echoed such comments, narrating how overcoming sexual violence trauma
had endowed them with strength and insight that they could pass on to others and, in the
words of one, “turn negativity into positivity”. However, the remainder either spoke of their
sexual assault and the aftermath as simply “a crappy situation” that “sucked”, in Samantha
Ann’s (2017) words, or they told of mundane sexual harassment that they hated but did not
find traumatic. Thus, #MeToo appears to have enlarged possibilities for narrating personal
experiences of sexual violence, undercutting the imperative to treat victimisation as a
problem of individual psychology and allowing it to be treated as a problem with social
causes and social solutions.

Silences
Our focus on influencers with reasonably large followings meant that white women from the
United States dominated our sample, although we actively searched for non-white, non-US
#MeToo stories. Feminist commentators have criticised #MeToo for centring the experi-
ences of privileged cis white women, even though its origins lay in African American wo-
men’s resistance to sexual violence (Gill and Orgad, 2018). Burke’s MeToo organisation has
highlighted how the stories of Black survivors are more likely to be challenged or dismissed
(Burke, Goss Graves and Bandele, 2021). By contrast, stories that conform to constructions
of vulnerable white femininity violated by evil predatory men are more likely to be heard
(Phipps, 2020).
The stories analysed here were, for the most part, told by attractive white women re-
counting the sexual victimisation of their younger, more naive self. Only five told of sexual

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violence when they were clearly adults. The oldest, Melody Maia Monet (2018), describes
sexual harassment by men in bars in her early 40s but as a recently transitioned transwoman
says she was like a 14-year-old in her experience of living in a woman’s body. Notably, all
the non-white women described experiences from when they were under 18 and easily fit the
category of innocent victims. Of course, this may reflect higher rates of sexual violence
against young women, but also suggests that women, especially non-white women, must still
negotiate tropes of innocence and culpability when telling their sexual violence stories.

Conclusion
The niche micro-influencers have carved out on social media requires them to present as
authentic and cultivate an emotional connection with a following. Sharing a personal story of
sexual violence provides one way to do that and, as #MeToo revealed, many women have a
story to tell. Influencers’ #MeToo stories provide a nuanced picture of sexual violence.
Influencers took a pedagogical tone, explaining to their viewers how their story constituted
sexual violence. They also problematised everyday experiences of sexual harassment and
called for women to recognise and push back against it. Some used their stories to illustrate
institutional and social norms that failed to support sexual violence victims and often make
things worse
For some, their story could be crafted to support their personal brand of providing
mentorship on how to succeed personally and professionally. Such stories exemplified the
hero’s journey narrative of sexual violence as a foundational trauma from which the post-
feminist subject emerges stronger after taking back control over her life and learning to thrive
in a male-dominated world. However, this narrative did not characterise most of the videos
suggesting that #MeToo may have shifted the conversation. Several influencers spoke at
length about their continued suffering because of sexual violence as something they shared
with many viewers, invoking a sense of community by reiterating “you are not alone”.
Most influencers used the hashtag to align their story with a collective narrative of
injustice and harm that requires solidarity to correct. By inserting their story into a col-
lective narrative, influencers built a sense of connection with viewers who had similar ex-
periences. Furthermore, they deflected victim-blaming stigma by claiming the credibility of
the collective story of #MeToo as their own. Influencers also depended somewhat on the
innocent victim trope insofar as they emphasised that they were young and naive when they
were sexually victimised. Notably, non-white influencers all told stories of victimisation
when they were children or under-aged teens. Clearly, women still must navigate victim-
blaming rape myths when telling #MeToo stories.

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 20
MENTAL IMAGES AND
EMOTIVE VOICES IN TRUE
CRIME PODCASTS FOCUSED
ON FEMALE VICTIMS
Jennifer O’Meara

The rapid rise in true crime podcasts is a notable trend accompanying the widespread ex-
pansion of podcasting in the twenty-first century. As Tanya Horeck argues in Justice on
demand: True crime in the digital streaming era, the growth of digital culture and technologies
has intensified the rhetoric around “an involved and interactive true crime audience” (2019,
p. 14), with questions of gender and race central to the affective mechanics of true crime in this
era. More narrowly, this chapter will consider the presentation of murdered or missing women
in a range of podcast series, with reference to questions of voice and the ways in which, even in
an audio medium, stories of violence against women can be sensationalist and emotive forms
of infotainment. The podcasts chosen for discussion provide a range of production contexts
and approaches to their presentation of female victims’ stories, including the American viral
sensation Serial (2014), the Audible podcast West Cork (2018), which is set in Ireland and
focuses on the unsolved murder of Frenchwoman Sophie Toscan du Plantier, and Missing and
Murdered: Finding Cleo (2018), which was produced by the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation and explores the disappearance of a young Indigenous girl.
As Lindsey Webb notes, true crime stories have existed for centuries, are largely focused
on violence against white women and “are intended to invoke feelings of horror and shock
among their audiences and suggest specific methods - arrest, incarceration, or death of the
perpetrator - by which social order may be restored” (2021, p. 131). The mode of delivery
for true crime stories is, as Lili Pâquet puts it, “increasingly moving from paperback to
podcast” (2021, p. 423). While podcasts as a media format and label (combining iPod and
broadcast) emerged around 2004, the trends for these easily accessed audio files to be
mobilised into serialised forms of true crime storytelling is often attributed to the global
success of Serial, which tells the story of the 1999 murder of Baltimore high-school student
Hae Min Lee, whose ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, was convicted of the crime. The episodes
were released weekly from October to December 2014 and featured phone conversations
between the imprisoned Syed and the producer-narrator Sarah Koenig, as well as recordings
of a range of people who knew the victim and/or alleged perpetrator and some contributions
by legal professionals. By November 2014, Serial had achieved five million downloads in
record time, and by Christmas, it had been downloaded 40 million times (Roberts, 2014).

222 DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-25

 Mental images and emotive voices in true crime podcasts

Spurred by this impact, a wide range of true crime podcasts followed, both emerging from
established news media outlets as well as streaming platforms such as Audible.
Critics and scholars of true crime podcasts are particularly interested in reconciling the
predominantly female listenership of these podcasts with content that often focuses on
female victims. For example, one online survey found that 73% of true crime podcast au-
diences are female (Boling and Hull, 2018, p. 92). Women’s sustained interest in true crime
podcasts is perhaps best exemplified in the long-running popular American series, My
Favorite Murder (2016-present), hosted by comedians Karen Kilgariff and Georgia
Hardstark. As reflected in the podcast’s catchphrase of “stay sexy and don’t get murdered”,
it initially appears to take an overly playful approach to violence through its dark comedy
premise that we prefer some kinds of murders over others. And yet, as sound scholar
Amanda Greer argues, My Favorite Murder reveals a relationship of care between the hosts
and the victims whose stories they discuss: “Hardstark and Kilgariff often find themselves
affectively overwhelmed by the narratives they impart, overwhelmed by the feeling of
togetherness, of affection, with and for the story’s victims” (Greer, 2017, p. 162). As I
discuss in further detail below, this kind of affective response – of being overwhelmed, of
feeling affection for victims – may help to explain the appeal of such true crime podcasts to
women. Furthermore, and unsurprisingly given the audio medium, such expressive
responses are generally conveyed vocally, through inflection and nonverbal as well as verbal
utterances. After first considering how mental images of victims’ bodies are presented
verbally, I examine aspects of the use of the voice in true crime podcasts. This analysis
addresses Danielle C. Slakoff’s recommendation that “researchers should dive deeper into
why certain voices are incorporated into [true crime] podcasts” (2021, p. 16).

Sensationalised (mental) images

Writing on what she terms as a “feminist materialisation of amplified voice,” Stacey
Copeland argues that podcasting “offers a powerful platform for a listening experience that
can challenge visual-philic heteronormative and gendered expectations by engaging with the
listener through the affective use of sound” (2018, p. 210). As related to the norms of true
crime media, this could mean a move away from visual tropes of women’s bodies as bearers
of pain, including crime scene photos of bruised or bloodied victims, which are almost
inherently sensationalist as they shock viewers with imagery of the damage inflicted during a
given crime. Julia Hoydis is similarly optimistic that “the focus on disembodied voices, so
central to podcasting, bears potential for feminist studies” to move beyond visualphilic
tendencies (2020, p. 7). Of course, Copeland and Hoydis are right that an audio medium
should allow for traditional visual, or audiovisual, gendered representations and expecta-
tions to be challenged. Indeed, this is potentially the case with My Favorite Murder in which,
as Greer notes, “the acousmatic female hosts counter crime film and television’s reliance on
images of degraded, violated and assaulted female bodies with purely aural recountings”
(2017, p. 153). But other scholarship and true crime podcasts reveal a more complex picture,
one in which the sensationalist visual images of women’s bodies are adapted into sensa-
tionalist mental images in true crime podcasts, as well as through the erotic presentation of
women’s bodies in marketing campaigns by the streaming platform, Audible (Verma, 2019).
For Slakoff (2021), mediated portrayals of intimate partner violence (IPV) in true crime
podcasts frequently fixate on physical violence over other forms of IPV such as controlling
behaviours. Slakoff coded transcripts from four true crime podcast series, with the primary

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code of “physical violence” subdivided into subcodes such as “hitting”, “slapping”,

“strangulation” and the unexpected addition of “bruising” (2021, p. 8). The transcription
process led her to add the subcode of bruising relatively late, due to bruises being described
viscerally across several podcasts. For example, in The Teacher’s Pet, a co-worker of the
victim Lynette Dawson (thought to be murdered by her husband, Chris Dawson) describes
a “messy” bruise: “It was a horrible blue-y dark blue-y purple bruise”. Later in the same
episode, her seamstress describes “the shape of fingers, of bruises, on her arms”, and one of
Lynette’s friends recalls “a really large grapefruit-size bruise” on Lynette’s thigh and
bruising on her upper arm (2021, pp. 9–10). Cognisant that emotional abuse is often ignored
in media portrayals of IPV, Slakoff is concerned by what she terms the fetishisation of
noticeable bruising: “The detailed descriptions of noticeable bruises are problematic
because they might insinuate to listeners that real abuse needs to leave physical marks or
that the only outward signs of abuse to look for are bruises” (2021, p. 14).
Slakoff’s findings and process supports the importance of close analysis of podcast details
(in this case entwined with Slakoff’s coding of transcripts) rather than relying on more
impressionistic accounts. Here, it helps to reveal how, despite being created in an audio
medium, the podcasts are substituting for visual images of female victims’ bodies by incor-
porating sustained descriptions of visible damage to their bodies. Through accounts of their
position, shape, colour and size, the bruises are conjured mentally for podcast listeners in ways
that align with more traditional portrayals of women’s bodies in screen-based true crime
media. This sensationalised focus on descriptions of violence is unsurprising when considered
in relation to what Martin Spinelli and Lance Dann term as podcasting’s “full frontal”
approach: “The podcast edit is racier and bolder, and podcasts often contain material most
national broadcasting regulators would rarely sanction. Where radio might suggest and
allude, podcasting is full frontal” (2019, p. 69). In true crime podcasts centred around violence
against women, such as Serial and West Cork, this boldness is evident in the decisions to grant
substantial air time to the convicted murderer (Adnan Syed) or the main suspect (Ian Bailey).
These decisions are justified by the podcast creators through a narrative focus on a ques-
tioning of their actual – as opposed to convicted or perceived – involvement in the woman’s
murder. And yet, both podcasts incorporate these figures in ways that are purposefully bold.
In Serial, for example, the repeated use of the automated female voice to tell us that the
recording we are hearing is “a Global-Tel link prepaid call from Adnan Syed, an inmate at a
Maryland Correctional facility” is repeatedly disconcerting for listeners unable to see Syed.
In West Cork, this approach is reflected in the purposeful structuring of material in epi-
sodes one and two, which leads to the twisting revelation that one of the locals who listeners
have already heard discussing the range of international “blow-ins” living in this part of
Ireland is, in fact, also the notorious prime suspect in Toscan du Plantier’s murder. (In 2019,
Bailey was convicted of her murder in absentia by a French court, though he is yet to be
extradited from Ireland.) In many ways, this decision to purposefully withhold this infor-
mation reflects a desire and expectation that the podcast will have an international audience,
many of whom will know next to nothing about Toscan du Plantier’s murder. For Irish
listeners, very familiar with the murder and Bailey’s subsequent notoriety in the national
media, the decision to purposefully mislead the listeners as to his centrality to the story is
intriguing but disconcerting; an early reminder that, like Spinelli and Dann (2019) note, the
podcast edit is racier and bolder than more traditional forms of audio broadcasting.
West Cork includes a wide range of voices, including locals in the rural town where the
murder took place, journalists who covered the case and recordings of Toscan du Plantier’s

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son in discussion with the podcast producers. It opens with the disclaimer, spoken by co-
host and producer Jennifer Forde, that “the following series contains some graphic images
and is intended for a mature audience”. This kind of warning is a familiar precursor to
many news media and documentary series of a sensitive nature, but it functions differently
at the beginning of a podcast series. It immediately sets up an apparent contradiction – how
are there graphic images in an audio medium? – and implies the kind of sensationalist
treatment of violence that Slakoff identifies in her study: these images may be mental, but
they will be described in such ways that they will still cause disturbance to listeners. The
revelation about Bailey is not the only element of the story that is drawn out (postponed,
even) for dramatic effect in the early episodes of the podcast. Hearing the details of what
happened to Toscan du Plantier, her violent death, is also positioned as something of a
cliffhanger to encourage listeners to proceed past episode one. Her death is teased at and
gestured toward in ways that align with victims’ bodies serving as a kind of structuring
absence in true crime podcasts.
Excerpts from recordings with locals and other figures involved in the case are integrated
for dramatic effect, positioned in ways that force us to imagine the female victim who we
cannot see or hear. Episode one ends with bar owner Billy O’Sullivan describing the last
sighting of Toscan du Plantier having tea in his bar, his heavily accented voice slowly laments
how “She was found the next morning, battered to death on the road” before the atmospheric
background music rises and flows into the credits. Other vague but ominous references to her
body are dotted throughout the episode. In the introduction, we hear an unidentified woman
explain how, due to the lack of resolution into the murder, “it’s like the casket can’t be closed”.
We hear this excerpt again near the end of the episode. She is described by another woman as a
kind of “phantom” who passed in and out of the small town, and with the intangibility of her
body further invoked by the discussion that, on the day that she was murdered, Toscan du
Plantier had been “spooked” by something that she saw at the remote cliffs of Three Castle
Head, a space that is supposedly haunted by the “White Lady” whose appearance is thought
to signal imminent death to those who see her. O’Sullivan’s closing description of Toscan du
Plantier being found “battered to death on the road” is thus more than just a dramatic
cliffhanger and motivator to listen to the next episode. It is a graphic description of a woman
who was not “a phantom”, though she may have become one, a woman whose casket we have
been told (twice) can’t be closed due to a lack of closure over the details of her murder. As in
other true crime podcasts focused on violence against women, Toscan du Plantier’s body is
simultaneously a structuring absence and something unseen but all too real. Her violent death
at the presumed hands of a man is sensationalised and the specific dynamics of the audio
podcast medium seem to be used to exploit it.
We can connect this suspenseful revealing of information to the kind of “risque
aesthetic”
that Neil Verma notes in selected podcasts and audiobooks produced by the streaming service,
Audible, the creator of West Cork. Verma identifies a trend for producers of Audible podcasts
to focus “on themes of privacy and the risque
, and their relation to perceived women’s desires
and experiences” (2019, p. 273), including with podcasts like The Butterfly Effect (2017), fo-
cused on Pornhub, and Breasts Unbound (2016), which explores breasts from a wide range of
perspectives. While the subject matter of West Cork was less risqué and might be considered
more as Audible’s successful attempt to create some content aligned with the popularity of
true crime podcasts, in other ways it reflects the trend that Verma identifies. The series engages
in a kind of narrative striptease, slowly revealing bits of information in a way that is designed
to build suspense and keep the listener holding out for more.

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Of particular interest to my discussion is Verma’s analysis of an erotically charged

Audible advertisement featuring a close-up of a young, white blonde woman wearing
headphones and his related argument that Audible went beyond podcasts’ general use of
“sensationalistic content”, with “creators [who] seem to have framed their sensationalism
around situations of private experiences, particularly women’s experiences, amenable to
(and intensified by) individuated listening practices” (2019, p. 274). The greyscale image in
the ad shows only the bottom of a woman’s face and is highly suggestive of the kind of
sensationalised or salacious content one could listen to on Audible around this time: “The
figure grazes her lip with her fingers in a gesture associated with erotica. What is she lis-
tening to that makes her touch her lip in a seemingly involuntary, unconscious way?”
(p. 275). The image is accompanied by the tagline “From the narrator’s lips, to yours. The
feeling is audible”. The advertisement feels like a sharp rejoinder to Copeland, Greer and
other scholars’ optimism that podcasting “can challenge visual-philic heteronormative and
gendered expectations by engaging with the listener through the affective use of sound”
(Copeland, 2018, p. 210). Instead, that same affective use of sound is being funnelled back
into a marketing campaign that reinforces traditional gendered expectations via visual
imagery wherein even the female podcast listener is presented in a semi-abstract but sex-
ualised and idealised form.
As a marketing strategy for an audio platform, the implied message seems clear and dis-
heartening. Even though Audible content will not provide any such visual representations of
women, they still believe that an erotically charged image of a woman will signal the risqué
nature of their audio content and will thus help expand their listenership. This is not dissimilar,
then, to the sensationalised descriptions of violence done to women’s bodies in true crime
podcasts that Slakoff identifies or implied by West Cork’s opening warning about the graphic
images. The take-home point is that audio platforms and true crime podcasts in particular often
trade on the (mental) imagery of women’s bodies, despite their apparent distance from the
gendered conventions of visual media. That said, psychologist Amanda Vicary reasons that true
crime stories can provide women with “a mental dress rehearsal of sorts, a way of unpacking
and understanding dangerous situations that haven’t yet happened to them” (Barcella, 2019).
Audio podcasts which also provide some detailed visual descriptions could potentially prove
more beneficial than audiovisual true crime media in that it becomes easier for the listener to
mentally place themselves in the scene. Even if this is one benefit to podcasts that include
detailed descriptions that allow for mental imagery, it must be considered alongside the ex-
ploitative aspect of including visual descriptions of violence against victims.

Emotive voices
There are some potentially redeeming dimensions to the graphically-embodied nature of
true crime podcast content focused on women’s bodies, wherein the expressive dimensions
of the voice are harnessed to capture the lingering impact of the damage done to victims on
those who knew them. Moreover, I think it is worth considering this affective use of sur-
rogate female voices in relation to the conventions of melodrama, a media genre tradi-
tionally associated with female audiences, tragedy, pathos and emotional “excess”.
Melodrama has traditionally been categorised as a “body genre” for its tendency to stim-
ulate a bodily response (tears) in audience members and what Linda Williams terms as their
“naked displays of emotion” (1991, p. 3). In screen studies, melodrama is grouped alongside
horror and porn, genres where the desired impact on the audience takes the form of fear

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(screams, jump scares, elevated heart rate) and arousal, respectively. Indeed, if we return to
Verma’s analysis of Audible’s risqué audio content and marketing, he notes how podcasts
belong to “what we might call an emerging cycle of ‘body radio’ programs that include sonic
explorations of the sounds of the wide and sometimes musical repertoire of visceral bodily
functions ordinarily excised from terrestrial broadcast” (2019, p. 291). But while Verma
refers to a variety of sexual sounds, the sounds of crying and sob-filled speech are equally
fitting. In relation to true crime podcasts, moments from Serial and Missing and Murdered:
Finding Cleo can help reveal how audible traces of a sorrow-filled body can balance out the
sensationalised mental images of victims’ bodies. Recorded voices can provide a rare kind of
sonic space for lingering grief and trauma to be materialised, amplified and heard.
Focused on the mysterious disappearance of an Indigenous girl from Saskatchewan who
was adopted in the United States in the 1970s, the Finding Cleo podcast has been praised for
departing from the overwhelming focus of true crime podcasts on white women, a trend
which disregards how women of colour and Indigenous women are disproportionately
victims of violence. The podcast is hosted by Connie Walker, who is also Indigenous, and
foregrounds Cleo’s siblings, as they struggle to find answers to what happened to their sister
amidst rumours that she was raped and murdered while trying to hitchhike back to
Saskatchewan from the United States after she was displaced from their family home by
child welfare workers in the 1970s. Copeland and Lauren Knight position Finding Cleo as
an anti-colonial soundtrack focused on “the promise of truth” to heal what they con-
ceptualise as “wounded vibrations” in reference to the affective weight of trauma that goes
back generations for First Nation peoples and remains present in “the voices of grand-
parents, of sisters and mothers [which] echo through the land” (2021, p. 102). Though
Copeland and Knight use the term “melancholic” to refer to the affective voice of Cleo’s
sister, Christine Cameron (p. 112), I would argue that the impact of her emotive tone and
cries also aligns well with the vocal conventions of melodrama as unapologetically excessive
and moving for an audience.
Copeland and Knight identify several moments where “Christine is open with her con-
veying of emotion and trauma as tears,” with “a sorrowful voice” heard in a number of
different moments throughout the series (2021, p. 112). This includes the first episode when
she calls Social Services Saskatchewan to request information about Cleo:

Christine begins to cry, ‘For 20 years you’ve told me nothing’, ‘I know’ the operator
replies with a sinking tone in her voice. ‘This is my sister – her body’s in the States you
know – Do you have a sister?’ Christine asks. ‘I do’ replies the worker. ‘Well then
maybe think about how I feel’ Christine responds through her tears. ‘I will call you
tomorrow at the latest to tell you where I’m at’ the worker replies. You can tell from
their voice that Christine’s emotion has resonated with the social services worker
(2021, p. 112).

Christine speaks through tears again in the final episode, explaining that although she
doesn’t look happy she is, due to finding a resolution to what exactly happened to her sister:
in this case, Cleo appears to have taken her own life, aged thirteen, as a result of her
increasingly difficult circumstances.
Finding Cleo’s use of Christine’s voice is notably in line with Jacob Smith’s interpretation
of the microphoned voice’s significance to melodrama in radio and film. Comparing
Barbara Stanwyck’s radio and film performances of Stella Dallas (Lux Radio Theater, 1937;

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King Vidor, 1937), Smith argues “the expressive lighting and lonely silhouette of the film are
replaced by Stanwyck’s choked sobs” (Smith, 2008, p. 103). Finding Cleo makes an ex-
pressive feature of the kind of vocal expressions of emotion that Smith identifies in relation
to radio melodrama. Christine’s close mic-ed setup allows us to hear what Smith and others
have termed “the sob in the throat” (2008, p. 101).
Serial also taps into the expressive power and revelatory nature of the (female) emotive
voice. The producer-narrator Sarah Koenig seems aware that it is not just what people say,
but the way that they say it, which creates impact. In episode eight, she plays what she
describes as her favourite piece of tape from the entire season. The segment features Laura,
a friend of both the imprisoned Syed and another suspect, Jay, as she reflects on her feeling
that neither of them was involved with Hae Min Lee’s murder: “Well then who the fuck did
it? Like, why would — it doesn’t make sense. Why would — (stuttering) Hae was — I can’t
— I’m probably just as confused as you are”. This may seem like an odd moment for
Koenig to select as her favourite recording, since it certainly isn’t revelatory. But, listening
to Laura start and restart sentences as she struggles to find the words to reconcile things, we
sense her frustrated confusion that it is still unclear who killed Lee, something to which
Koenig and many listeners can relate. In Serial, Finding Cleo and other true crime podcasts,
it tends to be female voices that are the most emotive and the closest to audibly sobbing.
Indeed, as I have explored previously in relation to film podcast host Karina Longworth,
this willingness to be heard crying while being recorded for a podcast goes beyond the true
crime genre (O’Meara, 2022, pp. 140–142).
I want to return to Slakoff’s suggestion that more critical attention should be paid to
precisely whose voices are being heard in true crime podcasts, a factor which potentially
impacts a range of factors including audience response, the possibility of victim blaming and
descriptions of the victims. For while Pâquet notes of certain Australian true crime podcasts
that at least they “privilege victim’s stories” the same cannot necessarily be said of other
podcasts considered here (2021, p. 428). As noted, both Serial and West Cork pay con-
siderable attention to the men who were formally or informally considered to have mur-
dered Lee and Toscan du Plantier. Aside from the podcast hosts, it is their voices that are
heard at the greatest length, over the course of many episodes. In West Cork, there is also a
jarring vocal and professional alignment between the podcast producers and Bailey, the
main suspect: all three speak with English accents, which mark them out from many of the
other contributors with regional Irish accents, and Bailey is also a former journalist. With
Serial, the New York-based host Sarah Koenig’s voice can also mark her as an outsider
from contributors from the Baltimore, Maryland community where Lee was murdered. As
she explains to listeners, the school and community where Lee and Syed lived include a large
Black population, as well as many first-generation immigrant families. With Finding Cleo,
there is less of an insider-outsider distinction between the podcast host and the main vocal
contributors, since Connie Walker is also Cree and grew up in a First Nation community in
Saskatchewan, just like the podcast’s subject.
Furthermore, for the female victims to be heard is not inherently a good thing. In Serial
it means hearing Koenig reading aloud excerpts from Lee’s diary, which were entered into
evidence as part of the trial. These segments give listeners a sense of Lee’s voice while alive,
and yet including them can feel inappropriate; both because Lee is expressing herself in a
candid but private teenaged way and because her family wanted no involvement with the
podcast series, and so almost certainly would not want their deceased daughter’s diary
turned into infotainment.

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In Finding Cleo, excerpts from Cleo’s letters to family members are incorporated at
points throughout. Although she is obviously unable to give consent to this, the excerpts are
used judiciously, read aloud by her sister (reflecting the fact that her family members were
willing to be involved in the podcast) and seem less invasive to share than those of a private
diary. Pâquet also highlights issues of consent with regard to incorporating pre-existing
records by a female victim in The Teacher’s Pet podcast, in this case, those of the former
student alluded to sensationally in the podcast title. As Pâquet observes, by broadcasting
taped police interviews, seemingly without the woman’s consent, the male podcast host
Hedley Thomas “replicates the power imbalances that have plagued victim-survivors in the
formal justice system” and raises ethical questions around the intersection of law and media
(2021, pp. 432–433).
Finally, what is missing from most true crime podcasts focused on female victims,
including Serial and West Cork, is contributions from experts in gender-based violence
(GBV). While such podcasts can seek expert opinions from a range of professionals,
including police investigators and legal experts, they rarely attempt to contextualise the
crimes in relation to GBV. The tendency to focus on one crime in-depth creates a narrative
focus that may appeal to producers and listeners but can lead to missed opportunities to
establish the crimes as just one of many in what is a much more widespread trend.

Concluding remarks
Despite some of the complexities of true crime podcasts considered here, they can be valuable
in giving sonic space to the voices of victims and those close to them. They can also offer
female victims and their families alternatives to seeking justice beyond formal systems
(Pâquet, 2021, p. 421), as well as help survivors to talk about abuse with their loved ones, and
provide educators in related areas with teaching tools (Slakoff, 2021, p. 18). At the same time,
I remain sceptical that the majority of true crime podcasts offer a radical and progressive
departure from trends for true crime stories of violence against women to provide sensa-
tionalist forms of infotainment that often trade in the shock factor of the damage done to their
bodies and lives. Of those considered here, Finding Cleo appears to offer the best example of
how to sensitively engage with stories of female victims, particularly those from minority
groups, and this is potentially due to supportive involvement by the victim’s family.
Alternative sides of crime and gender are also being productively explored in more niche
podcasts, such as Strict Scrutiny (2019-present), a series focused on the homogeneity of the
US Supreme Court that is hosted by three law scholars with the aim of “highlight[ing] the
voices of women and people of colour, to celebrate the expertise and skill of lawyers who
work on behalf of the less powerful, and to challenge prevailing views about what a
Supreme Court expert looks and sounds like” (Litman, Murray and Shaw, 2021, p. 72).
Given that the existing analysis of true crime podcasts often highlights their entwinement
with both formal justice systems and intersectional identity politics – due to the over-
representation of white women as subjects and white people as podcast hosts – then pod-
casts focused on legal culture as it relates to minorities are potentially more valuable than
more narrative based true crime accounts of victimisation. Indeed, Finding Cleo and Strict
Scrutiny align with Raechel Tiffe and Melody Hoffmann’s optimism that podcasts provide
much greater sonic space for “traditionally-oppressed voices” (2017, p. 118). Furthermore,
comparing women’s voices on podcasts to those in traditional radio broadcasting, they note
how journalism courses train reporters and radio hosts to “speak with little emotion,” in

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sharp contrast to their discussion of feminist podcasting where “embracing one’s ‘authentic
voice’ is a defining and foundational trend” (2017, p. 117). As I have shown, this move
towards an emotive delivery can clearly be heard in some true crime podcasts, with the
creative decision to retain the sounds of women’s sobs and vocal breaks offering some hope
that, outside of sensationalised verbal imagery of female victims, the expressive potential of
the voice can affect listeners differently.

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motivations in the true crime podcast audience’, Journal of Radio & Audio Media, 25 (1),
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 21
SEXUAL VIOLENCE AND
SOCIAL JUSTICE
The celebrity #MeToo documentary in the US
Tanya Horeck

In the wake of the explosion of public discourse on sexual violence since #MeToo went viral
in 2017, several documentaries on high-profile sexual abuse cases in the US have been
produced. Significant examples include Leaving Neverland (Reed, 2019); Surviving R. Kelly
and Surviving R. Kelly Part II: The Reckoning (Bellis and Finnie, 2019 and 2020); At the
Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal (Carr, 2019); Untouchable: The Rise and
Fall of Harvey Weinstein (MacFarlane, 2019); Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich (Bryant, 2020);
Athlete A (Cohen and Shenk, 2020); On the Record (Dick and Ziering, 2020); and Allen v.
Farrow (Dick and Ziering, 2021).1 These #MeToo documentaries are about celebrity male
abusers who used their power and wealth to commit acts of sexual degradation and abuse.2
Streaming on platforms such as HBO, Hulu and Netflix, #MeToo documentaries about
celebrity abusers have garnered considerable cultural interest and accrued high viewing figures.
For example, Surviving R. Kelly, a multiple-episode series about pop singer Robert Kelly’s
decades-long sexual abuse of black girls and women, broke records for the Lifetime cable
network, with the premiere netting 1.9 million total viewers, becoming the network’s “best
ratings performance in more than two years” (Bradley, 2019). In focusing public attention on
the long-ignored voices of the black girls and women hurt by Kelly (see Davis, 2018), the
docuseries is widely viewed as “the catalyst” (Strause, 2020) for the singer’s trial in New York in
2021, where he was ultimately found guilty of sex trafficking, 30 years after the abuse began.
While Surviving R. Kelly may be unique in terms of the role it is seen to have played in
helping to achieve carceral justice, the other #MeToo documentaries I discuss in this
chapter should also be viewed as agents of change insofar as they are helping to inform and
structure public understandings of rape culture in 21st-century media culture. Indeed,
considering growing debates about the serious limitations of carceral feminism, it is
important to critically examine what these documentaries bring to a feminist conversation
about transformative justice. Carceral feminism, a term coined by sociologist Elizabeth
Bernstein in 2007, is “committed to using the criminal punishment system for social change”
(cited in Phipps, 2020, p. 46, p. 101). But as Bernstein, Alison Phipps and other feminist
theorists and activists have argued, there are serious problems with the idea that gender
justice can be attained through the courts and the criminal justice system. Abolitionist
organisers Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba state that: “The criminal punishment system

232 DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-26

 Sexual violence and social justice

promises accountability for violence, but we know that in actuality it is a form of targeted
violence against poor people, people with disabilities, and people of color, and doesn’t
reduce violence in our society” (2018). Approaches that “construe justice too narrowly as
conviction and punishment” (Alcoff, 2018, p. 47) often overlook the intersecting forms of
oppression that structure punitive systems and target marginalised groups.
The #MeToo documentaries I analyse in this chapter work to produce “collective
knowledge” on the problem of sexual violation (Alcoff, 2018, p. 2) and they do so by
prioritising the experiences of sexual violence survivors. As a mode of filmmaking that
privileges truth claims and builds arguments, documentary is deployed as a critical format
with the potential to reform “conventional framing assumptions and knowing practices”
around sexual violence and gendered harm (Alcoff, 2018, p. 34). These documentaries
generate outrage – over the men who get away with committing abuse, over the system that
lets them get away with it and over the socio-legal discursive apparatuses that silence vic-
tims. As an attempt to redress these wrongs, #MeToo documentaries circulate in what
Phipps (2020) refers to as an “outrage economy”. While outrage is necessary and cathartic
“in a world where sexual violence survivors are routinely dismissed and disbelieved”
(Phipps, 2020, p. 86), there are risks involved in such affect generation; as Phipps notes, it is
important to be mindful of the ways in which, for example, so-called trauma “‘porn’ allows
us the quick fix of empathy and outrage but does not often lead to sustained protest or
systemic analysis” (2020, p. 91).
In this chapter, I provide an overview of a selection of #MeToo documentaries dealing
with celebrity abusers,3 identifying some of their shared formal and narrative features and
reflecting on how their visions of social justice might produce new spaces for reparation and
accountability. Engaging with themes of criminality, truth and justice, #MeToo doc-
umentaries can be situated within the context of a 21st-century boom in true crime media.
However, through their strong focus on victim perspectives, #MeToo documentaries break
new ground for true crime and constitute a significant new subgenre – one which draws
from feminist knowledge on systemic sexual violence and institutional culpability. At their
strongest, #MeToo documentaries attempt to dislodge individualised understandings of
violence by constructing a structural analysis of sexual violence and patterns of gendered
abuse. My aim in this chapter is to reflect on the potential for the #MeToo documentary to
not only advance public understandings of sexual violence as an institutionalised problem
but to unpack the destructive logics of white heteropatriarchy and its reproduction of
gendered harms and inequities. At the same time, my analysis will also address the limi-
tations of #MeToo documentaries and the specific challenges of addressing sexual violence
in the “period of heightened visibility” (Alcoff, 2018, p. 24) brought about by the #MeToo
moment.

Feminist true crime

#MeToo documentaries tend to be marketed or algorithmically tagged as “true crime”. This
is not surprising given the audience appetite for true crime stories and the widespread
popularity of contemporary true crime blockbusters (Horeck, 2019). However, while some
#MeToo documentaries (especially the serialised ones) deploy long-form true crime devices
such as cliffhangers, the subgenre differs from true crime blockbusters in two important
ways. First, #MeToo documentaries do not encourage speculation about the “guilt” or
“innocence” of the accused – there is no tantalising mystery for citizen detectives to pursue.

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Rather, the driving motivation of these documentaries is to investigate how male abusers
misused their power to hurt girls and women and to document the extent of the harm. The
structuring “mystery” of these series, such as it is, concerns not whether the men did it but
how they got away with it. Second, where true crime blockbusters tend to concern murder
cases in which the (female) victims are unable to offer their stories, in #MeToo doc-
umentaries the victim/survivors are on hand to testify.
At the centre of the #MeToo documentary is the interview. Often, the interviews of dif-
ferent women are edited together to underscore the power of collective testimony. For ex-
ample, towards the end of At the Heart of Gold, footage is included of survivor Rachael
Denhollander – one of the first women to publicly speak out against Larry Nassar – reading
her victim-impact statement to the court. As Denhollander asks the court to bear witness to
what happens when girls’ disclosures of sexual abuse are not listened to and institutional
cultures close ranks, director Erin Lee Carr inserts a montage of the young women who bravely
shared their testimony throughout the documentary. One by one, the women look direct to
camera, gazing at the viewers who have served as witnesses to their testimonies. This emotive
montage device is found in all the films discussed in this chapter and is used to underscore the
power of “speaking out” (see Serisier, 2018) – a central theme of #MeToo documentaries.
It is significant that the documentary filmmakers themselves are not visibly present in these
films. This is to say, in the #MeToo documentaries analysed here, the directors do not appear
on screen, even though there are notable moments in which their voices can be heard asking
questions off camera. For instance, in At the Heart of Gold, there is an especially poignant
moment when one of the now adult female victim/survivors is filled with anguish over how she
might have enabled Nassar’s predation to continue because, as a child, she did not recognise it
as abuse. Erin Lee Carr can be heard reassuring her, “but that’s because you didn’t know what
it was”. Here, the documentary filmmaker’s empathetic voice is included as part of an in-
terlocution, an attempt to hold the space for the victim/survivor and to engender care for her.
Above all else, the aim of these documentaries is to create the opportunity for victim/
survivors to be heard and ethically responded to. Amy Ziering, who, with her directing partner
Kirby Dick, has made several important documentaries on sexual abuse (both before and
after #MeToo) has said that her role as an interviewer is to “responsibly listen and then to
answer to what they have told me … honour that and respond to it” (“Episode 8: Amy
Ziering”, 2018). This method can be framed as what feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan
(1982) refers to as “radical listening”, which seeks transformation through deep listening to
the other. The inclusion of the “performer-director” on screen as another point of focus for
viewers would arguably undermine the ethos of these documentaries and their attempt to
honour and elevate the words of victim/survivors. Of course, this is not to say that director’s
involvement in shaping the material and engaging with the subjects is not evident in other
ways; as Bill Nichols writes, “the voice of the filmmaker emerges from the weave of con-
tributing voices and the material brought in to support what they say” (2001, p. 122).
The use of talking heads as a means of contextualising the experience of victim/survivors
is a critical feature of many #MeToo documentaries. Indeed, one of the key functions of
interviews with talking heads, including victim rights advocates and sexual abuse experts, is
to bust rape myths, defined as “prejudicial, stereotyped, or false beliefs about rape, rape
victims, and rapists” (Mack and McCann, 2021, p. 105). In the case of Surviving R. Kelly,
for instance, many of the girls and women abused by R. Kelly over the course of years
appeared reluctant to leave him. However, as clinical psychologists and criminology experts
explain across the six episodes of season one, abusers groom, manipulate and coercively

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control their victims, isolating them from their loved ones and convincing them they will
have nothing if they leave. While not all #MeToo documentaries make the same effort as
Surviving R. Kelly to include feminist voices, it is a defining feature of the genre to share
insights into victim psychology and behaviours.
Ultimately, the collective aim of these documentaries is to build on the #MeToo movement
and to produce what Leshu Torchin calls a “witnessing public”, which encourages audiences
“to take both responsibility and action” for the suffering they have witnessed (2012, p. 3). This
responsibility refers both to the abuse which took place “in plain sight” and should have been
recognised and seen as abuse at the time, as well as to the trauma witnessed through survivor
testimonies in the documentaries. However, the process of critically intervening in rape culture
is not clear cut and a key challenge for these documentaries is how to handle the tension
between the need to tell stories about violent men and the institutions that enable them,
without reproducing myths about monsters and “bad apples”.

#MeToo monsters
The trope of the monster is as problematic as it is unavoidable in the media discussion of
#MeToo stories. For victim/survivors, their abusers are monsters and the use of the word as a
descriptor is common in their testimonies in the documentaries under discussion (Mack and
McCann, 2021, p. 104). The problem lies not in the victim’s use of the term but rather in how
the media emphasis on the monster trope might encourage an understanding of sexual abuse
as being about innately “evil” men (Mack and McCann, 2021, p. 104). If the discussion is all
about how individual men such as Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein are monsters, the
worry is that the inherent violence of the structures that protected these men will get over-
looked. As Karen Boyle suggests, it is about “trying to achieve a balance between giving voice
to women and keeping both the structural nature of men’s violence against women and
the responsibility of individual men in view” (Boyle, 2019, p. 12). This balancing act is evident
in #MeToo documentaries as they juggle the testimony of women, accounts of the monstrous
behaviours of individual men and criticism of the violence of institutions.
At the Heart of Gold and Athlete A examine how Larry Nassar was able to abuse
hundreds of children in large part because of his normative masculinity as a kind and
“quirky” male doctor.4 These documentaries expose how it was precisely because Nassar
did not fit “the cultural archetype of the monster rapist” (Mack and McCann, 2021, p. 105)
that he was able to commit sexual abuse over decades. The institutions he embedded himself
in produced the conditions for the abuse to occur and in fact implicitly sanctioned it as part
of a wider pattern of gendered control over girls’ bodies.5
While they gesture towards the structures of power that protected Epstein and Weinstein,
Filthy Rich and Untouchable tend to reinforce a notion of the “exceptionalism” (Boyle,
2019, p. 101) of their narcissistic male subjects, who are pictured as extremely powerful,
wealthy and pathological. While there is good reason to characterise the men as such, both
documentaries at times rely on unexamined discourses of monstrosity which activate raced
and gendered stereotypes of sexual violence. Ashley Noel Mack and Bryan McCann co-
gently outline the problems with the “monster myth” in social discourses of sexual violence,
arguing that the media emphasis on Weinstein as a “monster par excellence” in effect ra-
cialised him, evoking the “figure of the monstrous Black male rapist – a mythos whose
cultural currency is vast and consequences for Black bodies often fatal” (2021, p. 104).
Moreover, they note that “many visual representations of Weinstein position him within

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ocular registers of anti-Semitism” (p. 109) and move him away from the “locus of normative
White masculinity” (p. 110).
However, it is notable that Weinstein’s racialisation was largely implicit and factors of
racial identity largely go unremarked in #MeToo documentaries centring on white male
abusers. For example, although Allen v. Farrow touches very briefly upon Woody Allen’s
status as an affluent, famous white man and the difference that made to how his case was
handled by New York authorities, it “omits any sustained engagement with race, religion,
and ethnicity” (Bromberg, 2021). Moreover, as Eli Bromberg notes, “Allen’s Jewishness
goes unmentioned” (2021). This omission, can, as Bromberg suggests, be attributed to the
“documentary filmmakers threading so much complex narrative material”, as well as
understandably wanting to avoid fuelling anti-Semitism but there is a “missed opportunity”
to interrogate the complicated gendered and racialised tropes and discourses at play in the
case (Bromberg, 2021). In analysing #MeToo documentaries, it is important to reflect on
whether they delve into what Mack and McCann describe as the “logics of whiteness” that
“structure sexual violence in the US” (2021, p. 112) and in the next section I explore the
issue of intersectionality in more detail.

Intersectional #MeToo
In the #MeToo documentaries that focus on the sexual abuse of black girls and women,
specifically Surviving R. Kelly and On the Record, there is an in-depth interrogation of the
racialised dimensions of sexual violence. Significantly, the trope of the Black male rapist and
the role it plays in public fantasies of rape is critically acknowledged and dissected. As one
of the most enduring of all rape myths, “The myth of the Black male rapist has functioned
as a distinctly monstrous figure against which the state and public sought to violently
protect White women and determine the borders of permissible sexuality” (Mack and
McCann, 2021, p. 106). The harm done to black communities because of this myth is ex-
tensive and continues to inform responses to sexual violence. Both Surviving R. Kelly and
On the Record draw from black feminist thought to theorise sexual abuse, and to illustrate
how the violent history of criminalising and demonising black masculinity often prevents
black female victims from speaking out. Surviving R. Kelly indicates that a history of racist
oppression is what made some members of the black community, including African
American girls and women, support R. Kelly and his music over his black female victims.
Both Surviving R. Kelly and On the Record also demonstrate how, in the white hetero-
patriarchal imaginary, racialised stereotyping determines who gets recognised as a victim.
On the Record begins with the Black British writer and journalist Bim Adewunmi
reflecting on the question: “What is missing from #MeToo?” It is worth including her
response in full:

What is missing from #MeToo? It’s difficult for me to say. But I don’t think it’s a
coincidence that most of the women who have come forward in Hollywood have been
white women. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they are generally quite successful. If
we look at the earning power of people in America, for example, at the very top are
white men and at the very bottom are women of colour. And that is something that I
think is necessary to look at when we are talking about who gets to come forward and
give their own stories about surviving sexual abuse or sexual assault.

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Adewunmi’s critical reflection on whose stories are prioritised in the dominant media
coverage of #MeToo forms part of an opening montage in On the Record in which several
black women critical thinkers, including Shanita Hubbard, Tarana Burke, Kimberle
Crenshaw and Kierna Mayo reflect on #MeToo’s failure to acknowledge the complexities
of intersectional oppressions. These opening remarks provide an intersectional black fem-
inist framework for the story it tells about black female music executive Drew Dixon, who
was raped by black music mogul Russell Simmons in 1995 following years of sexually
inappropriate behaviour from him in the workplace. Dixon was compelled to speak out
against Simmons in the wake of #MeToo, even though, as she tells director Amy Ziering:
“as a black woman, I wasn’t sure if this [the MeToo moment] applied to me”. Discussing
how she feared the implications of what might happen if she went on the record with her
experiences, Dixon references the historical example of Anita Hill, the American lawyer
who was publicly vilified in 1991 after she accused US Supreme Court nominee Clarence
Thomas of sexual harassment. Dixon states that she did not want “to add fuel to the myth
of the sexually aggressive black man”. Similarly, Tarana Burke, who appears as a talking
head in On the Record (as well as in Surviving R. Kelly), speaks to the intersectional com-
plexity of “black women not wanting to put black men in the line of fire because of race
loyalty” and their painful awareness of an “American criminal justice system that destroys
black men.”
In centring black feminist thought on intersectionality and in historicising racialised
experiences of sexual violence, On the Record marks an important shift away from a focus
on individual victims and perpetrators to an analysis of how “oppressions [are] co-
constituted and simultaneous, rather than separate and different” and “how the intersecting
structures of heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism and colonialism make certain identity
categories more vulnerable than others” (Phipps, 2020, p. 50). On the Record demands
outrage not only over the behaviour of the sexual predators it identifies but over the loss of
what Drew Dixon describes as the “brilliant women” who were hurt and whose careers were
destroyed because of the abuse they suffered.

Conclusion: activating change

A key question posed by this group of #MeToo documentaries is: what next? What are the
solutions to the endemic problem of sexual violence? While #MeToo documentaries make
visible women’s pain and resistance, this does not in and of itself comprise a solution to the
problem of sexual violence. As Sabrina Moro (2022, p. 175) cautions, social justice rhetoric
around victimhood can be slippery and imagery of women as “heroic survivors” can be co-
opted to neoliberal ends that put the emphasis on narratives of individual recovery rather
than on the structural inequities baked into patriarchal institutions. Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy
Rich, for example, deploys neoliberal discourses on the resilience of the individual in ways
that can obscure wider systems of gendered power and displaces the opportunity for fem-
inist analysis (Boyle, 2019, p. 13). Its final episode, “Finding Their Voice”, concludes with
imagery of individual women survivors and relies heavily on rhetoric around the need to “be
strong” and name and shame “the monsters”. Though it briefly references #MeToo, it does
not explore it as a social movement in any detail. Filthy Rich also generates much of its
dramatic momentum across its four episodes through its depiction of a group of good, white
men who articulate their disgust with Epstein’s actions and who battle to take him down,
implying that the problem is not the system itself but the individual men operating it.

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There is a palpable tension in many #MeToo documentaries between the desire to see
abusers receive carceral punishment and the need to keep pushing for a deeper under-
standing of the societal roots of the problem. The #MeToo documentaries discussed here all
conclude with printed onscreen messages regarding the criminal charges levelled against the
abusers and their accomplices and/or enablers. Most of them also conclude by referencing
the power of collective resistance. The ending of Untouchable, for example, acknowledges
the need to move beyond a focus on the individual to wider systems of power, but it
reinforces the “me, not you” messaging of white feminism as identified by Alison Phipps. It
does this through its return to the young actress who opened the film – Erika Rosenbaum –
who talks about what #MeToo meant to her as a (white) woman and through its concluding
montage of white actresses looking direct to camera, as Ronan Farrow talks about the
bravery of risk-takers speaking out against sexual violence. Untouchable gives the final word
to one of these actresses, Paz de la Huerta, who states: “It’s not over, it continues”.
This sense of ongoing pain and trauma is heavily emphasised in Surviving R. Kelly, a
series which uses its multi-episode structure to evidence the scale of the abuse and enduring
suffering. There are now two seasons and eleven episodes of Surviving R. Kelly. The second
season demonstrates the extent to which the documentary itself has become part of the
activist movement (which includes #MuteRKelly) to hold R. Kelly accountable for his
crimes against girls and women. The serialised structure of Surviving R. Kelly means that
there is repetition across episodes, as it often circles back to the same points. However, the
stretching out of the story is also symptomatic of the volume of the trauma and the need to
provide space and time to deal with long-suppressed and ignored accounts of abuse. As a
piece of activism, the docuseries also works to keep R. Kelly’s crimes in the public eye and
to continue to agitate for justice for black girls and women.
Though it is beyond the scope of this chapter to fully explore the multi-episode versus the
feature-film format of #MeToo documentaries, there are a few points to briefly consider.
Three of the #MeToo documentaries discussed here – Surviving R. Kelly (seasons 1 and 2),
Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich and Allen v. Farrow – are serialised. By extending their narra-
tives across episodes, these series can be seen to be capitalising on the popularity of long-
form true crime documentary in the digital streaming era. Indeed, serialised #MeToo
documentaries use true crime storytelling devices such as narrative hooks and cliffhangers
to suture viewers into a “play-next-episode” mode of engagement. Filthy Rich, for example,
prioritises suspense and drama in its cat-and-mouse re-telling of the struggle to bring the
already dead Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell “down,” focusing in particular
on Virginia Giuffre as a heroic survivor. Episode 3, “The Island,” ends with imagery of
Giuffre on a beach on her own, as her voice-over states: “enough’s enough … he has to be
held accountable, and that’s when I said, let’s go and get them, we’re going to go and get
them all”. Surviving R. Kelly also uses true crime storytelling devices to an extent, though
the crux of all its episodes is always the victim/survivor testimony.
Regardless of the format, #MeToo documentaries are highly affective objects that work
to generate outrage. If #MeToo documentaries can be said to “put us in touch with our
feelings” about gender-based and sexual violence (Phipps, 2020, p. 85), the question of how
these feelings of outrage might connect to social justice initiatives and action is a compli-
cated one, especially in a social media “economy of visibility” based on likes, clicks and
shares (Banet-Weiser, 2018, p. 10). What this means for victim/survivors on and off screen is
also complex, as this kind of sustained attention can mean they lose control over their own
narratives. For example, as this essay went to press, one of the victim/survivors who accused

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Hollywood actor, Armie Hammer, of rape, has criticised – and rejected – the Discovery
channel documentary series about his sexual violence, House of Hammer (Elli Hakami and
Julian Hobbs, US, 2022) because she believes that the “project is doing more to harm
Hammer’s alleged victims than to help them” (Kaufman, 2022). Moreover, even though she
declined to participate in it, the series used her Instagram account of her assault, including
screenshots. The filmmakers have countered that these posts are now part of the “public
discourse” on the case (Hughes, 2022).
The denouements of #MeToo documentaries typically position an active audience, who
are invited to join the fight for social justice. Athlete A and At the Heart of Gold conclude
with images of young female gymnasts doing the sport they love. Both documentaries
emphasise the duty of responsibility all citizens bear for protecting young athletes. Towards
the end of At the Heart of Gold, Erin Lee Carr is heard off-camera, asking the question,
“What can be done so this doesn’t happen again?” A child welfare expert interviewed
throughout the documentary answers: “We have to start listening to children”. The con-
clusion to Athlete A also references structural problems and addresses an active viewer who
will continue learning beyond the documentary; specifically, it directs viewers to a website
which contains further educational and activist materials: “Learn more and take action
AthleteAFilm.com”.
In the face of a broken US legal system, #MeToo documentaries are exploring how to
attain gender justice and how to productively build on the collective knowledge of victim/
survivors. While some of the #MeToo documentaries about celebrity abusers discussed in
this chapter retain a steadfast belief in the necessity and value of punitive justice, others are
more aware of its limitations. Challenging viewers to quell understandable urges for spec-
tacles of perpetrator punishment, they ask us to think about other forms of social
transformation.
In reference to The Invisible War, a 2012 documentary about the epidemic of sexual
assault in the military which she co-produced, Amy Ziering has said she was mindful of “not
wanting viewers to be satisfied that the bad guy was caught” (“Episode 8: Amy Ziering”,
2018). As Ziering states: “To leave viewers with a feeling of satisfaction that justice was
done, would mean they would have to avoid asking hard questions about the wider
structural issues at stake” (“Episode 8: Amy Ziering”, 2018). What is laudable and
important about Ziering and Dick’s On the Record is that it shifts the emphasis away from a
“cat and mouse” narrative structure that focuses on punishing the perpetrator, to a con-
textualised and historicised understanding of the socio-political discourses and gendered
power dynamics that need to be dismantled to prevent sexual violence.6 This is the direction
that #MeToo documentaries need to take in order for them to have the cultural impact I
hope that they can.

Notes
1 This list is not exhaustive and documentaries on celebrity abusers continue to be released. For
example, as this essay was in production, three new docu-series were released: We Need to Talk
About Cosby (W. Kamau Bell, Showtime, 2022), which details Bill Cosby’s life and career in the
context of his sexual assault charges; Phoenix Rising (Amy Berg, HBO, 2022), which provides an
account of the actress and activist Evan Rachel Woods’ experience of domestic abuse by Marilyn
Manson; and House of Hammer (Elli Hakami and Julian Hobbs, Discovery, 2022), which details
the sexual abuse charges against actor Armie Hammer in the context of his upbringing and his
rich, dysfunctional family.

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2 #MeToo documentaries were not the first to deal with celebrity abusers, nor is the tradition unique
to the US. In the UK context, for example, there have been several documentaries on Jimmy Savile
that predate #MeToo (see Boyle, 2018). There are also documentaries which explore sexual abuse
in the entertainment industry beyond the US, including Bollywood #MeToo (Alicia Arce, UK/
Channel 4, 2018).
3 In this chapter, I focus on documentaries that deal with men’s violence against women: Leaving
Neverland, with its focus on male sexual abuse victims, warrants its own discussion elsewhere.
4 According to Wikipedia, Larry Nassar is of Lebanese heritage, but his ethnic identity tends to be
left unmarked; in media coverage, he is referred to as white or is assumed to be white American.
The documentaries on Nassar do not reference his ethnic identity.
5 Despite its attempts to offer a structural critique, Sabrina Moro argues that Athlete A vilifies Be
la and
Ma
rta Ka
rolyi, the two Romanian gymnastic coaches for USA Gymnastics. She suggests that their
assigned status as “evil” individuals relies on xenophobic tropes and Cold War imagery ( Moro, 2022).
6 For more of Amy Ziering’s insights on the “black hole of horrors” that is the criminal justice
system and the need to dismantle problematic “cultural givens” see Meek (2021).

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sibility”’, The Hollywood Reporter, 2 January. Available at: https://www.hollywoodreporter.
com/tv/tv-news/surviving-r-kelly-part-2-reckoning-is-survivors-say-bosses-1265026/ (Accessed:
19 September 2022).
Surviving R. Kelly (2019) Directed by Nigel Bellis and Astral Finnie [TV documentary], Lifetime.
Surviving R. Kelly Part II: The Reckoning (2020). Directed by Nigel Bellis and Astral Finnie [TV
documentary], Lifetime.
Torchin, L. (2012) Creating the witness: Genocide in the age of film, video, and the internet.
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Untouchable: The Rise and Fall of Harvey Weinstein (2019) Directed by Ursula McFarlane [TV
documentary], Hulu.

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 22
REMEDIATING THE
“YORKSHIRE RIPPER” EVENT
IN THE ERA OF FEMINIST
TRUE CRIME
Hannah Hamad

On 10 March 2021, the phrase “Yorkshire Ripper” was listed as “trending” in the UK on the
social media platform Twitter in response to breaking news that Sarah Everard, a 33-year-old
British woman who had gone missing in south London a week earlier, had been found
murdered in the English county of Kent. Parallels were being drawn in many of the users’
posts between these current events and the notorious serial killings and attempted killings of
women in the north of England from 1975–1980 that came to be known in popular parlance as
the “Yorkshire Ripper” murders.1
But why – and how – was this case a reference point for Twitter users some 40 years later?
In line with Tanya Horeck’s incisive contention that “true crime as a genre lends itself to the
attention economies of ‘24/7 capitalism’ [Srnicek, 2016] and its solicitation of ‘active’ user or
viewer engagement through participatory media technologies” (2019, p. 7), the link between
Everard’s murder and the “Yorkshire Ripper” case also transpired to have been responsive to
a true crime documentary released just a few weeks earlier in the UK on the streaming service
Netflix. For example, in response to the rapid online recirculation of a My London news article
reporting that women in the Clapham area had been told by police “not [to] go out alone”
(Phillips, 2021), one Twitter user wrote: “Watched the Yorkshire Ripper documentary on
Netflix recently, all happened before my time. Nothing ever changes” (10 March 2021). Many
other users took to the platform to express similar sentiments, for instance: “Just finished
watching the Yorkshire Ripper doc on Netflix … That was forty years ago and wtf has
changed?” (10 March 2021), “Watched Yorkshire Ripper doc on Netflix and the women
were raging about being told to stay in. Fast forward forty years and nothing has changed”
(10 March 2021).
Explicit parallels were thus being drawn, particularly between the victim-blaming rhetoric
and discourse that underpinned the entreaties of police (and others) both then2 and now3 for
women not to walk out alone at night. And the impetus for the drawing of these parallels had
been, for many Twitter users, their recent viewing of the four-part Raw TV productions
documentary series The Ripper,4 which dropped on Netflix UK on 16 December 2020. By
24 December 2020, The Ripper had become the streaming platform’s second-most-viewed title
in the country at that time.5

242 DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-27

 Remediating the “Yorkshire Ripper” event

By coincidence, the notorious perpetrator of the misogynist crimes detailed and discussed
in The Ripper had died just a few weeks earlier, on 13 November 2020. This ensured that his
crimes once again became front-page news in the UK and gave rise to renewed interest in
the events of the case and to renewed remembrance of the victims and survivors in main-
stream media. For example, on 14 November, the front page of the (relatively) left-leaning
tabloid The Daily Mirror devoted itself to the remembrance of the 13 women known to have
been killed in the case with a full-page gallery of their portraits, accompanied by the
headline “Now Rest in Peace” (2021). It pushed all other news items (e.g. the one con-
cerning the highly anticipated exit from 10 Downing Street of British Prime Minister Boris
Johnson’s adviser Dominic Cummings, which was that day’s other big national story) to the
internal pages of the paper. The Ripper, therefore, dropped into a context of heightened
renewed interest in its subject matter.
Using a range of documentary techniques, including the judiciously edited compilation
of archive footage and interviews with a range of parties still living who had been connected
to the case, The Ripper goes to lengths to shine a light on the victim-blaming that char-
acterised the official discourse which presented itself as advice to women from the
authorities about how to stay safe while the perpetrator remained at large. It was the second
such ostensibly feminist revisionist remediation of the events and contexts of the Yorkshire
Ripper case in television documentary in as many years. Much like the BBC’s The Yorkshire
Ripper Files: A Very British Crime Story (2019), The Ripper highlights some of the feminist
stakes of remembering the events and contexts of this case, 40 years on from the appre-
hension of the perpetrator. And it does so in ways that enable its unambiguous relevance to
the continuing problem of men’s violence against women to be easily discerned by viewers.
This chapter thus addresses the legacy of the Yorkshire Ripper case in contemporary media
culture, focussing on texts and contexts surrounding The Ripper and arguing for its status as
a symptomatic example of what Horeck terms “feminist true crime” (2019).
In addition to riding the wave of the 2010s true crime boom, another factor contributing
to this plethora of cultural remediations and remembering of the Yorkshire Ripper case and
its social and cultural ripples has been the cognate and contemporaneous wave of new
historicisations of second-wave feminism and the women’s liberation movement, in the UK
(Jolly, 2019) and beyond (Bruley and Forster, 2016). As Karen Boyle writes, “there has been
a flourishing of scholarship on feminist activism from the 1970s and 1980s” (2019, p. 10),
and increasingly this has come to include and encompass scholarship on those strands of the
UK movement that were most directly concerned with combatting men’s violence against
women (Rees, 2010; Wattis, 2018; Hague, 2021).
Media scholar Heather McIntosh expounds and illustrates some of the defining aspects
of what she describes as “ethical and meaningful” (ostensibly feminist) intersections of
documentary and gendered violence that push back against problematic stereotypes in the
history of the media’s treatment of this subject matter (2015, p. 2). She does this by pointing
to things like “privileging the points of view of survivors and resisting elements and modes
that can be experienced as re-victimizing” as symptomatic examples of how such ethical and
meaningful treatments can be achieved (2015, p. 2). Elsewhere, in the same volume, Lisa
Cuklanz correspondingly points to “debunking rape myths” as a means by which docu-
mentary films that deal with gendered violence “can be easily understood as feminist on the
level of overt argumentation” (2015, p. 31).
With specific regard to the true crime genre in the “digital streaming era”, Horeck goes
further than this, delineating the features of what she describes as “a feminist version of true

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crime” which “captures the social, collective, and intersectional dimensions of crime” (Horeck,
2019, p. 169) and “maintains focus on the victims and the wider societal structures at work that
allow such violence to occur”, (p. 170) – violence that is “enabled by systems of power. And is,
therefore, not attributable to the actions of individual ‘bad men’” (pp. 170–171). In this way it is
indirectly a core concern of feminist true crime to debunk so-called “Ripper myths” and to
dismantle the spurious notion of the exceptionality of the “sexual murderer” (Cameron and
Frazer, 1987). Rather, as Horeck continues, “The critical impetus [of feminist true crime is]
to humanize the forgotten and ignored victims of violent crime” (p. 172), in “an approach to [the
genre] that keeps the female victims in the center of the story” (p. 174).
Feminist true crime thus intervenes in some of the tendencies towards the celebrification
of perpetrators and the elevation of serial sexual murderers of women to the status of
ostensible folk heroes. This is something that Rebecca Frost calls the media’s “enduring
formula for notoriety” (2020, front matter), and it has often been noted as characteristic of
reportage and cultural commentary on the “Yorkshire Ripper” event both at the time
(Rickford, 1980), but also since, in the form of cultural remembering and re-mediations of
the kind undertaken in documentaries like The Yorkshire Ripper Files and The Ripper.
A recent uptick in interest in remembering the “Yorkshire Ripper” event has manifested
in a number of ways, including in the form of a cluster of cultural remediations of it that
emerged in mainstream media and culture across 2019–2020, at the end of a decade that has
seen a major cross-media surge of interest in the true crime genre (Horeck, 2019; Mellins
and Moore, 2021). Prior to The Ripper, the principal texts that have comprised this cluster
are as follows. In academic publishing, Louise Wattis’s feminist sociological, criminological
and cultural feminist account of the case and its socio-cultural impacts Revisiting the
Yorkshire Ripper Murders (2018). In commercial book publishing, prolific true crime author
Carol Ann Lee’s Somebody’s Mother, Somebody’s Daughter (July 2019).6 Liza Williams’
BAFTA-winning documentary mini-series The Yorkshire Ripper Files was first shown on
BBC television over three consecutive nights in March 2019. Olivia Hirst and David Byrne’s
play The Incident Room (2020), which played to sell-out audiences and strong reviews at the
Edinburgh Festival in August 2019: set in Millgarth police station in Leeds as the investi-
gation into the Yorkshire Ripper murders is carried out, the play unfolds largely through
the highly empathetic point of view of long-suffering and perennially overlooked female
police detective Megan Winterburn.
This cluster of texts, therefore, emerged across the final years of the 2010s on the back of an
explosion of interest in the true crime genre, but also in tandem with renewed attention being
paid in the context of fourth-wave feminism and, in the aftermath of the virality of the
#MeToo movement and associated phenomena, to the ongoing need to challenge and combat
rape culture. All share a common interest in elevating the voices and viewpoints of women in
different ways, centring those women who either survived or lost their lives to the actions of
the perpetrator of the crimes depicted; those who played material parts in the investigation of
these events; those who are turned to as voices of authority and expert interviewees; and those
who were key members of the creative personnel involved in the production in question.
Taken together, these true crime cultural productions on the Yorkshire Ripper event are thus
noteworthy for their clear feminist pushback against the tendency to mythologise sexual
murderers and emphasise their actions, experiences and psychologies at the expense of the
viewpoints and voices of victims and survivors, or their representatives. In these ways, identi-
fiable commonalities across each of the texts that comprise the cluster sketched out above
enable a reading that corresponds with Horeck’s conceptualisation of feminist true crime.

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There are various points across all four episodes of The Ripper when the series goes to
lengths to contextualise the events of the case in relation to the social backdrop against
which they unfolded. In particular, it makes a point of highlighting social phenomena
including, firstly, diminishing industry in the north of England as a result of globalisation in
manufacturing and engineering, with the resulting implication that the nature and tenor of
everyday life for working people in that region at the time had changed for the worse.
Secondly, it points to the racially diverse makeup of the population of the Leeds suburb of
Chapeltown (where a number of the murders and attacks took place), depicting and
acknowledging the racist victimisation that the residents experienced, often at the hands of
the police, and the correspondingly strained relations between the local population and the
authorities, with the reluctance of rightly mistrustful residents to assist police in their en-
quiries during the investigations (for more on this, see Mackay, 2015).7 This is most can-
didly confronted in episode one, “Once Upon a Time in Yorkshire”, which vividly recalls
social historian Judith Walkowitz’s invocation of what she describes as “the specters of
imperial and domestic industrial decline” in her explanation of “the Ripper Story’s capacity
to play out an elaborate repertoire of contemporary anxieties” (1992, p. 4). Archive footage
of Chapeltown street scenes featuring local residents of colour going about their daily lives
is edited to a voice-over narration explaining the socio-economic decline of the area which,
thanks to the affluence afforded by previously thriving industry, was once thought of as
“the Highgate of Leeds” (in reference to an area of north London that was characterised at
the time by the wealth of its residents, the opulence of its homes and, significantly, by its
whiteness). In an archival interview, an expert then speaks of high unemployment and low
living standards before the viewpoint shifts to that of present-day interviewee Andrew
Laptew, a junior police officer involved in the investigation at the time. Laptew brings the
racial makeup of Chapeltown to the fore, explaining that it “was mostly a black commu-
nity” as archival material depicts white police patrolling streets in which black children play.
He speaks of racist police targeting of black social clubs while archive audio juxtaposed with
corresponding visuals depict excessive policing of the area, making clear the extent to which
poor relations between police and residents impeded the effectiveness of investigations.
Laptew states directly that black residents of Chapeltown “were being victimised” and
thus attributes the reluctance of residents to help police with murder enquiries to racism
evinced by members of West Yorkshire Police. Archive audio describes Chapeltown as
“A decaying Victorian suburb with a slum problem, a high immigrant population and a
large number of prostitutes” before Laptew explains that it had become the city’s “main
red-light area”. Later, a montage of archival material depicts textile mills thriving earlier
in the century before present-day audio with Yorkshire Post journalist Tony Harney
offers context that “Yorkshire from the Second World War onwards … was the pow-
erhouse of England. Trains were built … in Leeds. Bradford [was] the textile capital of the
world”, and footage depicts operational mills and machines. “The mills never stopped
running, 24 hours a day”, Harney explains, “There was vast wealth. By the ‘70s, a decline
was beginning. Heavy engineering started to fall apart because of foreign imports. It was
obvious they were not going to stagger on a lot longer”, and archive footage now depicts
inoperative mills, abandoned former workplaces, and increasingly populous job centres.
Wealth leaves Leeds along with the decline of industry and a picture is painted of a
central Westminster government indifferent to the economic plight of the newly post-
industrial north. In this way, the documentary attributes the vulnerability of women in
the night-time economy of 1970s Leeds in part to a combination of industrial decline and

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the racism that accompanied the post-war migration of people of colour to a now dis-
enfranchised Chapeltown.
With respect to the feminist true crime remit to elevate the voices of women, and as The
Yorkshire Ripper Files had done the year before, The Ripper also employs carefully juxta-
posed and edited pieces of archive footage, in a bid to make clear the extent of the
involvement of women in the investigation of the case. Shown mostly in behind-the-scenes
capacities, carrying out the administrative and clerical leg work that was required to keep
the wheels of the investigative operation moving, it makes a point of including and
privileging the voices, viewpoints and recollections of several of these women. Archive
audio and visuals highlight that the “team of 270 men” on the investigation in fact included
many women. Among them, were police detective Elaine Benson and forensic scientist
Angela Gallop, both of whom speak candidly and in detail in their interview segments
about their experiences working on the investigation, including as women in male-
dominated professions. Gallop, for example, was the first woman to join the investigation’s
forensic science team whereupon she was “received with a large dose of scepticism” by her
male colleagues. In doing so, The Ripper intervenes in the widely held (and with good
reason) truism that the investigation of the “Yorkshire Ripper” murders and attacks was, as
journalist Joan Smith avers in an interview segment in episode 3 of The Yorkshire Ripper
Files, “a conversation among men. About dead women”. Interviewed the following year for
The Ripper, Smith expounds upon this statement, throwing down the gauntlet for feminist
interventions in these narrativisations to elevate the voices of women, to the effect that the
cultural narrative of the “Yorkshire Ripper” event “is a story about a man killing women,
and the people who are investigating it are all men, and virtually all the people who are
writing about it and reporting it are all men. So where do women get a voice in this?”8
Using equally judiciously assembled archive material and interviews, The Ripper also
shines a light on the victim-blaming rhetoric which characterised the official discourse that
presented itself as advice to women from the authorities (i.e. the police and the mainstream
news media) about how to stay safe while the perpetrator remained at large. This manifested
in the policing, both discursive and literal, of women’s behaviours and movements in the
form of, for example, calls for a night-time curfew on women and the negatively judgmental
censure of those who walked alone in public after dark. Episode 1 includes archival news
material in which a reporter states that Jayne MacDonald, a 16-year-old girl who was killed
in June 1977, was likely mistaken for a sex worker by the perpetrator “because she was
walking home alone late at night”. Episode 3 features newsreel footage of West Yorkshire
Police Chief Constable Ronald Gregory issuing instructive advice to women “that they must
not walk out at night alone”, and Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield who was in
charge of the investigation, issuing an instruction to women via the mainstream media:
“don’t travel out alone”. In each case, the implication is clear – that in the eyes of the police,
the mainstream media and the patriarchal world at large, women who walk outside alone,
especially at night, invite male violence and are therefore complicit in the misogynist crimes
of their attackers.
Notwithstanding the extent to which The Ripper concerns itself with highlighting and
demonstrating the extent to which the oppression and terrorisation of women during this
event extended well beyond the actions of the perpetrator himself to heavily inflect the ways
in which his crimes were investigated, the series is equally invested in conveying to audiences
some of the things that many women at the time did to push back against their experiences
of this egregious victim-blaming. Much of episode 3 “Reclaim the Night” is devoted to

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depicting the ways in which many women were moved by the events of the “Yorkshire
Ripper” case, to join activist feminist protests and to engage in various kinds of anti-
violence activism that included organised street marches, anti-misogynist graffiti, sit-ins,
boycotts and over time, even arson. Indeed, this investment informs the series’ approach to
the core subject matter throughout this episode, which directly and outspokenly concerns
itself with interrogating the gender politics of the “Yorkshire Ripper” event and the way it
galvanised the feminism of many women, some of whom had heretofore been otherwise
uninvolved in the women’s liberation movement.
The Ripper thus goes to lengths to highlight some of the feminist stakes in remembering
the events and contexts of this case 40 years on from its conclusion. As if to draw a line
under this, and echoing the strikingly similar ending to The Yorkshire Ripper Files, it em-
ploys the use of a gallery montage of images to close the final episode “Out of the
Shadows”, depicting each of the faces of the murdered women. As journalist Christa
Ackroyd opines that “If we can do anything, it’s to push [the perpetrator] back into the
shadows and to bring out the women”, a still photographic image of each of the murdered
women is seen in turn against a black background, with each image presented sequentially
in the chronological order that their bodies were found. In this way, the closing moments
pull focus on the identities and subjectivities of these women and away from those of the
man who killed them simply because they were women (Hollway, 1981).
The success and impact of The Ripper in some ways is indicative of the ongoing hold that
the “Yorkshire Ripper” event and its contexts continue to have on the imagination of the
UK populous. In the afterword to Somebody’s Mother, Somebody’s Daughter, Lee reflects
that “It seems incredible that almost [at her time of writing] forty years later, the Yorkshire
Ripper case should remain relevant in terms of the issues it raises” (2019, p. 300). However,
she goes on to observe, “stories of sexual violence and abuse towards women have domi-
nated the headlines during the writing of this book” (p. 300). At that time and since, the
high-profile nature of revelatory phenomena in the digital landscape of contemporary media
such as #MeToo, has elevated the ongoing need to combat violence against women to
raised levels of cultural consciousness, moving some of the issues and debates arising from
feminist anti-violence campaigning into the mass-mediated mainstream spheres of cultural
commentary in ways heretofore unseen.
With further regard to the feminist potentialities of the ostensible victim and survivor-
centred true crime of the kind that The Ripper sets out to be, it is also significant that both
this series and The Yorkshire Ripper Files give voice to and provide a platform for the
experiences of survivors Tracey Browne and Mo Lea, both of whom survived brutal attacks
in 1975 and 1980 respectively. This marks a shift in focus away from what is recognised in
the UK context (and especially in the visual discourse of this particular case) to be the well-
worn true crime gallery-of-the-dead trope, notwithstanding the efforts made by feminist
remediations like this one to subvert the meanings of this trope in ways that re-centre the
subjects of these galleries rather than accepting their voicelessness as a fait accompli.
Moreover, having centred the voices and experiences of survivors like Lea and Browne
alongside those of some of the victims’ loved ones (in this case Wilma McCann’s son
Richard and Emily Jackson’s son Neil) space is made for the voices of survivors as well as
those of victim-adjacent parties whose lives were likewise negatively impacted by the trauma
of violence against women. When true crime gives a platform for such parties to speak their
experiences and/or to represent those who did not survive to speak for themselves, it
changes the feminist stakes and potentialities of a genre that is often seen as complicit in the

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perpetuation of patriarchal narratives of female victimhood, via strategies and tactics that
interoperate to silence the voices of those affected by violence against women while ele-
vating the cultural profiles of those who enact it.
The ways that recent remediations of the “Yorkshire Ripper” event have resonated with
both contemporary feminism and present-day campaigning against violence against women
such as that seen in the aftermath of the disappearance and death of Sarah Everard are, as
elaborated at the outset of this chapter, extremely clear. Twitter users responding to Netflix’s
The Ripper in March 2021 are not the only social and cultural commentators to have drawn
this parallel with contemporary events. In her history of the movement to combat domestic
violence, Professor Emerita of Violence Against Women Gill Hague (2021) sketches a his-
torical outline of the 1970s and 1980s Reclaim the Night marches and their status as a
manifestation of women’s outrage over the “Yorkshire Ripper” event. Hague likens this to
“new activism”, which she notes has given rise to “large-scale vigils called ‘Reclaim these
Streets,’” and which ensued after the disappearance, rape and murder of Sarah Everard (2021,
p. 89). The social problems of sexual murder and men’s violence against women remain clear
and present and the need to combat these problems continues to be urgent. The extent to
which feminist interventions into how the urgency of these problems is communicated
through the media have the potential to make a meaningful impact, whether via feminist
cultural remembering of the kind undertaken in texts like The Ripper, via news reportage of
current events like the disappearance of Sarah Everard, or via social media discourse of the
kind referenced at the outset that brings these things together, remains to be seen.

Notes
1 The epithet “Yorkshire Ripper” has been offset in inverted commas in this chapter in recognition
of the part that it has played in the perpetuation of sensationalising and misogynist “Ripper
myths” (see Brownmiller, 1975; Walkowitz, 1992), and in the celebrification and elevation to folk
hero status of the perpetrator ( Rickford, 1980; Frost, 2020). Its usage continues to be contro-
versial due to its traumatising impact on survivors and loved ones of victims and survivors. For
example, in a condemnation of the decision to alter the title of the 2020 Netflix documentary series
Once Upon a Time in Yorkshire to The Ripper a group of survivors and family members wrote in an
open letter that “The moniker ‘the Yorkshire Ripper’ has traumatised us and our families for the
past four decades … It glorifies the violence of [the perpetrator] and grants him a celebrity status
that he does not deserve … The repeated use of this phrase is irresponsible, insensitive and
insulting to our families and our mothers’ and grandmothers’ legacies” ( Al-Othman, 2020). In this
chapter, I use the phrase “‘Yorkshire Ripper’ event” to refer to the events and contexts pertaining
to the case and in recognition of its cultural profile which made a nationwide impact beyond that
which it had on the directly affected localities. I do this to try to strike a balance between re-
specting the continuing traumas of the victims and survivors and acknowledging the historical
reality that the prominent use of this epithet has been central to its place in debates about media,
culture and misogyny that are pertinent to the concerns of this chapter.
2 “I could only say to them [women] that they must not walk out at night alone”, Chief Constable
Ronald Gregory, West Yorkshire Police, The Ripper, Episode 3 ‘Reclaim the Night’.
3 Reportedly, there was widespread “Anger after police [told] women ‘not to go out alone’ in [the]
wake of Sarah Everard’s disappearance” ( Cruse, 2021).
4 Several members of the production team behind The Ripper, both above-the-line and below-the-
line, were approached with a view to participating in this research. All declined.
5 With thanks to Dr Lawrence Napper for alerting me to this at the time.
6 It is also noteworthy that seemingly responsive to renewed interest in the genre and subject matter,
Gordon Burn’s 1984 biographical treatise on the perpetrator, Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s

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Son: The Story of Peter Sutcliffe, was republished by Faber & Faber in July 2019 under the slightly
revised title, Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son: The Story of the Yorkshire Ripper (2019).
7 The series does not allude to particular examples with this level of specificity, but the case of David
Oluwale stands out as a contextually significant local flashpoint event here. Oluwale was an ex-
tremely socially vulnerable black Briton, whose death by drowning in the river Aire in Leeds in
1969 followed a sustained campaign of racist harassment and brutality against him by Leeds police
( Aspden, 2007).
8 Simple content analysis of the use of interviewees in The Ripper reveals that to a certain extent,
cultural remediations of the “Yorkshire Ripper” event such as this one continue to constitute
conversations among men about dead women insofar as there are almost twice as many men
included as talking heads versus women: 23 to 12 across the four episodes (with multiple uses of
the same interviewee eliminated from the count within individual episodes, but not across them – so
if an interviewee features several times within an episode they are counted once, but are counted
again if they appear in another episode). That being the case, it is noteworthy that in episode 3
‘Reclaim the Night’ which is explicitly concerned with the gender politics of the case and its
cultural reverberations, gender balance in the ratio of women to men interviewed has been
achieved (4 to 4). This said, while revealing in some respects (e.g. of the extent to which the cultural
narratives of this event continue to be shaped by the contributions made by men’s voices), these
numbers cannot capture the complexities and nuances of the feminist meanings produced by this
text in edits, assemblages and other textual devices that interoperate to intervene in some of the
heretofore dominant misogynist cultural narratives and truisms about the “Yorkshire Ripper”
event and its investigation.

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Palgrave Macmillan.
McIntosh, H. (2015) ‘Introduction: The intersections of documentary and gendered violence’, in
Cuklanz, L. M. and McIntosh, H. (eds.) Documenting gendered violence: Representations, col-
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Phillips, J. (2021) ‘Sarah Everard missing: Women in Clapham area “told to be careful and not go out
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 23
CLASS, VICTIM CREDIBILITY
AND THE PYGMALION
PROBLEM IN REAL CRIME
DRAMAS THREE GIRLS
AND UNBELIEVEABLE
Helen Wood

Introduction
Contemporary television has responded to #MeToo both in documentaries (Horeck, this
volume) and fictionalised series (Vossen, 2018), sometimes in ways which show considerable
progress in the representation of sexual assault as a result of popular feminism (Kornfield
and Jones, 2021). At the same time, the intersectional relations and effects of #MeToo have
been explored, pointing to the differences in what happens when the “wrong people” speak
out – working-class women, women of colour, transgender women (Johnson and Renderos,
2020). Tarana Burke states: “I often say that sexual violence knows no race, class or gender,
but the response does … Ending sexual violence and harassment will require every voice
from every corner of the world. And it will require those voices that are most often heard to
find ways to amplify the voices that often go unheard” (in Onwuachi-Willig, 2018).
Alison Phipps (2009, p. 668) suggested that feminist work on sexual violence had been
“largely silent” on class and in her later critique of #MeToo she points to a “political
whiteness” in its objectives, marginalising women of colour and working-class women such
as sex workers whose “victimhood” is harder to wield in the commercial clickbait of the
#MeToo moment (Phipps, 2019). This “political whiteness” and its association with the
carceral state and its institutions as protector – rather than perpetrator – of systemic abuse,
is classed. She points to the continuation of the problem: “Both liberal and reactionary
feminisms by and large fail to interrogate the system of capitalist accumulation that relies
upon women’s economic subordination to men in both the family and the workplace, which
is a key driver of violent and sexually violent abuses of power” (2019, p. 71).
The 2021 Office for National Statistics crime survey for England and Wales suggests that
the unemployed are twice as likely to be victims of sexual assault – although criminal justice
statistics are not routinely broken down in ways that help to explain complex relationships
with social inequalities (Parmar, 2017). Whilst conviction rates for rape are notoriously low,
they are even worse for Black and Asian victim/survivors and other marginalised groups.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-28 251

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This includes women in vulnerable housing and with poor mental health, indicators which
might be taken as evidence of low socio-economic status. Whilst rape myths affect con-
viction rates, it is generally understood that it is the terrain of prevailing cultural discourse
that influences ideas of “victim credibility” (Daly, 2022).
In this chapter, I want to draw attention to the way that class frames the structural
perimeters for speaking out and being believed through an analysis of two true-crime tel-
evision serialisations that centre impoverished white victims1: Three Girls (BBC, 2017)
which depicted the Rochdale sexual grooming scandal,2 and Unbelievable (Netflix, 2019)
which covered the investigation of a serial rapist in Washington State and Colorado. Whilst
these are very different narratives in terms of the crimes themselves, their geographical
location and the television ecologies in which they were produced, they share something
crucial in common. The real crimes were difficult to bring to prosecution as the victims were
not initially believed because they were poor girls from vulnerable backgrounds – they
simply were the “wrong” kind of victims.

Three Girls (2017) and Unbelievable (2019): some parallels

The BBC One three-part drama Three Girls was broadcast in July 2017 to critical acclaim
and won three BAFTAs in 2018. The drama stages the real events of the Rochdale child sex
abuse scandal that were brought to light in 2011 by The Times’ journalist Andrew Norfolk
(Norfolk, 2011). As revealed in the end titles, the series is based on extensive research,
interviews and published accounts, including the memoir of one of the “three girls” (Girl A
and Bunyan, 2013). Unbelievable (2019) is a Netflix eight-part miniseries documenting the
investigation into a serial rapist across Washington State and Colorado. The series is based
on a Pulitzer-prize-winning news article “An Unbelievable Story of Rape”, written by
T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong (2015). In both cases, the actual rapes were reported
in 2008 but convictions came many years later as the victims were not initially believed.
It is important to state that both television series took incredible steps forward in
espousing a victim-centred approach to rape which paid less attention to the perpetrators
than the victims and whilst Unbelievable took more license with its characters (changing
names and condensing timelines), both series paid considerable attention to the details of
the cases. Writer Nicole Taylor told BBC Breakfast Television on the day of the first
broadcast of Three Girls that “There was no use sanitising it. I wanted to tell the truth”3 and
Susannah Grant, the creator of Unbelievable, was clear that “Being truthful to the experi-
ence of the people involved was absolutely essential”, adding “You don’t want anyone to
look at it and say, ‘Well they exploited my traumatic experience’” (in Blake, 2019).
The shows deal with very different contexts – the British series handling the racially sen-
sitive issues of “grooming gangs” preying on vulnerable (often white) girls who live “risky”
lives without much familial, economic or emotional support, whilst the US series follows a
white serial rapist who methodically attacked strangers of different ages and ethnic back-
grounds. It is important to note that the racialised character of the UK case was further
heightened by the use of the scandal by the far right for their own ends. Critics have pointed to
the ways in which the press coverage demonised Asian men, at the same time as it margin-
alised minority women’s experiences of abuse (Gill, this volume; Gill and Harrisson, 2015).
Despite these differences, there are similarities in their centring of “unbelievable” victims
which make them useful to consider together. Both series also document the state as the
perpetrator of abuse, with failed police systems, punitive effects of the state bureaucratic

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process and an absence of care from those very organisations that should have protected
them. And both show the dogged determination of angry female champions (police and
health workers) concerned with the truth and bringing the perpetrators to justice. As such,
we might suggest that they do the work of “amplifying the voices that often go unheard”, to
paraphrase Tarana Burke (in Onwuachi-Willig, 2018).

The class politics of credibility

As Jilly Boyce Kay (2020, and this volume) reminds us, the politics of speaking out in a
media culture characterised by neoliberal capitalist structures is fraught with “communi-
cative injustice”. In a climate in which there has been a backlash to #MeToo for the
“weaponisation of trauma” (Nair, 2021), the available terrain for speaking out through
mediated architectures points to a key tension. On the one hand, it challenges the endemic,
painful and historical silencing of women, whilst on the other it lends itself to a market-
responsive spectacularisation and commodification of trauma (Kay, 2020). This tension can
lead to women being blamed for speaking out in the “wrong” – spectacular, commodified –
way (Serisier, this volume), a risk that is always more acute for working-class women.
Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kathryn Higgins (2022) detail the ways in which an “economy of
believability” operates within this post #MeToo conjunctural moment and analyse three
serialised TV dramas – Unbelieveable, The Morning Show (Apple+, 2019) and I May Destroy
You (BBC/HBO, 2020) – which they argue espouse the various forms of labour involved for
women to become believable. Women’s lack of “believability” is rooted in an epistemic
association of masculinity with rationality; “truth” must thus be struggled over and believ-
ability can only be won by women through material and psychic toil. Importantly, they also
point out that “the believability of women is contingent upon the judgement of others and so
always dependent upon other factors, including the cultural construction of all women – but
especially working-class women, women of colour, trans women and women in sex work – as
inherently unbelieveable” (2022, p. 132). In this chapter, I want to detail what this “inher-
ently” entails in terms of the intersectional politics of class and its structured association with
the relations of victim credibility in sexual assault.
Both Three Girls and Unbelievable show us the “wrong” kind of victim, unable to tell in
the expected ways the “right” kind of narrative and so access credibility. The opening of
Three Girls shows us Holly (Girl A, played by Molly Windsor) in an intimidating police
interview room struggling to articulate what has happened to her. The police officer clearly
displays his boredom and mistrust, yawning through her testimony (a moment also
described in Girl A and Bunyan, 2013). Holly is judged as lacking innocence: that she was
not a virgin when she met the perpetrators means her claims of rape are not believed. In
Unbelieveable, Marie (Kaitlynn Dever) sits with a male police officer and clearly states “I
was raped”. However, she is told to be “more specific” and asked intrusive questions. She is
forced to tell the story (and we are compelled to witness it) multiple times and is repeatedly
interrogated on every aspect of her testimony: the repetitions make it clear that she is not
actually being heard.
Architectures of testimony are already classed. Carolyn Steedman (1986) discusses how
the formation of working-class subjectivity has long been subject to forms of telling – to
clergy, social workers, benevolent benefactors – in order to seem “deserving” of support,
welfare or care. These histories of classed telling are rooted in experiences of shame and in
processes of demonstrating credibility against institutionalised forms of judgement. Bev

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Skeggs’ (2004) work draws attention to how these interactions are developed and trans-
ferred into neoliberal structures of governance through which the bourgeois individual
emerges as the successful “self” able to demonstrate their ability to construct a coherent
future-invested narrative. Being “credible” for working-class women, therefore, is yoked to
the historical and prevailing cultural discourses of respectability (Skeggs, 1997). These are
wielded in uneven responses to sexual assault. Recent research into rape trials has shown
how respectability plays a key role in undermining credibility (Smith, 2018). Powell, Hlavka
and Mulla’s (2017) extensive research into over 650 court appearances in the US highlights
three prevailing narrative themes that are used to discredit victims: “rebellious adolescents”;
“dysfunctional families”; and “invisible wounds”, when the victim does not display the ex-
pected visible physical or psychological wounds (Woodiwiss, 2014). Ellen Daly’s (2022)
research in the UK showed a repeated use of micro-examinations about welfare benefits,
alcohol use and promiscuity which all draw on the discourses of “respectability” to discredit
victims. Working-class women’s bodies do not bear their wounds in the “right” way which
undermines their credibility.
We see these themes played out in the two dramas. Three Girls details the risky trans-
actions between the girls and the gang who give them food, drugs and alcohol. These ex-
changes lead police and social services to be suspicious of the girls (not the men who abuse
them) and ultimately lead to the Crown Prosecution Service dropping the case because the
girls are not credible victims. In Unbelievable there are apparent inconsistencies in the
victim’s story and Marie does not seem to respond in the “right” way or, initially, seem
“damaged enough”. Doubts are raised by her foster mother to police in a scene intercut with
a flashback from her foster mother’s memory: Marie dancing provocatively at a children’s
birthday party as evidence of previous sexualised behaviour. These doubts are cemented by
the detective’s reading of a report from child and family services: Marie’s socially deprived
background becomes the evidence for her lack of credibility. Whilst we are not given many of
the details of Marie’s younger life in the series, in Miller and Armstrong’s (2015) report of the
case we learn that the real Marie Adler was raped at age seven and moved from a series of
dangerous foster placements throughout her childhood. Both series help us to see how the lack
of belief manifests itself in direct relation to the assumptions made about the deprived
backgrounds of the girls, against a police force used to judging their credibility and
“deservedness”. Marie is even coerced by police officers into saying that she invented the rape.
These victims are not innocent “enough” and they replay a common problem in child sexual
exploitation which is to measure the extent of the crime by the degree of harm supposedly
visible upon the victims, rather than the severity of the crime itself (Woodiwiss, 2014).
In Unbelievable the drama works by showing the contrast between Marie’s experience in
Episode 1 and the experience of Amber (Danielle Macdonald), a 26-year-old engineering
student, in Episode 2. In the second episode, female detective Karen Duvall (Merritt
Weaver) handles Amber’s experience with care – allowing her to tell her story, getting her
permission to ask specific questions, finding out whether she is comfortable, and allowing
her to take her time. Adrian Horton (2019) in The Guardian suggests that the second episode
could be a training video for sexual assault investigators. Whilst Julia Havas and Tanya
Horeck (2021) associate this more sensitive handling of rape with an important feminist and
pedagogic imperative from the Netflix stable that highlights the deft approach of the women
detectives, I want to point out its relevance to establishing distinctions within victimhood.
Amber in Unbelieveable is an engineering student with a boyfriend who is presented (unlike
Marie) as already articulate and able to tell her story in an “acceptable” way: remembering

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precise and exact details of the perpetrator and the attack and providing information central
to cracking the case (most notably the identification of a birthmark on the perpetrator’s left
leg). Duvall treats Amber with respect, commenting on her “presence of mind”. Testimony
here is deliberately encouraged and nurtured without the background conditions of classed
judgement that strangle Marie’s narrative.
One of the strengths of Unbelievable is that it does not just juxtapose these modes of telling
but – over the course of the remaining episodes – stays with Marie even when she is not
believed, to ensure that her story is eventually given shape. In one scene after the rape, Marie is
shopping with one of her ex-foster mothers who finds Marie’s distanced “unwounded”
response to the rape suspicious. Marie only becomes distressed when she cannot find the exact
same bedlinen that she had on the bed during the rape – which the foster mother finds strange
and proclaims it as the last thing she would have wanted in the same situation. Unbelievable
therefore recognises that there are different responses to trauma that are themselves linked to
the modes of expression available to differently-positioned victim/survivors. These amplifi-
cations of mistrusted voices, therefore, deliver an important lesson on the complicated rela-
tionship between trauma and testimony and begin to reveal normative codes of credibility. We
see the way that classed cultural narratives stick to victims, travel with them through the
trauma and ultimately separate out victims into hierarchies of credibility. Whilst this problem
is critiqued in both of the dramas, it is also the case that these hierarchies can be reproduced
through the representational devices afforded by television, as I go on to explain.

Victim hierarchies: narratives of fallen women

Whilst I have written elsewhere about the many triumphs of Three Girls (Wood, 2020), one of
the main problems is with who gets to speak and whose voice is amplified over others. This is
largely because Three Girls centres the story of Holly – “Girl A” (Girl A and Bunyan, 2013) –
whose testimony, in being seen as more “credible” than other girls, helps to secure the
prosecution of the gang. We see Holly first in a normative nuclear family setting with parents
who clearly care about her. As the abuse takes hold, we see her gradually fall into disarray,
taking less care of herself, consuming alcohol and drugs, and running away from her family.
But we also see her eventually emboldened to speak out, to begin to take good care of her baby
and, at the end, we understand that she will go to university and move forward with her life.
This follows a dominant narrative available to working-class subjectivity – that of the fallen
woman – where she demonstrates her ability to be redeemed (Steedman, 1986).
Three Girls operates in a British social realist tradition and similar criticisms were made
of the narrative trajectory of Cathy in the classic docu/drama Cathy Come Home (BBC,
1966) about homelessness. The casting of a blond, middle-class 60s icon helped to reinforce
a notion of a fall from grace, rather than focussing on the type of person more likely to be
homeless in Britain (Paget, 1999). In my earlier analysis of Three Girls, I argued that the
other two girls, Amber and Ruby, were let down not only by the system but also, in the end,
by the drama, as their voices become marginalised. There is no redemption narrative
available to them, partly because the police deemed Amber a non-credible witness who was,
in the end, indicted for abetting the abuse of other girls.4 Rather than the drama staying
with the consequences for Amber, narrative closure is provided with Police Detective
Maggie Oliver’s (Lesley Sharp) resignation in outrage at the outcome.
Clear distinctions between Holly and Amber in Three Girls reinforce the story of a girl
who once had innocence and can be saved, as opposed to the girl who lacks innocence and

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does not always identify her experiences as rape. Helena Parkilla and Mervi Heikinnen
(2018) suggest from their study of girls in the care system, that we need a more nuanced
understanding of the violence that is done to vulnerable girls in order to understand the way
in which so-called “risky behaviours” work to blame victims rather than perpetrators. In
their study, they identify that girls in care have what they call a more diminished sense of
“bodily integrity” which then impacts their perceptions of sexual abuse. In Three Girls the
distinctions drawn between the more innocent Holly, and Amber, who has lived with this
diminished “bodily integrity”, draw a victim hierarchy. This was true in the real case (in
terms of Amber’s lack of access to justice) but is also true of the drama: it is Holly who is
given a more fully developed narrative arc because she is able to more nearly embody the
position of the “ideal victim” (Woodiwiss, 2014). In focussing on the story more easily
adaptable to television, the narrative draws lines of distinction between the girls and
transfers boundary markers between the deserving working class and those living with
poverty (Wood, 2020).
Unbelievable, however, operates differently. The girl given the least credibility and who is
failed most by the system is given the central narrative of the story.5 Marie does get justice,
unlike Amber in Rochdale and in Three Girls, but at the same time, the signs of her prior
stigma are more nebulous and so do not prescribe her credibility. For instance, we know
about her experiences in care through other social workers and her sexualised behaviour is
alluded to only through the memory of the foster mother. Marie’s traumatic background
history is revealed in the reaction of the detectives to her file and so the material conditions
that delimit her “believability” are not dwelled upon.
The effect of this is that Marie is allowed a different story arc. Marie starts the story
living independently in “Lynwood teen centre” where she has moved from foster care, has a
job and friends. The material consequences of not being believed mean that she loses
friends, her job and her place in the apartment and its community. The subsequent fall into
chaotic behaviour, an episode of drinking and drug-taking and taking less care of herself, is
directly the result of the way she has been treated by the system, rather than the rape itself.
The damage is done to her and does not belong to her in the same way that it inhabits
Amber throughout Three Girls, permanently marked in order to ascribe her value in the
world. This acts like the process of reification in Marx’s terms, where capital social relations
become “inherent” characteristics written onto those bodies subject to them (Wood, 2020).
Banet-Weiser and Higgins (2022) point out that this “fixing” of doubt is also acknowledged
in Unbelievable when the therapist who helps Marie says, “this might not be the last time
you are misunderstood”. But, I would argue that the narrative allows Marie some devel-
opment. Marie recovers, gains the strength to sue the city after the perpetrator is caught and in
the end we see her driving off in her new jeep to the coast – a place that has peppered the
storyline as a “happy place” of projection throughout her trauma. Marie also voices the very
last meaningful words of the eight-part mini-series. She calls Detective Duvall to thank her –
not just for solving the case but also for teaching her that someone cares: “I wake up now and I
imagine good things happening. I just wanted you to know that you did that for me and to say
thank you”. Duvall says little other than “you’re welcome” as Marie drives into the sunset
with a narrative resolution that works in the commercial tailoring of trauma for TV.
Unbelievable, following detectives Duvall and Rasmussen (Toni Collette), works hard to
even out any victim hierarchies produced through the cultural narratives of a flawed system.
It tells the stories of a number of the serial rapist’s victims who are each affected in different
ways. The drama also introduces other victims: the detectives think about their first rape

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cases; we see Duvall eyed as a potential victim in a bar; the two foster mothers acknowledge
that they have both experienced sexual assault; and there is discussion of the problems of
sexual violence within the police force. The repeated, endemic and indiscriminatory nature
of the sexual assault is made explicit echoing Burke “that sexual violence knows no race,
class or gender” (in Onwuachi-Willig, 2018) and in Unbelievable neither should the
response. This is important to a commitment to amplify all women’s voices and to recognise
all testimonies as equal.
However, I was left with another concern. One of the major differences between Three
Girls and Unbelievable is the location. In a British Social Realist tradition, we see the nature
of the deprived town of Rochdale in post-industrial decline. We also see the townscape
playing a character role in the abuse through time-lapse photography as the town’s dep-
rivation is partly responsible because of the girls’ reliance on their abusers for basic
resources like food. Netflix’s streamed serialised exposition of rape does very little to detail
the role social inequality plays in the experiences of the victim. All of those raped were
women living alone in apartment blocks that look very similar and unidentifiable in the
middle-class suburbs of Denver. Even Marie’s apartment in the teen centre does not look so
different from the apartments of the other potentially middle-class women. In doing so,
Unbelievable evens out victim hierarchies, which whilst it may be important to the valuation
of testimony and credibility, mutes any account of social inequality.

Doing away with Pygmalion

Forms of respectability for working-class women and women of colour are drawn from their
distance to “classic”, Imperialist ideals of beauty and moral perfection and their closer
association with the “grotesque” – through which they are framed as excessive, excreting and
morally unruly (Russo, 1995). This works its way into the cultural narratives available around
victim credibility, as seen above. Since George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912),6 popular
culture and television, especially in the UK, have been convinced of the desire to transform the
working-class woman’s femininity so that she can move more freely (upwards) into the world
(Skeggs, 2004; McRobbie, 2004; Skeggs and Wood, 2012). Shaw’s play is based on the Greek
Myth of Pygmalion – a sculptor who falls in love with his own sculpting of feminine perfection
which comes to life. For working-class women, the bodily characteristics of their class position
are the very same ones that attach to them an “inherent” lack of innocence and ultimate lack
of trustworthiness which are in need of moral and bodily correction.
As we know, these transformative narratives are re-worked into the contemporary scripts
of advanced capitalism where entrepreneurialism and resilience are something to be sustained
(Gill and Orgad, 2022). In the “economies of believeability” opening out across the con-
temporary cultural landscape (Banet-Weiser and Higgins, 2022), there lurks a series of classed
narratives into which being believed is already subscribed, limited and contained. The labour
of believeability cannot be mobilised evenly for poor women and black women for whom
speaking out is already inherently charged with forms of judgement (Cooper, 2018) in the
uneven landscape of communicative injustice (Kay, 2020). Class provides the background
conditions of “un/believeability” and they are not satisfactorily acknowledged or accounted
for in these televised series, for which class is central to the abuse and is depicted as something
from which one can escape (Lawler, 2012). Reproducing the Pygmalion narrative in the
representations of sexual assault associates victimhood with a social recuperability that ulti-
mately re-attaches the assault and thus the blame to the “inherent” characteristics of the

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victim. The danger here is that healing and recovery from trauma become too closely tied to
the individualised myths of social mobility rather than to any interrogation of the structural
conditions of power and inequality that enable abuse. So, the representational problem seems
to be this: how do we make social inequality visible without making it seem “inherent” to the
subject to whom the crime somehow belongs? Can we represent the classed dynamics of these
narratives without further contributing to a situation where, “class distinctions become
imprimaturs, producing, marking, mutilating and fixing the bodies of poor women and their
being and value in the world” (Adair, 2005, p. 822).
We need a representational device that, whilst it flattens out victim hierarchies, also
demonstrates the very real terms of social inequality that frame the abuse. Frances
Hatherley (2018) calls out a related problem in art where critics have repeatedly refused to
associate beauty with working-class femininity and argues for a reclamation of the “female
grotesque” through an “anti-pygmalion” aesthetic. What could that mean here in this kind
of television? We would need to “sit with” these differing forms of “bodily integrity” (a term
I am not entirely happy with7) and to understand classed recovery from rape trauma as not
necessarily also an escape from our social location within the world. We would need to
acknowledge classed responses to rape through the materially visible signs of class and insist
on those not always being negative. Somehow, we would need to be able to hold onto the
difference that class makes without reproducing the hierarchies in victim credibility per-
petuated by the state. We could generate a narrative arc in which recovery might also be a
return to “getting by” or at least “getting through” which allows a new subjective voice that
might not be one of upward flight.
So enduring and so prevailing is the Pygmalion narrative that we do not really know what
that voice sounds like yet. But in the interests of social justice, we ought to try to hear it.

Notes
1 It is difficult to tackle their whiteness in this short chapter, but in the UK those involved would
belong to a category of racialised “extreme” whiteness that is associated with the working class and
that does not yield the same privileges as normalised whiteness ( Lawler, 2012).
2 The Rochdale case was one of a series of “grooming gangs” eventually prosecuted in the UK in
2012, where vulnerable girls were plied with drugs and alcohol and passed around male groups.
Prosecutions were hard to secure because of police disinterest and the Crown Prosecution Service
dropping the case as the victims lacked credibility largely because they came from poor and
“chaotic” backgrounds ( Radio Times, 2018).
3 Broadcast 16 May 2017.
4 In 2022, Amber received a personal apology from Greater Manchester Police although she has not
received justice for the abuse done to her ( Bindel, 2022).
5 This may be related to the way in which the case is reported in the original news article which
moves between Marie’s story of rape, followed by her discrediting and criminalisation for lying,
and then to the investigations of the detectives into a potential serial rapist. Indeed the actual link
to the wider investigation is only made when images of Marie being assaulted appear with a copy
of her driving license on her stomach after the arrest.
6 The play is about a Professor of Phonetics, Henry Higgins, who is convinced he can train the
working-class Eliza Doolittle to pass as a Duchess.
7 I presume that Parkilla and Heikinnen (2018) use the word “integrity” here to mean a feeling of
wholeness, rather than any reference to honesty and morality. Yet suggesting a diminished
wholeness still negatively assumes a more unified sense of self against which working-class girls can
be compared and are found “lacking”. This seems to echo ideas of the more coherent selfhood of
the bourgeois individual.

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 24
VICTIMHOOD AND VIOLENCE
Weaponising white femininity in South Africa
Nicky Falkof

With one of the world’s most consistently high rates of gender-based violence (GBV),
contemporary South Africa can be a frightening place to be female. This is a country of
endemic poverty and inequality, institutional and infrastructural corruption and ineptitude
and highly valued cultural traditions of patriarchal masculinity that are resistant to inter-
rogation and reform. While men are, of course, also victims of male violence, it can often
feel as though the country is in the grip of a “war on women”, an ongoing crisis of attrition
in which female bodies and lives are treated as disposable and irrelevant. Current statistics
suggest that the country has the world’s fifth-highest murder rate for women and seventh-
highest for men (ISSAfrica, 2021). Women and girls are not safe on the street or at home; in
public transport or in private cars; in malls, post offices or places of employment; in schools
or on university campuses. Unsurprisingly, given the ongoing intersection of race and
poverty in South Africa, women who are black and poor are disproportionately likely to
suffer rape, femicide, domestic abuse and other forms of GBV (Snodgrass, 2015).
As in other places, however, these women’s stories are less likely to appear in the main-
stream media than stories of wealthier (which often means whiter) victims. Poor black victims
of GBV are doubly erased: first by their aggressors and then by the press, which tends to take
an interest only in cases whose viciousness makes them exceptional. As Pumla Dineo Gqola
(2015) writes, public interest in “spectacular” cases of GBV, such as the particularly brutal
murders of Anene Booysen in 2013 and Uyinene Mrwetiyana in 2019 (Frost, 2018; Okech,
2021), actually obscures the everyday problem of rape in South Africa.1 Spectacularity and
sensationalism present certain kinds of violence as unusually shocking and worthy of atten-
tion, with the unintended but nonetheless insidious consequence of dismissing other kinds
of violence – equally destructive if less dramatic – as less notable. This dichotomy between
worthy and unworthy victims is often filtered through lenses of race and class, in keeping with
persistent modes of social organisation that originated in the colonial and apartheid eras.
Much has been written globally about how media use racialised categories to under-
value certain kinds of lives within reporting on GBV (e.g. Meyers, 2004; Halim and
Meyers 2010; Fuentes, 2020; Minwalla et al., 2022). In the context of South Africa,
scholars like Nechama Brodie (2020) discuss the paucity of representation of black female
victims in media coverage of femicide. My intention in this chapter is not to restate these

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-29 261

 Nicky Falkof

important arguments but rather to examine a different iteration of this common dynamic,
in which the hyper-visibilisation of white female victims of crime and violence, and the
concurrent exclusion of black women, has specific consequences within South Africa’s
racialised social landscape. Rather than discussing the institutional failures of mainstream
media, I am concerned here with the representation of violence within a particular social
media space that caters overwhelmingly to white users. As well as fostering fear of crime
and ongoing anxieties about the violent tendencies of black men, the emphasis on white
female victimisation within this digital community has the effect of exceptionalising white
trauma and thus highlighting white victimhood.
To summarise, I argue that the exclusive emphasis on white women as actual and potential
victims of crime and violence weaponises their experiences and the risks they face (common to
all women in this violent country) to entrench beliefs about the specialness, uniqueness,
importance and value of whites in South Africa, who are presented as unusually vulnerable
and in need of special protection. Such exceptionalism reinforces the cultural history of South
African whiteness by positing whites as distinct from other people. It draws on a “Eurocentric
conception of the human which divides between individual white subjects and a racialised
mass of others” (Lentin, 2020, p. 119): the white individual is special, unique and at risk, in
contrast to the faceless majority of “everyone else”. Within this historically persistent dis-
course, black men are classified as perpetrators of violence while black women are, by
omission, treated as inherently “rapeable” (Maldonado-Torres, 2007, p. 255). Black women’s
experiences of violence and trauma are ignored or disavowed, suggesting that these experi-
ences are not important, not noticeable, not out of the ordinary. In focusing a collective lens so
narrowly on white fears of violence, digital communities like the one I will discuss here
implicitly normalise violence as a “natural” part of black life, like the “black-on-black vio-
lence” that was for decades casually dismissed by white media and political commentators as
part of the usual order of things (Falkof, 2018, p. 196).
In the sections that follow I begin by offering some brief historical context for my
arguments. I go on to explain my methods and choice of data and then present an analysis
of relevant material. This chapter draws on broader claims about the marketing of “white
victimhood”, particularly of women, by the South African far right, which I have discussed
at length elsewhere (Falkof, 2022).2

Weaponising white women

The notion of white victimhood, of whites as extraordinarily at risk and deserving of special
protections, pervades seemingly benign as well as obviously far-right discourses in majority-
white nations across the globe.3 In the contemporary moment, “broader stories of white
victimhood have underpinned Brexit, the election of Trump, and the elevation of other far-
right figures and parties worldwide” (Phipps, 2021, p. 83). White victimhood is nothing new
to South African, and particularly Afrikaans, social theories:

The fear of being overrun, the fear of domination, the fear of losing the purity that was
supposed to guarantee their superior position, the fear of cultural genocide through
intermingling – these anxieties were always present … Whiteness in SA has always, at
least in some part, been constellated around discourses of resistance against a constant
threat; it was a bulwark against what at some level was sensed to be the inevitable.
(Steyn, 2001, p. 25)

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This anxious state, this sense of being always under threat, has often drawn on the existing
politics of gender. Within the heterogeneous histories of white South Africa, women have
traditionally been treated as metonyms, as “embodiments of the nation and its attendant
anxieties” (Musila, 2015, p. 66). White femininity has been idealised in both Afrikaner and
British cultures, the historically dominant modes of whiteness in South Africa. This is in stark
contrast to the way in which black women have been presented as disposable in terms of their
labour, their bodies, their reproductive capacity and their autonomy (see Stoler, 2010).
Afrikaner political mythology, which laid the groundwork for the formal apartheid that
was initiated in 1948, represented the volksmoeder (mother of the nation) as the heart of the
home and family upon which the national structure was based. Her role was seen as mainly
domestic, in contrast to historical evidence which shows Afrikaner women taking an active
and even heroic role in building and protecting their communities (duToit, 2003). The
volksmoeder became a “symbol of self-sacrificial, silent and passive motherhood” (van der
Westhuizen, 2020, p. 258), the stable point around which traditional Afrikaner masculinity,
with its emphasis on guns, whiteness and self-determination, coheres (Swart, 1998, 2001).
She provided the nascent Afrikaner nation with its spiritual nodal point and motivation for
collective upliftment, as seen in the central but anonymised position she takes in Afrikaner
memorial spaces like the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria4 (Van der Watt, 1998) and in
the 1938 Great Trek re-enactment, a countrywide pageant of Afrikaner nationalism, which
featured “white mother and children sequestered in the wagon – the women’s starched
bonnets signifying the purity of the race, the decorous surrender of their sexuality to the
patriarchy and the invisibility of white female labour” (McClintock, 1995, p. 371).
For 19th and 20th century British colonial culture, meanwhile, white women embodied
Victorian ideals of purity and virtue. Scholars argue that the so-called “black peril” panics
of the early 20th century, in which black men were imagined to be raping and assaulting
white women en masse, were as much about restraining and disciplining white women’s
potentially unruly sexuality (Baderoon, 2015, p. 86) as they were about demonising black
men as barbaric and uncivilised (van Onselen, 1982; Ullmann, 2005). As with Afrikaners,
the imaginary of the white nation required women to remain contained, sexually virtuous
and admirable, a worthwhile icon to inspire continued colonial pride (McClintock, 1995).
Within this set of rolling moral panics, black men were violently penalised as part of white
society’s collective over-investment in the moral purity of white women. According to Grace
Musila, “Fixation on the black peril … was motivated by the need to protect and affirm
hegemonic white male authority and supremacy through exclusive access to white women”
(2015, p. 69).
For both British and Afrikaans cultures, then, the purity, virtue and submission of white
women (whether enforced or imagined) have historically been utilised to bolster under-
standings of the superiority and moral value of the white nation – and, concurrently, to
imply that black women have little or no value, that their suffering is not significant. This
distinction is painfully visible in the legal history of colonialism in South Africa. As Gabeba
Baderoon shows, during the entire period of slavery at the Cape, “not a single free or
enslaved man was convicted of the rape of an enslaved woman” (2015, p. 84). Violations of
colonised women were simply dismissed, while imagined sexual insults paid to white women
by black men (as well as consensual sexual relations between such couples) inspired outrage
and punitive legislation from colonial authorities (Nightingale, 2015, p. 264). The inherent
victimhood of white femininity has for well over a century been used to dismiss and negate
black women’s experiences of rape and other forms of GBV. In contemporary South Africa

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this tendency can once again be seen within particular social media spaces, now repackaged
within the language of fear of crime, one of the country’s most potent lingua francas.

“Farm murders” and GBV

To support my arguments here I focus on a single Facebook group. However, it is
important to make the point that these tropes and discourses appear online in multiple
forms. Claims of exceptional white victimhood can be found in community WhatsApp chats
(Dixon, 2018), YouTube videos made by self-proclaimed “white rights” groups (Falkof,
2022), Facebook pages devoted to formerly white neighbourhoods (ibid) and even online
petitions protesting Covid-19 lockdowns. While it would not be fair to call them pervasive,
we can definitely state that gendered notions of white victimhood are fairly common in
certain social media fora, which provide a sort of digital imagined community (Anderson,
2006) for worried whites.
The group I am discussing here is named “Farm Murders & Crime – Southern Africa”
(https://www.facebook.com/fmcsouthernafrica/).5 At the time of writing the page had
10,182 followers. While this is not stated explicitly, the page’s visual and verbal discourses
make it clear that it is intended to attract and serve a white readership. The thumbnail
photos of the site members who post comments are almost exclusively “white”-coded, as are
their names, many of which are Afrikaans. Of course, the actual demographics of these
followers may be very different – there is no way of verifying Facebook posters’ names or
profile photos – but what is relevant for my purposes is how the group positions itself and
who the majority of its followers appear to be, which will likely have a significant effect on
who chooses to follow and post here.
From the outset, the page emphasises “farm murders”, or plaasmoorde in Afrikaans, as a
paradigmatic form of crime. The term appears in the page’s name, its logo and its header
image. In the context of South Africa, “farm murders” do not simply mean murders that
happen on farms. Rather, the term connotes a type of extremely violent crime that is imagined
to be both more prevalent than other kinds of criminal violence and to affect white farmers
alone. Journalistic and scholarly research has repeatedly disproven these claims about farm
murders, showing firstly that their rates are not in fact higher than other forms of crime and
secondly that all kinds of people, not only whites, suffer from rural violence (Special
Committee of Inquiry into Farm Attacks, 2003; Wilkinson, 2017; Burger, 2018; Walsh, 2019).
Nonetheless, conspiracy theories about farm murders as both worse and more prevalent than
other kinds of violent crime persist among certain strata of white South Africans. The
impression that this page is dedicated to white anxieties is strengthened by its header image, a
long shot of a valley covered in the white crosses that are traditionally used as memorials for
victims of violence. The names written on the crosses are Afrikaans, meaning they would
probably be understood to belong to white people. In the near distance, a series of letters have
been erected on the horizon spelling out “PLAASMOORDE”. The overall impression is of a
cemetery, memorial or place of mourning for murdered whites.
Also significant is the text used to describe the group, which includes the following
statements:

NO RACIST COMMENTS ALLOWED! … This page is not a white or black or any

other colour or races’ supremacist page. All races, colours and nationalities are wel-
come as long as you are a kind, just and good human being … This page is for humans

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concerned about murder and torture of fellow humans living on farms as well as any
other type of crimes in Southern Africa including crimes against animals.

A discursive reading of this self-definition reveals an over-determined anxiety about race

and a powerful urge to visibly perform non-racism. The “badness” of racism is empha-
sised while the racialised undertones of South African talk of crime (Sasson, 1995) are
disavowed. The page assumes that its members will agree on what constitutes a “kind,
just and good human being”, although questions of justice in South Africa are not at all
simple or obvious when one considers the ongoing injustices of minority rule that have
persisted into the 21st century, alongside widespread white resistance to reparations and
affirmative action policy. Notable too is the mention of animals: in many white com-
munities domestic and wild animals often seem to be valued more highly than black
people and accorded a proto-humanity that is refused to black workers (see for example
Cock, 1989; Ginsburg, 2011).
A look through posts reveals that, whenever racism is mentioned by the administrators
who post on the page or by site members who comment below posts, the speakers are black
and the “victims” are white. One common type of post features a screengrab of a statement
made on social media by a user who appears to be black, which seems to threaten (often
retaliatory) violence against whites. People who post these images and those who comment
below them vilify the black poster as a disgusting racist. For example, on 14 April 2021, the
admins posted a screengrab of a comment that had been made on the page, presumably
under a story of a “farm murder”. The avatar of this poster suggests that he is a black male
and his comment reads, “The Farmer Killed a Guy From Mozambique who works for him
last year … & nobody said anything so you whites only want Justice but how about the
black nations Justice?” The screengrab was posted under a comment from the page admins:
“YET ANOTHER ATTENTION SEEKING RACIST”. Other admin comments on sim-
ilar posts, which include the faces and names of black men accused of anti-white statements,
include, “The dumb and racism is strong in this gentleman” (3 November 2020) and “Let’s
expose this unapologetic racist” (12 October 2020). Site members’ comments under these
kinds of posts draw on well-known racist tropes (referring to people as primates, invoking
“they” as a faceless black horde, casually equating black masculinity with violence) as well
as actively encouraging violence. Within the page’s discursive world, however, this kind of
speech is never classified as racist. That epithet is reserved for the black men who are
shamed here, probably without their knowledge.
In order to undertake the brief analysis that follows, I went through the Facebook page
following its reverse chronology, beginning at the time of writing (October 2021) and ending
at the start of 2020. I bookmarked and screengrabbed each post that was relevant to my
concerns Posts had to 1. be related to South Africa rather than Namibia, which was
mentioned intermittently, and 2. feature women in their images and/or headlines. Due to
space constraints, in the analysis that follows, I focus on the posts themselves rather than
discussing comments, also a rich source of data. In most cases, the posts were links that led
to external pages, some of which have been discussed below. In this sense, the page func-
tions as a news aggregator, collecting and curating information and stories that will be of
interest to its projected readership. There were no ethical considerations involved in this
research as the page I am examining is public and the admins who write the posts are
anonymous, so no personal data can be revealed. The names and details of the alleged
female victims of these crimes, where given, are already in the public domain.

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In the section below I discuss common themes and trends in these posts, using them to
suggest some of the ways in which the paradigmatic white female victim of crime is con-
structed in this social media milieu and how her glorification ensures that no other kinds of
victims are afforded space in the narrative.

Weaponising whiteness
Of the 14 posts that fit my criteria for this discussion, 13 were solely about white women.
More than any other element of this material, the exclusive focus on white female victims of
crime illustrates the racial blindness at play, where other victims remain invisible and
unacknowledged. For the people who run and post on this site and for the people who are
imagined to be its audience, the female victims who matter are all white.
The only post that mentioned a black female victim of violence featured a headline
about a farm attack in which three men “brutalised a woman and her domestic worker”
(21 October 2020; italics added). The article that the post links to repeats this same for-
mulation: the white victim is referred to throughout as a “woman”, while the black victim is
referred to as “a” or “her” domestic worker three more times (South Africa Today, 2020). It
is only in the final paragraph, when we are told that “both the women were rushed to
hospital”, that employer and worker are granted any kind of discursive equivalence, any
sense of their shared humanity making their traumatic experiences similarly important.
Until that point, the worker’s story is subsumed under the employer’s, a detail to add to the
“real” story of the harm done to a white woman.
Many of the posts that contained detail about crimes emphasised the female victims’
relational status to husbands, children, parents and others. For example, a newspaper
headline reading “Grandmother, 71, dies after forced [sic] watch granddaughters raped”
(8 July 2020); a screengrab of a Facebook post revealing an attack on the poster’s “mom
who is 90 years old and sister who is 83 years old [sic]” (2 November 2020); a newspaper
article about the suicide of a “gang rape victim’s mum” (3 June 2020); and an online
article about a man who “fights for his life to save wife during farm attack” (16 October
2020). While it is to be expected that journalists writing about crime and people posting
about their own experiences will try to humanise and individualise victims, it is none-
theless notable that all of these white female victims are defined by their familial status, as
grandmothers, granddaughters, mothers, sisters or wives, in keeping with white South
African traditions that valorise white women as the centre of the family and thus the
heart of the nation.
Of the five posts that contained images of white women, three of them featured these
women as parts of couples. One image (“Moordenaars van bejaare egpaar skulde gevind”, 20
February 2020) shows a smiling elderly couple inside what is presumably their home, as the
woman hands the man a plate of food. Another (“East couple tortured with grinder”,
29 September 2020) shows a smiling couple, with the woman placed in the foreground, leaning
back and her hand on her husband’s knee. The third (“Voorman op Vrystaat leierboer se plaas
vermoer”, 2 October 2020) shows a couple kissing in front of a field of sunflowers. The man’s
face is visible to the camera while the woman’s is turned away. His arm is draped around her
neck while she stands passively. All of these images emphasise these women’s entanglement in
the compulsory heterosexual partnerships that are usually seen as the norm within South
Africa’s constrictive gender roles. A fourth image of a white woman, on the post about “gang
rape victim Hannah Cornelius” (3 June 2020), is a close-up of the victim’s smiling face. In each

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of these images, white women are represented within the trope of the “ideal victim” outlined
by Nils Christie (1986): they appear appropriate and likeable, with no sense of complicity in or
blame for their own victimisation. Of course this should be the norm in media coverage of
violence, but in South Africa it remains explicitly racialised: black and brown women, par-
ticularly those who are poorer, are more likely to be presented as to some extent damaged and
responsible for their own victimisation (Brodie, 2020). Class does not seem to play a role in the
ideal victimhood of the white women in this small sample.
Only one of the posts in question shifts outside the familial dynamic discussed above
to offer an association of white womanhood and violence that is not about exceptional
victimhood. This links to an advert for a women’s self-defence programme called
“Kamp Phoenix” run by a group that calls itself “Boerelegion”, Farmer’s Legion. The
use of the Afrikaans term boere, which has longstanding connotations of Afrikaner
culture and has sometimes been used as a pejorative by other groups, makes clear who
this opportunity is aimed at, while “legion” conjures up associations with white
Afrikaans culture’s much-vaunted military past (Swart, 1998). The advert offers a jar-
ring combination of visual aesthetics: most of the text is in pink on a background of pink
camouflage, presumably as an unsubtle semiotic message that this is for “ladies only”,
but the lower half of the ad is illustrated with an image of a slender, attractive, dark-
haired woman wearing tight fitting neck-to-toe army gear and brandishing a large and
intimidating rifle. Here we encounter a vision of womanhood that recalls earlier ar-
chetypes of Afrikaner women as fighters who stand alongside their men rather than as
helpless and hapless victims whose innocence and need for protection justifies excep-
tional measures in both social and policy frames.

Conclusion
This brief analysis has suggested some of the common ways in which white female victims
of violence and crime in South Africa are represented within a particular social media
space, which appears to be designed for white viewers. While this discussion is hardly
exhaustive, it offers an informative set of stereotypes that characterise much social media
conversation around white victimhood, both idealising white women and presenting
their experiences of violence as the only ones with any validity. As I argued at the start of
the chapter, the broader consequence of this hyper-visibility of white women is the
invisibility of black women, who suffer greatly from South Africa’s extremes of quotidian
violence.
I refer to this as a weaponisation of white victimhood as it has larger political con-
sequences for whiteness in South Africa. The moral entrepreneurs (Becker, 1995), ev-
eryday media makers and members of the public who share these versions of reality
are all complicit in creating and sustaining a dangerously paranoid worldview that cen-
tralises white experiences and presents white South Africans as the “real” victims of the
country’s disastrous crime problem and policy failures. These presentations have real-
world consequences, not least as whites still control a disproportionate share of the
country’s assets and are over-represented in media and public culture. The valorisation of
white women in contemporary South Africa, even as victims of violence, is in keeping
with the longstanding global linkage between white femininity and white supremacy,
through which both media and gender help to sustain the structures that shore up racial
capitalism.

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Notes
1 Anene Booysen, 17, was gang raped, disembowelled and left for dead on a building site in
Bredasdorp in 2013. Before dying of her injuries, Booysen told police that five or six men were
involved in the attack and that she knew some of them. In 2019 Uyinene Mrwetiyana, a student at
the University of Cape Town, was lured to a closed Post Office by her killer, who raped her,
bludgeoned her to death and then burned her body in a field. Both of these cases garnered much
national attention and provided a focus for activist work against GBV.
2 My book Worrier State (2022) considers the myth of white genocide, a potent and disturbing idea
that draws on the same assumptions about “farm murders” that I discuss in this chapter. The claim
that white people in South Africa are undergoing a “genocide” rather than experiencing the same
kinds of crime and risk as other South Africans has been publicised by right-wing Afrikaner
groups and has spread throughout far-right groupings elsewhere in the world ( Pogue, 2019). I
analyse websites and YouTube videos related to two “Afrikaner rights” campaigns to show how
they weaponise South Africa’s high crime rate in order to construct a paranoid vision of whites as
the ultimate and only meaningful victims of violence, and marketise apocalyptic white fears for
political gain.
3 The trope of the white victim has been the subject of a broad range of scholarship, too much to
mention here, but see for example Banet-Weiser (2021), Bloch et al. (2020) and King (2015) on the
US, and Nelson et al. (2018) and Sharples and Blair (2021) on Australia.
4 Built between 1938 and 1949 with money donated by the public, the Voortrekker Monument
outside Pretoria commemorates the Great Trek, the northerly migration of Afrikaners who left the
Cape colony in the 1830s and 1840s to escape British rule.
5 Facebook is home to thousands of groups and pages about crime in South Africa, many of them
solely concerned with farm murders and with risks to white people. I have selected this page for
two main reasons. Firstly, it has a relatively large following, which makes it a robust source of
data; secondly, it is overtly framed as anti-racist rather than being shamelessly white supremacist,
as is common in many other instances.

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 25
PREGNANT AND DISAPPEARED
The Missing White Woman Syndrome in magazines
Jennifer Musial

“When it comes to body counts, whose bodies ‘count’?” (Stillman, 2007, p. 491)

Introduction
Every few years, a white woman goes missing and her disappearance becomes a national
story in the United States. In July 2021, Gabby Petito was that person: a young, blonde,
white woman with a large Instagram following who vanished while on a camping trip with
her boyfriend. In the span of one month, Petito was mentioned nearly 1500 times on tel-
evision news programmes in the US, just 34 fewer times than President Biden (Yee, 2021).
Magazines were invested too. In October 2021, People ran a cover story “Road trip
nightmare: what happened to Gabby?” while InTouch speculated about “Gabby Petito’s
final 24 hours” on its cover. Coverage of Petito’s disappearance renewed interest in the
Missing White Woman Syndrome, a phrase created by Gwen Ifill to name media fascination
with stories about white women or girls in jeopardy (CNN, 2021).
The Missing White Woman Syndrome is a deeply entrenched racialised and gendered
narrative in the US. White girls and women are idealised citizens that personify innocence
and hope. Eugene Robinson writes that America’s obsession with missing white girls and
women derives from a “meta-narrative of something seen as precious and delicate being
snatched away, defiled, destroyed by evil forces that lurk in the shadows, just outside the
bedroom window. It’s whiteness under siege. It’s innocence and optimism crushed by cruel
reality. It’s a flower smashed by a rock” (2005, p. A23). The phrase “missing” is crucial
ontologically and affectively. To be missing is to be lost, which implies existence or presence
in the first place. Missing women that make national news counted and mattered. Therefore,
they are grieved when they are absent (Casper and Moore, 2009, p. 3). If missing white girls
and women tap into deeply-rooted fears of an aborted white future, stories about missing
pregnant white women trigger the deepest anxieties of all: a white future not to be.
This chapter examines stories about missing pregnant white women in US magazines to
highlight how the media solidifies that white (middle-class) lives matter and are therefore
grievable under white supremacy. I focus on missing pregnant white women because there is
a heightened urgency in these stories: a woman cannot be pregnant forever so she must be

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-30 271

 Jennifer Musial

found immediately. The public is encouraged to care not just about the missing person but
her foetus too. If her body is later discovered, public outrage intensifies. Not only is she
mourned for the future she could have had, but so is her foetus, imagined to have a life that
was interrupted before it officially began.
Weekly gossip and entertainment magazines are an ideal site for this inquiry because not
only do they routinely link pregnancy and tragedy (e.g. in stories focusing on unusual acci-
dents, disastrous medical procedures or courageous battles with illness), but their most
commonly published reproductive tragedy is a missing pregnant white woman.1 Frequently,
when these magazines cover a story involving a missing pregnant white woman, domestic
violence is presented as a likely catalyst for her disappearance. Notably, these magazines are
not held to the same journalistic ethical standards as newspapers or television news. They
emphasise celebrity gossip and salacious detail. For scholars interested in gender and violence,
this makes them particularly important sites for investigation as their emphasis on the per-
sonal opens space for discussion about domestic violence that is not available in traditional
news outlets (Thill and Dill, 2009). These magazines provide a unique way to understand the
Missing White Woman Syndrome as a mediated effect of the celebrity gossip industry.
I open this chapter with a history of the Missing White Woman Syndrome, first in
relation to its generation in the work of journalists of colour and second in relation to
scholarly literature. After laying the conceptual groundwork, I present a close reading of a
People issue featuring Erin Corwin, a nineteen-year-old woman who was murdered in her
first trimester in June 2014. I conclude the chapter by showing how social media is a nec-
essary tool for covering stories of missing pregnant women of colour who are not featured
in magazines. Twitter accounts such as @BAM_FI (i.e. Black and Missing Foundation) and
hashtags like #MMIW/ #MMIWG2S (i.e. Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women/
Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit Peoples) are critical tools
to address the symbolic annihilation (i.e. the violence of underrepresentation) of missing
racialised women (Gerbner and Gross, 1976).

The analytical origins of the Missing White Woman Syndrome

The Missing White Woman Syndrome phrase came from a journalistic reflection on gen-
dered and racialised disparities in the coverage of missing women. Alex Johnson wrote a
piece entitled “If you’re missing, it helps to be white” for MSNBC.com on 23 July 2004 in
which he compared coverage of a missing Black man to that of a white woman. The late
Public Broadcasting System (PBS) journalist Gwen Ifill coined the term “Missing White
Woman Syndrome” at the Journalists of Color Conference on 5 August 2004. On the panel,
Suzanne Malveaux lamented the disproportionate media attention to domestic, true crime
scandals compared to international human rights crises, which she felt deserved more
regard, when Ifill interjected, “I call it the missing white woman syndrome. If there’s a
missing white woman, we’re going to cover that [dramatic pause] every day” (CNN, 2021).
A year later, The Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson opined that “damsel in
distress” stories go national when the damsel is “white. This requirement is nonnegotiable
… She must be attractive – also nonnegotiable. Her economic status should be middle class
or higher, but an exception can be made in the case of wartime (see: [former prisoner of war
Jessica] Lynch)” (2005). In her analysis of the “Missing Pretty Girl Syndrome”, conservative
journalist Michelle Malkin (2005) concurs that socio-economic class plays a significant role
too. Taken together, Ifill, Robinson, and Malkin – three journalists of colour – articulated

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that newsworthiness is determined by a missing person’s gender, race and class. After claims
of media racism and classism were made public, heads of newsrooms were pushed to
respond. Johnson (2004) said coverage disparity is “a topic journalists are reluctant to talk
about,” and CNN, CBS and ABC news editors were unwilling to be interviewed for
Johnson’s story. In the face of denial about the Missing White Woman Syndrome, academic
researchers set out to prove its existence.
There are two ways to study the Missing White Woman Syndrome: a quantitative
approach that proves coverage disparity exists and a qualitative approach that analyses how
missing white women are described in media stories. Three quantitative studies are espe-
cially powerful in demonstrating the scope of the Missing White Woman Syndrome. To
understand the racialised nature of missing persons cases, Danielle C. Slakoff and Henry F.
Fradella (2019, p. 81) pulled data from the Federal Bureau of Investigations’ (FBI)
National Crime Information Center to discover that while white people are about 77% of
the US population, they account for roughly 59% of the missing persons. Asian American
Pacific Islanders (AAPI) comprise 7% of the US population and account for about 4% of
missing persons cases. In contrast, Black people are just over 13% of the US population but
account for nearly 34% of missing persons. Yet despite the fact that Black people are dis-
proportionately represented in missing persons cases, white people are more likely to be
covered by media when they are missing. In their examination of 782 newspaper and tel-
evision texts featuring missing persons in Louisiana from 2009–2013, Michelle N. Jeanis and
Ra
chael A. Powers found that missing white people were three times more likely to receive
media attention than people of colour (2017, p. 9)
Existing literature also includes gender as a category of analysis. For instance, Jeanis and
Powers found that missing women were twelve times more likely to receive attention than
missing men in Louisiana (2017, p. 9), which is interesting because men and women go
missing at roughly the same rates nationally (51% for men, 49% for women), according to
FBI data (Slakoff and Fradella, 2019, p. 81). Slakoff and Pauline K. Brennan scrutinised
131 front-page stories about missing women across four newspapers with a regional foot-
print (New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Houston Chronicle). They
learned that 57.3% of stories featured a white victim while 42.7% featured a Black or Latina
victim (2017, p. 497). Diving into newspaper articles too, Slakoff and Fradella analysed eleven
newspapers over a four-year period. Using a sample of 194 articles about missing women or
girls where their race was also clearly marked, they found that 68% of the articles were about a
white woman or girl, 19.6% about a Black woman or girl and the remaining 12.4% about a
missing woman or girl from another race or ethnicity (2019, p. 85). Clearly, white missing
people, especially women, are greatly overrepresented in the media while Black missing people
are significantly underrepresented. The disparity is not rectified on social media where posts
about missing white victims had more engagement in terms of clicks, likes and shares (Jeanis
et al., 2021, p. 467; see also Solymosi, Petcu, and Wilkinson, 2021).
If quantitative research convincingly shows that white people, women in particular, are
hypervisible in missing persons coverage, qualitative studies usefully outline how white
women are described in media stories. Missing white women are framed around three key
themes: their appearance, their family status and their morality. Missing white women are
often described as beautiful, attractive, youthful people with pretty smiles (Conlin and Davie,
2015; Moody, Dorries, and Blackwell, 2009; Slakoff and Fradella, 2019). They are emphasised
as a “loving and loyal family member” (Conlin and Davie, 2015, p. 39), which is bolstered by
extensive interviews with frightened family members who describe their lost loved one in

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glowing terms (Moody, Dorries and Blackwell, 2009, p. 13). If a missing woman is a mother,
this will be mentioned in the story too (Slakoff and Fradella, 2019). When it comes to stories
about missing pregnant women specifically, white women are more likely to be framed as
happy to be pregnant and excitedly awaiting the birth of their child (Moody, Dorries and
Blackwell, 2009; Musial, 2010). Finally, a missing white woman is regularly framed as a
“good”, upstanding member of society. Often, white women are presented through their
valued social roles such as being teachers or volunteers in their community (Moody, Dorries
and Blackwell, 2009, p. 14). Rebecca Wanzo isolates “words such as ‘perfect,’ ‘ideal,’ ‘angelic,’
‘golden,’ and ‘fairy tale’ [which] are used in the media to describe them or their lives” (2008,
p. 99). “Innocent” is a term that comes up frequently too. Slakoff and Fradella found that
“Missing women and girls with legitimate jobs (including those who were students or retired)
were significantly more likely to be described as innocent” (2019, p. 88). Innocence is grafted
on other phrases like “naive, wholesome, or harmless” (Slakoff and Brennan, 2017, p. 12).
Here, innocence is both legal (a person who adheres to the law and has not perpetuated or
been the victim of a crime) and social (a person who follows normative gender roles of niceness
and propriety). While these terms show up in stories of missing children under 12 (Slakoff and
Fradella, 2019), they appear in stories about adult missing white women too. Moody, Dorries
and Blackwell go so far as to say that missing white women are “placed on a pedestal by their
family and community members” in media stories (2009, p. 14). The fact that they are missing
takes on national importance: it is crucial to find this lost gem.

Magazines and the celebrification of missing white women

Scholarly studies almost exclusively focus on the Missing White Woman Syndrome in print
and television news. There are a few outliers such as Carol Liebler’s (2010) look at editorial
cartoons, op-eds, journalists’ blogs as well as news stories, Zach Sommers’ (2016) analysis of
online news sites and emerging work on social media (Jeanis et al., 2021; Solymosi, Petcu
and Wilkinson, 2021). To date, Leonard M. Baynes (2008) is the only researcher who has
analysed “white women in peril” (i.e. white women who need to be rescued) in magazines.
Baynes contends that endangered white women narratives are ideal cross-platform stories in
a deregulated media industry (Baynes, 2008, p. 14). One woman’s story can be packaged as
news by CNN, infotainment by E!: Entertainment Television, and celebrity gossip by TMZ
all at once by parent company Time Inc., which owned People too until recently.
People is the oldest and top selling magazine of its ilk in the United States, outpacing its
closest genre competitor US Weekly, by reaching over 65 million readers weekly with its
print and digital editions (Tracy, 2021). It is estimated that “one in eight Americans reads
People” (Thill and Dill, 2009, p. 89); it is especially popular with the one in three Millenial
women (18–34 years of age) who read the magazine (Tracy, 2021). People forwards “per-
sonality journalism”, which is a focus on “the headliners, the stars, the important doers, the
comers and on plenty of ordinary men and women caught up in extraordinary situations”
(Arakaki and Cassidy, 2014, p. 4, 1). Though People set out in the 1970s to devote 51% of
an issue to known celebrities and 49% to everyday people doing exceptional things
(Petersen, 2011, p. 141), Arakaki and Cassidy found that only 35 covers out of 599 studied
between 2000 and 2010 featured ordinary people (2014, p. 7). It is very unusual for a non-
celebrity to make the cover of People.
When a non-celebrity shows up on People’s cover, it is because something extraordinary
happened to them. A common non-celebrity story involves people (typically women) who

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have experienced atypical acts of violence like being kidnapped at a young age or held
captive by a predatory person (usually a man). People stories on otherwise quotidian
domestic violence typically involve a mystery “whodunit” element and/or a missing person.
When survivors are featured, domestic violence stories are framed as personal acts of
courage and determination (Thill and Dill, 2009, p. 92). Other domestic violence stories veer
towards the most salacious details of a case to pique reader interest. Despite running more
articles on domestic violence than any other magazine in their sample, Kathryn Phillips
Thill and Karen E. Dill contend that People does not publish these stories to raise awareness
or intervene in the epidemic of violence against women. Instead, People stories about
domestic violence serve as infotainment (2009, p. 88–89, 90). Therefore, People is an ideal
site of study to examine the pregnant Missing White Woman Syndrome.

Erin Corwin is “Pregnant and Missing”

On 11 August 2014, People told Erin Corwin’s story using the headline “Mystery of the
Marine’s wife pregnant and missing: did a military love triangle lead to tragedy?” Corwin
was a young, white, married, newly-pregnant woman who was reported missing after she
did not return home from a visit to Joshua Tree National Park in California. At the time of
publication, Corwin had been missing for six weeks. The People article shares that she was
having an affair with her neighbour Christopher Lee (which he denied at the time) and hints
that he may be the father of her unborn child. Her body was found one month later. Lee
eventually confessed to the affair and admitted to strangling her and disposing of her body
in an abandoned mine shaft close to the park. It was later proven that he fathered the
unborn foetus too. The People story serves as a useful exemplar of Missing White Woman
Syndrome as, whilst ostensibly sympathetic to Erin and her family, it packages the mystery
of her disappearance as infotainment, looking for clues in her life that would explain her
disappearance. It is particularly interesting because of the way it reconciles Erin’s infidelity
with an otherwise “innocent” image, and her pregnancy – intersecting with her whiteness,
age and proximity to the US military – is key to her vulnerability.
Erin Corwin was an everyday person, not a celebrity. The fact that she made the cover of
People is remarkable given how infrequently the magazine featured ordinary folks on its
covers (Arakaki and Cassidy, 2014, p. 7). That said, the magazine had a history of covering
select cases of missing pregnant white women: People published at least ten issues with Laci
Peterson, a white pregnant woman who went missing in 2002, on the cover. Peterson’s
husband was convicted of first degree murder for Laci’s death and second degree murder for
her foetus’ “death” in 2004. Peterson is the most famous missing pregnant white woman in
the United States; her death spun true crime books, made-for-tv movies and documentaries,
inspired Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012) and led to the passage of the federal Unborn
Victims of Violence Act in 2004. It is possible that People felt Corwin’s disappearance had
the makings of another Peterson case. Unlike Laci who was missing for four months while
Scott maintained his innocence, Lee confessed and the case was wrapped up quickly.
Importantly, there are no photographs of Erin’s pregnant body. At the time of her disap-
pearance, she was nearly two months pregnant and had only known about her pregnancy
for one week. She was barely pregnant so the magazine could not draw on material evidence
of her pregnancy (e.g. sonograph or pregnant belly photographs) to sell her story; instead,
the issue opens with her excitement to tell her mother about the pregnancy so readers are
left to imagine Erin as a young, newly-pregnant woman who was eager to become a mother

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herself but she would “never have the chance” (Aradillas, 2014, p. 69). Corwin did not appear
on the cover of People again but there was a brief update in the “Mailbag” section of the
magazine during the pretrial hearing (People Update, 2015). People ran two stories online
when Lee was convicted in 2016 but these stories were not published in the magazine indi-
cating that editors felt print readers would not be interested. Or, put another way, the story no
longer sold magazine copies. Corwin’s death was a tragic blip in the pantheon of mediated
missing pregnant white women stories. Nonetheless, the initial story about her disappearance
fits with a longer-running narrative about missing pretty, pregnant white women.
Corwin’s death may not have been as well known as Peterson’s, but it was still presented
using the common tropes of the Missing White Woman Syndrome. This story takes up
roughly 75% of the cover space for People’s 11 August 2014 issue. The headline font is white
but “Pregnant and Missing” is offset with a bigger, yellow font to draw readers in. There is a
photograph of Erin and her husband Jon underneath the headline with an insert photo-
graph of Christopher Lee. The image of Erin and Jon is significant and worth a close read.
Erin and Jon stand side-by-side with their bodies turned away from the camera but heads
turned back towards the camera; the photograph shows the couple from the waist up. Erin
wears a navy blue dress with a sparkling diamond-like necklace and earrings. Jon is dressed
in his military uniform. Jon’s left hand is lightly on Erin’s left elbow, Erin’s hands are softly
placed together in front of her. Erin’s head is tilted towards Jon’s and his head is tilted down
to hers. They stand in front of an American flag to the left and a Marine Corps flag to the
right. Their smiles are posed but soft; their white skin is glowing and blemish-free. It looks
like a high school prom image.
Writer Elaine Aradillas opens the article, “Petite, blue-eyed, 19-year-old Erin Corwin
had a secret” (2014, p. 69). Aradillas includes an in-set quote from family friend Isabel
Megli who says, “‘I pictured her as a little girl, having a baby, she was just … innocent. She
was very sheltered’” (2014, p. 74). Readers are told that Corwin is a “country girl” who grew
up riding horses. There are two photographs that show Corwin with horses: in one pho-
tograph she sits atop a horse and in the other photograph she nuzzles a horse cheek to cheek
with her arm around it. Corwin’s age is mapped onto morality. Rather than calling
attention to the fact that she was a pregnant teenager, an experience that stigmatises many
Black and brown young women, especially when they are not married, Corwin’s age and
reproductive status construct her as innocent, harmless and therefore properly grievable.
She typifies what Robinson identified as the “precious and delicate” white woman buoyed
by “innocence and optimism [but] crushed by cruel reality” of a violent encounter (2005,
p. A23). Corwin was married to Jon, her “high school sweetheart” (p. 69). A bolded quote
from Erin’s sister-in-law DeeAnna Heavilin tells readers that “‘they were so young … but
their relationship has always been really good’” (p. 70). There is a photograph in the middle
of the page that shows Erin and Jon sharing a chaste kiss. Despite their age, they married as
soon as Jon finished high school (presumably while Erin was still in high school due to their
two-year age gap) because “‘You know when it’s the one. And they knew,’” according to
Jon’s mother Sheila Braden (p. 71). By all accounts, Erin came from a loving family too.
The family’s anguish is apparent as the story contains multiple quotes from family members
who are scared and grieving. Her brother Keith Heavilin told People that not knowing the
whereabouts of your child is every parent’s worst nightmare. Through Isabel, Keith, Sheila
and DeeAnna, readers understand that Erin was cared for and is deeply missed. It is a tool
to invite readers to care too, a journalistic technique that missing women of colour are often
denied (Conlin and Davie, 2015; Malkin, 2005). What is not said here is also significant. For

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instance, although Erin was a pregnant teenager there is no reference to teenage pregnancy:
instead, the emphasis is on young love, romance and respectability.
There are a lot of photographs of Erin in the People issue. Slakoff notes that news is most
remembered when accompanied by photographs and missing white women are more likely
to have photographs attached to their stories (2020, p. 7; see also Stillman, 2007).
Photographs are important for identifying missing people and creating associations for
readers. The depiction of Jon Corwin in his military regalia is also critical: not only does this
enhance the urgency of the search for Erin (she was loved by such a man), but it also aligns
this search with a national interest. Jon was a Marine Corporal, a junior ranking officer in
the US military, and there are three photographs of him in uniform. The cover image is
replicated on the first page of the article. On the next page, there is a photograph taken
when Jon returned from boot camp. Once again Jon wears his Marine uniform and Erin
stands beside him interlinking arms with a caption that reads “young love”. Aradillas in-
forms that Erin and Jon lived on the military base in Twentynine Palms California.
Alongside the cover’s colour design that is bathed in the red, white and blue of the US flag,
these images remind readers that this is an American tale. Readers should care because this
is a patriotic, American (young, pretty, white) military wife who is missing: and a patriotic,
American (young, handsome, white) military man who is grieving.
So what of her “secret”? People is not held to the same standards of reputable news
outlets, such as The New York Times or PBS NewsHour, and thus it can circulate gossip by
“cloaking it in the quasi-respectable trappings of journalism about everyday people and
problems” (Petersen, 2011, p. 133). People is invested in the Missing White Woman
Syndrome, but it is also invested in scandal. There are plenty of salacious details in this
story to pique reader curiosity. The cover uses words like “mystery”, “love triangle,” and
“tragedy” and, in the first line of the story, readers are told that Erin “had a secret”
(Aradillas, 2014, p. 69). Even Aradillas’ title – “The Marine, His Wife and Their Neighbor”
– is a play on The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (Greenaway, 1989), a film that
depicts a fateful affair. When missing pregnant women of colour are revealed to be in
relationships with married men, they are made “culpable victims” and victim-blamed for
engaging in illicit behaviour (Jeanis and Powers, 2017; Meyers, 1997; Musial, 2010; Slakoff
and Fradella, 2019). Erin Corwin is so consistently described as young and naive that she
seems to evade this shaming even though some details of the affair appear in the story.
Erin’s affair appears to be rooted in her naivete as she was swept away by an enigmatic
neighbour: even her affair can be utilised as evidence of vulnerability.
Instead of moralising, People presents this as a true crime mystery. Readers are given a
timeline of events and shown a photograph of Erin’s car as an “ominous sign” (p. 74) that
something was amiss. But Aradillas does not present Jon or Christopher as suspects or
violent men; by all accounts, there was no prior violence in either relationship. Jon and
Christopher are not quoted in the article either. The whole story is narrated through family
and close friends. Very little is said about Jon other than his military career, love for Erin,
and excitement about her pregnancy. Christopher receives more attention in the piece.
Aradillas mentions that Christopher was arrested for possession of an illegal potato gun.
This arrest prevented Christopher from returning to Alaska, which was his plan after his
honourable discharge from the military (p. 74). While these nuggets spark questions (“why
would Christopher have this potato gun?”, “why was he trying to leave town so quickly
after Erin’s disappearance and his discharge?”) readers are, at the same time, reminded of

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his honourable military career. He is also described as a friendly “family man” who is
“caring. Especially to animals. And his daughter, too” (p. 72, 74). This is important to the
characterisation of Erin as well: it is understandable that she might have been attracted to
such a man. Overall, each man is described as too loving to hurt Erin so readers must
decipher the clues to figure out what happened.

Conclusion
When someone is missing, media attention is often crucial in solving the mystery of their
disappearance. In this context, the disproportionate attention devoted to missing white
women means that other missing people too often remain missing, at least from public view.
Many people of colour are producing work that brings light to missing racialised women
too and social media appears to be the primary vehicle for these efforts.
Starting in 2005, bloggers and local activists rallied to raise awareness about Latoyia
Figueroa’s disappearance. Figueroa was a pregnant Black Latina woman who went missing
and was later discovered to be murdered by her boyfriend. Early forms of social media like
blogs formed a communication chain to pressure the national media to cover her case. More
recently, the Black and Missing Foundation was established to publicise cases of missing
Black men, women, and children. The organisation features missing people across Facebook,
Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. In 2021, HBO aired a four-episode series called Black and
Missing about the Foundation’s efforts which the Foundation co-produced. A grassroots
effort in Canada prompted the use of #MMIW and #MMIGWG2S to raise awareness of
Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in the wake of the Amnesty
International Report Stolen Sisters that formally acknowledged the epidemic of settler vio-
lence against Indigenous women, girls and Two-Spirit people. Podcasts are another media
genre that interrupt the Missing White Woman Syndrome. Series’ like Finding Cleo (discussed
by O’Meara, this volume), Finding Tamika (2022) and the satirical We Stay Looking (2022)
critique the disproportionate attention that missing white women receive.
Even though early analysis by Jeanis et al. (2021) and Solymosi, Petcu and Wilkinson
(2021) shows that social media still contributes to the Missing White Woman Syndrome, it
appears to be influencing other platforms, if slowly. In September 2021, People ran a cover
story “Where are these missing moms?” featuring some women of colour including Akia
Eggleston, a missing pregnant Black mom in her third trimester who disappeared on the
way to her baby shower in Baltimore (Truesdell, 2021). This was the first time a missing
pregnant Black woman was on the cover of People but her appearance was blended with
other missing mothers, so she did not receive a full cover page and feature in her own right.
Further, the issue emphasises the tragedy of children left behind when mothers go missing –
rather than focusing on the women themselves. Analysis of Erin Corwin’s disappearance
shows that visibility has its limitations and unless the nature of coverage also shifts then
there is a danger that missing women continue to matter in very limited terms, not as
individuals with rights, but as wives, daughters and potential mothers.

Notes
1 This chapter draws on my wider work in this area, particularly Musial 2010 and my in-progress
manuscript Pregnant Pause: Reproduction, Death, and Media Culture.

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 26
DISCOURSES AND NARRATIVES
OF GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE
IN GREEK WOMEN’S
MAGAZINES
Rafaela Orphanides

Introduction
This chapter is concerned with the exploration and analysis of gender-based violence (GBV)
discourses in Greek women’s magazines. In this chapter, I identify discursive disparities in the
ways GBV experiences of women in “western1” and “non-western” contexts are mediated.
These are explored through the development of two original repertoires – the “women-ology”
and the “dynamics of exclusion” repertoires – which reflect mediated representations of GBV
in the “western” and “non-western” contexts respectively. While the repertoires appear
contradictory at first, they work in tandem in helping to examine discourses of belonging and
exclusion circulated in women’s glossy magazines within different geographical and socio-
cultural settings. Thereby, this chapter contributes to the discussion of how intersectional
inequalities affect the positioning of a woman within hierarchies of power in situations of
GBV. Below follows a brief reference to relevant concepts in terms of the identified reper-
toires, before moving on to the discussion of the elements comprising the two repertoires
identified through this analysis.

Belonging and exclusion

Through this analysis the significance of the concept of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989) in
unravelling mediated “western” and “non-western” experiences of women’s violence became
apparent. While the concept coined by Crenshaw (1989) originally dealt with how intersections
of gender and race compound experiences of marginalisation and oppression, intersectionality
now refers to a significant number of interactions between social structures such as ethnicity,
social class, sexuality, disability, religion and age (Nyhagen et al., 2012; Weldon, 2008).
Scholars adopting this approach argue that although all women potentially experience a type of
oppression due to their gender, the intersection of gender, race, ethnicity, class and sexuality
means they will be oppressed or discriminated against in different ways (McCall, 2005).
The concepts of “imagined communities” (Anderson, 1991) and “othering” (Powell and
Menendian, 2016) are also significant in exploring the sense of belonging and exclusion con-
structed within mediated representations of GBV. The concept of “imagined communities” was

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-31 281

 Rafaela Orphanides

coined by Anderson (1991) who saw the technical potential of representing the nation as an
imagined community in novels and newspapers. While the concept was initially referring to
imagined representations of nation, nowadays it refers to a socially constructed group, con-
ceived by the people who see themselves as part of that group (Anderson, 1991, p. 6). This
concept has subsequently been employed in media studies (Beetham, 2006) by scholars who
engaged in discussions of the ways the circulation of discourses in popular media can lead to
imagining disparate groups as one cohesive public body “whether at a regional, national or
imperial level” (Tsaliki, 1995, p. 348).
Through his influential research, Stuart Hall (1992) showed how the “western” world utilises
stereotypical portrayals of “others” for the upholding of a discourse which separates the rational
and civilised “West” from the repressed and forgotten “rest”. As Pickering (2001) accentuates,
stereotypical portrayals of individuals often work as dissociating mechanisms which reduce
those so stereotyped to “others”. Following Powell and Menendian (2016), this chapter per-
ceives “othering” as a “descriptively inclusive term that captures the many expressions of broad
prejudice across any of the dimensions of group-based difference” (p. 34) and uses it as “a
conceptual framework featuring a generalisable set of processes that engender group-based
marginality” (p. 34). Thereby, through the exploration of mediated representations of GBV in
Greek women’s magazines, this chapter also examines how representations of interlinked sys-
tems of power contribute to the construction of a sense of belonging and/or exclusion.

Methodology
This chapter is based on the qualitative discursive repertoire analysis of a total of 40 printed
and digital versions of two of the highest-selling Greek women’s glossy magazines:
Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire produced from 2012 to 2017 (20 per magazine). These mag-
azines are the Greek versions of the global magazine brands and include both original Greek
articles and reproductions and adaptions of articles featured in their international counter-
parts (primarily in their British and American versions) tailored to Greek audiences. Of the 40
magazines, 30 (75%) included an article focused on GBV (18 from Cosmopolitan and 12 from
Marie Claire) and it is these articles which are analysed in this chapter. The GBV articles were
featured in three main sections of the magazines: Life/True Stories (19 articles), Featured
Articles (9) and two Editor’s Notes/Introductions featured on the first pages of the magazines.
This study utilised repertoire analysis (Hermes, 1995; Gill, 2009) to identify the ways
GBV was discursively constructed in the articles. Repertoire analysis was deemed a suitable
method for identifying recurring textual patterns and relating them to wider social for-
mations (Wetherell, 1998). This allowed me to identify two original interpretative reper-
toires: “which set up contained subject positions or voices sometimes in opposition to each
other … and which develop recognizable and bounded links or arguments” (Wetherell,
1998, p. 38). The discussion is now turned to the analysis of the GBV discourses and
narratives comprising these two repertoires: “women-ology” and “dynamics of exclusion”.

2
The “women-ology” repertoire
The “women-ology” repertoire is invoked by a total of 19 articles in the sample. All 19
articles share incidences of GBV which took place in Greece and other “western” contexts
and focus on women between the ages of 18–45 (the target demographic of the two mag-
azines). The vast majority of the sampled articles invoked by the “women-ology” repertoire

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fall in the Life/True Stories category in which GBV survivors – both everyday women and
public figures such as celebrities – share their experiences, while two of them were featured in
the Editor’s Note/Introduction articles. Typically, these articles are signalled by what I call the
“Post-traumatic empowerment” (PTEM) discourse, since they depict GBV female survivors
as inspirational women who, by overcoming their “victimisation”, managed to reclaim their
power and regain their confidence and voice. Within these articles, emphasis is placed on
studying and learning about other women and specifically their GBV experiences, for example
by understanding the way(s) women might react in certain situations and the underlying
reasons behind their actions. As a result, readers engage in a process of comparison between
themselves and the “survivors” featured in the articles, even when these survivors are other-
wise marked as exceptional (e.g. in stories featuring celebrities). In these stories, the survivors
are the main agents and, indeed, stories are often written in the first-person by survivors
creating immediacy and intimacy. This can consequently aid in the construction of an
imagined community (Anderson, 1991), in this case, within the “western” context.
A typical article invoking the “women-ology” repertoire which disseminates the PTEM
discourse is “The Secret” which is authored by Roxanne Pallett, an English soap-opera
actress and reality TV star (Pallett, 2013). It is worth noting here that while Pallett is
identified as an actress in the first lines of the article and her role in the TV series Emmerdale
(ITV, 1972 – present) is also mentioned, Pallett is not particularly well-known in Greece.
There is an attempt to adapt the article to a Greek context (through the inclusion of Greek
statistical data regarding GBV), however, it is interesting that Pallett’s story is still assumed
to have appeal to a Greek audience. Whilst these magazines do also discuss GBV experi-
ences of public figures well-known in the Greek context – such as Rihanna, Serena Williams
and Reese Witherspoon (Strempa, 2017) – the Pallett story suggests that it is not celebrity
per se but relatability which is key to how the story works.
In this article, Pallett, who is portrayed as a relatable woman of a similar age to the
magazines’ target audience, shares her experience of being abused by her ex-boyfriend.
Through adopting an internally-focalised narrative perspective in which first-person nar-
ration is utilised (Caspar et al., 2016), Pallett offers a recollection of her experience,
thoughts and reactions during and after the abuse. Pallett starts by sharing how she initially
attempted to justify her ex-boyfriend’s abusive behaviour due to “love, fear and denial3”
(p. 128). She then talks about how she kept blaming herself for his abusive behaviour: “in a
way I believed that I was responsible for our fights – and his anger” (p. 128). Pallett
describes how her ex-boyfriend violently hit her and her initial reluctance to speak to her
mother and her friends about the abuse, noting “however, when I asked for their help, they
came running” (p. 129). Whilst this arguably emphasises women’s solidarity, the sisterhood
invoked in these articles is primarily interpersonal. In this way, emphasis is placed on the
personal empowerment of the “survivors” to use the resources they already have, instead of
highlighting wider gender inequalities which facilitate the recurrence of GBV situations.
Specifically, throughout this article, emphasis is placed on female agency through sharing
Pallett’s transition from a passive and scared “sufferer” to a reborn and empowered “sur-
vivor” who is now sharing her story to help women with similar experiences. At the end of
this article, Pallett directly informs the magazines’ readers that there is help if they are
experiencing similar situations: “This is the most important thing for women who experi-
ence violence in a relationship. That there is help: organisations, specialised professionals,
police, your friends, your family. And this is why if something like this happens to you, you
need to speak to someone immediately, before it’s too late” (p. 129). Pallett’s post-traumatic

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empowerment is further enhanced through phrases such as “this is definitely not your fault”
(p. 129) which attempt to de-stigmatise women’s victimisation.
The relevance of Pallett’s experiences to Greek readers is highlighted by incorporating
Greek statistics and helplines. This emphasis on the commonality and persistence of GBV
issues in “western” contexts, highlights the relevance of GBV to all women and thereby
attempts to create a common social identity. In their analysis of women’s magazines,
Stevens et al. (2007) argued that women’s magazines can influence their readers’ ambitions
and perceptions through the construction and association with an “imagined community
of other women who share common experiences and interests” (p. 237). Through engaging
in a social comparison process between themselves and the “survivors” featured in the
articles, readers are prompted to learn and understand more about themselves and/or their
communities “with a commonly held perspective or experience to bind them together”
(Summers et al., 2014, p. 36). Nonetheless, this “imagined community” is not open to all.
While this repertoire is not restrictive in terms of race, it is restrictive in terms of the
possession of “western” identity and particularly the possession of similar characteristics
with the target readers of the magazines in terms of social class and the reconciliation of
“western” ideologies.
Another practice utilised in a noteworthy portion of articles invoking the “women-ology”
repertoire is “community talk” (Potter and Collie, 1989) which draws on the positive eva-
luations tied to community-related discourses. Through infusing vernacular language and
incorporating words such as “we”, “us” and “ours” these stories signal a sense of unity
and commonality which can help in the development of a common social identity. Specifically,
the inclusiveness of the language suggests that the readers and the authors/survivors featured
share the same aspirations and ambitions. A typical example of “community talk” is illus-
trated in the article “The end is near” (Hatzidaki, 2012). In this article, the author Alina, who
is depicted as a friendly figure who shares common struggles with the readers of the maga-
zines, underlines the need for women to escape relationships which do not make them happy.
Alina refers to relationship-related issues in the plural form, implying that these issues concern
the reader as much as the author: “The grass is always greener. By keep thinking that we are
doomed to want what we can’t have in a relationship …we tend to beautify and see the
situation as much better than it really is” (p. 132, emphasis added).
Nevertheless, while articles that circulate PTEM-related discourses leave a positive message
regarding overcoming GBV trauma (at least in the Global North), they mostly focus on
women’s empowerment, rather than tackling the root of the problem. Specifically, the dis-
courses embedded in the articles do not associate GBV with gendered inequalities, nor
challenge embedded patriarchal norms which reinforce them. Instead, they tend to place the
determinants of GBV on individual male pathology since the vast majority of articles invoking
the “women-ology” repertoire depict male perpetrators as violent manipulative figures who
externalise their anger and possessiveness via violence. Thereby, emphasis is placed on wo-
men’s responsibility to overcome personal GBV situations rather than society’s responsibility
on preventing them from occurring. Specifically, while some articles highlight the prominence
of GBV in contemporary societies, they at the same time disregard the conditions which
facilitate them. Tackling GBV is therefore depicted as an individual battle lacking any societal
complexity that “survivors” need to endure, which consequently abdicates “western” societies
from any responsibility. Foremost, as stated most explicitly in Pallett’s (2013) reference to
“specialised professionals, organisations and police” (p. 129), it is assumed that systems and
support mechanisms are always both available and effective. Thus, the emphasis is on

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countering post-abusive situations and not on preventing or tackling violence at its root. This
reflects the magazines’ tendency to present GBV as an expression of individual male
pathology instead of deeply embedded societal and re-circulated ideologies.

The “dynamics of exclusion” repertoire

The second repertoire identified is the “dynamics of exclusion” repertoire which represents
GBV experiences of “non-western” individuals and is invoked in 11 sampled articles.
Articles invoking this repertoire offer GBV experiences of women whose stories take place
in the Global South and particularly African countries such as the Democratic Republic of
Congo (DRC) (Karpidi, 2012; Moraitou, 2013) and Central Asian and Southwestern Asian
(Arab) countries like Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan and Iran (Mpampleki, 2014). In contrast to the
“women-ology” repertoire, articles which invoke the “dynamics of exclusion” repertoire
adopt a more distant stance. This repertoire allows for the exploration of the ways repre-
sentations of interlinked systems of identities such as gender, race, nationality, culture and,
to a lesser degree, social class, contribute to imaginings of belonging and exclusion and
particularly the social construction of the “sufferer” (Mpampleki, 2014, p. 94) – as opposed
to the “survivor” of the “western” context.
These articles depend upon an implicit comparison between “the West and the Rest” (Hall,
1992, p. 276), which distances the “sufferer” from the magazine readers in four main ways by:
associating GBV with a specific geographical context; associating GBV with a specific social
and cultural context; writing in the “third person” (not first-person stories of survival as in the
women-ology repertoire); and focusing on types of GBV which are presented as unusual, at
least in “western” contexts (e.g. forced marriages, female genital mutilation).
The first two “othering” techniques often work in conjunction as in the article “The Face
of Hope” (Moraitou, 2013) which examines sexual slavery in the Democratic Republic of
Congo (DRC). Specifically, this article represents the recollections of women in
Afghanistan, the DRC, Rwanda and Bosnia and Herzegovina who endured abuse,
referencing the campaign “If you knew me you would care” which is the result of a col-
laboration of women’s rights activists, Zainab Salbi who is the founder of the international
organisation “Women for Women”, and photographer Rennio Maifredi. The article starts
by sharing the story of Nambidu, a woman from the DRC who was raped in front of her
children by two males, whilst her husband was away on a professional trip, and was later
abducted by eight men. The author of the article continues sharing Nambidu’s story: “he [a
man she was sold to by her abductors] bought her for some bullets and a few cans of beers.
He kept her locked in a room in his house for three months as a sex-slave and he was raping
her at his will” (p. 84). While this article initially prompts readers to imagine being in the
sufferer’s position through the usage of the campaign’s name and slogan “if you knew me
you would care” (p. 83), their construction as “distant others” is reinforced both through
the language adopted and the association of sexual slavery with the DRC’s current con-
ditions and specifically its association with the corruption of the government and internal
conflicts which take place in the geographical area. Similarly, in the article “Whatever the
war takes” (Karpidi, 2012), certain types of GBV such as rape, female genital mutilation,
forced marriage and child marriage are depicted as rooted in Rwanda’s culture. Specifically,
this article shares ActionAid’s actions in Rwanda: ActionAid is a non-governmental global
organisation which operates against poverty and injustice worldwide. The article relates the
story of Lucy, a woman from Rwanda who participated in an ActionAid documentary.

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Lucy was raped, got pregnant with twins and was infected with AIDS when she was 14 years
old. Due to this, her siblings kicked her and her two children out of their family home:
“1994 … was the cruelest period in Rwanda. Pain, losses, fear, and soldiers who were raping
women before killing them and their children. We were also told to give them money in
order to kill us with a bullet. The other choice was to get slaughtered by a machete” (p. 119).
Through this association of GBV with geo-socio-cultural contexts, the stigmatisation of
certain geographical and cultural locations is facilitated. These perceptions do not merely
obstruct readers from resonating with the “sufferer” (Shaver, 2012), but also shift the
responsibility for the violence from the perpetrators to the context in which it is perpetuated
and thereby, positions the suffering of the “distant other” beyond the remit of the readers’
action (Chouliaraki, 2006, 2019).
The third “othering” technique refers to the perspective from which the GBV abuse is
shared. In the majority of articles invoking the “dynamics of exclusion” repertoire, the GBV
issue or incident is imparted either by a journalist or a member of an NGO/charity orga-
nisation. A typical example of this is the article “Emergency call” (Mpampleki, 2014) in
which the author Alexia, a worker in PRAKSIS (a Greek NGO with the goal of creating
and implementing humanitarian action), shares her experience as a social worker, working
“with women who are victims of trafficking, immigrants, HIV carriers” (p. 94). Specifically,
Alexia refers to various GBV “sufferers” (p. 94) she encountered: “I’ll never forget the story
of a woman – victim of trafficking, who managed to escape from the man who kept her
captive” (p. 94). This article adopts an informative third-person narrative style in an
attempt to promote awareness about trafficking, however, the “sufferers” of the abuse
remain unspecified and invisible throughout. The significance of this does not merely lie in
the depiction of “sufferers” as passive victims instead of “survivors”, but also in their de-
humanisation and the consequent obstruction to the imagination of community beyond the
readers’ “western” identity. Thus, readers are positioned in a “safe” spectator position
(Chouliaraki, 2006) since their ability to relate and empathise with the “sufferers” is
obstructed, which consequently disengages them from being interested in tackling these
issues and the conditions which facilitate them. Thereby, it becomes apparent that instead of
being aligned with the “sufferers” featured in the articles, readers are aligned with the
international NGO workers supporting the “sufferers”, who do not themselves “belong” to
the national or cultural contexts in which the violence takes place.
The last “othering” technique refers to the type of GBV that is addressed in the articles.
Articles which utilise this “othering” technique often depict types of GBV such as female
genital mutilation, trafficking and forced marriage. Whilst these forms of violence are
present in “western” contexts (see e.g. Käkelä this volume), it is notable that for the
magazines these forms of violence are firmly located elsewhere. For example, in “The face of
hope” (Moraitou, 2013), focusing on the aforementioned “If you knew me you would care
campaign”, the author shares the story of Anonsiata, a woman from Rwanda who was sold
as a wife (p. 86). Alongside Anonsiata’s story is that of Nambidu, a woman from the DRC
who was raped (p. 83). Whilst rape is obviously a prevalent form of GBV in western
contexts, readers are still kept at a distance from Nambidu and her experience through its
conceptualisation as a form of abuse deeply embedded in the geographical and cultural
context of the sufferer. This emphasis placed on GBV differences between “western” and
“non-western” contexts decreases audiences’ ability to empathise with the “sufferers” and
consequently facilitates the development of an “imaginary wall” which separates “western”
from “non-western” experiences of GBV.

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Conclusion
Through the juxtaposition of the “women-ology” and the “dynamics of exclusion” reper-
toires, the disparities among the ways discourses of GBV in “western” and “non-western”
contexts are circulated in Greek women’s magazines are exemplified.
As evidenced in Table 26.1, articles invoking the “women-ology” repertoire mainly come
in the form of true stories in which the narrator adopts a first-person perspective. Through
the encapsulation of the “Post-traumatic empowerment” PTEM discourse which has been
developed in this analysis, the “survivors” featured in the articles are framed as “empowered
survivors” who transformed their suffering into power and became the “heroic” and
inspirational women they are today. Other key characteristics of this repertoire are the
proliferation of articles which emphasise female solidarity and sisterhood, and the utilisa-
tion of community talk through which words which signal unity are employed. The
amalgamation of these characteristics aids the creation of a sense of commonality and as-
sists the construction of an imagined community amongst the readers and the “survivors”
featured in the articles. Nonetheless, at the same time, this repertoire is also signalled by an
emphasis on individual rather than structural societal norms which in turn abdicates social
responsibility for preventing GBV.
In contrast, articles invoking the “dynamics of exclusion” repertoire are signalled by the
“West and the rest” (Hall, 1992) narrative which is comprised of four “othering” techniques
developed in this analysis which widens the gap between the “West” (the readers) and “the rest”
(the “distant sufferers”) and consequently obstructs the imagination of community among the
readers and the “sufferers” featured in the articles. The “othering” techniques refer to the en-
tanglement of GBV with geographical contexts and socio-cultural conditions, the abuse being
shared by a third person and the types of violence they focus on. Through these techniques,
women’s suffering takes on a faceless approach, in which “sufferers” of GBV in the “Global
South” are depicted as passive “victims” while their experience and suffering are shared by a
third person (usually a journalist or an activist) who is situated “outside” the context they are
writing about. In addition, the emphasis placed on the geographical and socio-cultural context
and the types of violence described leans towards the construction of the “sufferers” as “distant
others”, while the perpetuation of GBV in “non-western” contexts is depicted as rooted in
culture. The importance of this lies in the shift of the responsibility from the perpetrator to the
geo-socio-cultural conditions in which the GBV occurs. This also discourages magazine audi-
ences from actively engaging in helping to tackle the conditions which perpetuate the abuse.
Through the analysis of these two repertoires, it became apparent that the intersecting
identities of race, ethnicity and socio-cultural background of the women featured plays a

Table 26.1 GBV in Global North and Global South settings in women’s magazines

“Womenology” repertoire “Dynamics of exclusion” repertoire

“Western” context “Non-western” context
Rooted in individual male pathology Rooted in geo-socio-cultural conditions
First-person narrative Third-person narrative
Empowered survivors Passive sufferers
Heroisation of survivors Victimisation of sufferers
Commonality Othering
Inclusion in an imagined community Alienation and disengagement

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 Rafaela Orphanides

vital role in women’s mediated representation in relation to GBV and particularly in their
framing as “empowered survivors” or “passive sufferers” and their respective “heroisation”
or oppression. In addition, intersecting identities also play a key role in whether or not the
“survivor” will be depicted as a member of the imagined community. Lastly, representations
of intersecting identities also perpetuate the normalisation of hierarchical relations among
“western” and “non-western” women’s experiences of violence.

Notes
1 The terms “western” and “non-western” refer to the mediation of women’s experiences in the
Global North and Global South, respectively.
2 Name of repertoire inspired by Gill’s (2009) “men-ology” repertoire which is invoked by articles
concerned with studying and learning about men.
3 All the quotations/extracts from the magazines are my English translations of the Greek texts.

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 27
JUST A FANTASY
How the discourse of fantasy attempts to
resolve the conflicts of porn consumption
Maria Garner and Fiona Vera-Gray

Discussion of the status of pornography viral video as a form of media which blurs the
boundary between fiction and reality is common in academic debates on porn. Arguments
are made from all sides which complicate the idea that pornography is simply a form of
representation, from critical interpretations which focus on the production of porn to more
celebratory understandings which explore how pornography consumers use porn in ways
that expand their “real-world” sexual experiences. Despite this, the idea of an unambiguous
boundary between reality and fantasy structures much of the public story of porn. Often
framed around a clear distinction between “porn sex” and “real sex”, the dichotomy is used
both by those who are supportive of pornography and those who critique it. It is ubiquitous
in educational resources for young people, such as KB Creative Lab’s (2013) explaining the
differences between porn sex and real sex, and common in discussions of pornography by
workers in the porn industry such as the series hosted on Pornhub, “Ask a Porn Star”
created by the porn production company Woodrocket. It is also a distinction that is reg-
ularly drawn on by pornography users in discussing what they watch and why. But what
does it actually do?
We have both previously conducted research to explore what porn means for men
(Garner, 2016) and for women (Vera-Gray, 2020). Our studies involved different samples
and approaches, yet were connected through the application of Garner’s (2016) concept
of a “pornography biography”. This is the account contextualising consumption; the
story of how porn came to occupy the space it does in the broader landscapes of parti-
cipants’ lives. We found many gendered points of departure in the biographies of par-
ticipants in comparing our studies, but we also found points of overlap. One of the most
pervasive of these was an experience of conflict arising from an awareness of the rela-
tionship between porn and violence against women and a shared drawing on the dis-
cursive structures of fantasy in an attempt to resolve it. For women, this resolution was
grounded in an appeal to fantasy and reality as being in a relationship of dichotomous
oppositional difference (Hill-Collins, 1986), something which functioned to enable and
explain the difference between personal arousal and political standpoint. For men, it was
more difficult to hold onto a clear boundary between fantasy and reality as the porous
nature of the two was more evident in their everyday lives. Instead, though men still drew

290 DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-32

 Just a fantasy

on the discourse of fantasy as a motivator for using porn and an anchor for sexual
desires, it was used without specific form or substance, an empty lexicon designed to
conceal tacit knowledge of porn’s role in violence against women. This chapter brings our
two studies together to explore these similarities and differences. We begin with a brief
outline of the studies’ methodologies and sample characteristics before moving on to a
discussion of how the relationship between reality and fantasy has been addressed so far
in academic work on porn.

Methods and sample

The data drawn on here was originally collected for two separate studies: Garner’s (2016)
work on men’s engagements with the sexualisation of culture and Vera-Gray’s (2020) study
on women’s relationships to porn. Detailed information is available in prior publications
for these studies, however in order to situate the data used for this discussion we give an
overview of the studies here.
For Garner’s (2016) study, 12 men from the UK took part in two in-depth interviews
looking at their engagements across the broad spectrum of sexualisation – including por-
nography – with an additional 151 men taking part in a qualitative survey allowing for
anonymous responses. The men were predominantly White British and self-defined as straight
or heterosexual. The study did not offer a definition of porn, but worked with the men’s own
definitions. In the main, discussions focused on commercially available online pornography.
All men made reference to violence against women and degradation in porn, but were also
keen to distance themselves from it as consumers.
In Vera-Gray’s (2020) study, one hundred women from the UK participated in in-depth
interviews exploring the role of pornography in their lives. Recruitment deliberately tar-
geted women with different investments in pornography with the final sample including
women who produced pornography, both regular and irregular porn consumers, and
women who had not used porn themselves. The sample had a particularly wide range of
sexualities, broadly grouped into five categories: asexual (2%); bisexual (35%); heterosexual
(46%); lesbian (7%); and something else such as unsure, questioning or fluid (10%). Almost
half of all participants fell into the 25-34 age range (45%), with the other half divided
between 35–44 (24%), 18–24 (16%), 45–54 (12%) and 55 and over (3%). Just over three
quarters (77%) of participants identified as being from a White ethnic background, with 15
percent from a Black ethnic group, five percent with dual heritage (Black-White, Asian-
White or Arab-White) and just three percent identifying themselves as having an Asian
ethnicity. As with Garner’s (2016) study, pornography was not defined for participants
though the vast majority referred directly to free mainstream online visual pornography
when situating their responses. Indeed, one of the key findings of the study was that wo-
men’s use of pornography was predominantly this kind of mainstream “tube site” material
rather than independent or feminist porn, “erotica” or other written material which often
form part of the narrative about the kinds of pornography that women access.
Though neither study makes claims to representativeness, their shared methodological
approach — particularly the application of the concept of the “pornography biography” —
enabled a density and richness in the data which throws up questions and challenges for
some of the key divisions structuring the porn debates at large. For the rest of this chapter,
we will focus on just one of these, namely the line between fantasy and reality, in order to
explore what participant accounts make visible about the functions of this distinction.

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Troubling the line

Unlike the neat separation of reality from fantasy that we see in much of the public dis-
cussion of porn, academic work from both critical and pro-pornography scholars regularly
troubles the line between the two. It has been a stalwart principle in arguments which
reframe pornographies from cultural texts to processes and practices of inequality, that
pornography is both a representation and a reality. In her arguments against some academic
framings of pornography, Gail Dines (1998) emphasises the reality of the contexts of the
production of pornography, claiming that “to [the women in porn] pornography is not a
polysemic text, a fantasy to be savoured, a form of sexual liberation or discourse. It is an
event that forever changed their lives, and has to be dealt with every day” (p. 164).
Similarly, Natalie Purcell (2012) directly engages with the reduction of pornography to
“only fantasy” by highlighting its industrial foundations, arguing that pornography is in
many senses the opposite of fantasy; it is a material reality, a consumer product and profit-
generating commodity that shapes people’s lives.
It is not only, however, those who are critical of pornography who question the posi-
tioning of porn as just fantasy. Simon Hardy (2008) highlights the overlaps by looking at
how pornography seeks to represent the real. He claims that “if we consider pornography as
a commercial genre concerned with the explicit representation of human sexuality, we see
that throughout its history one of its defining characteristics has been the attempt to make
its representations seem as authentic as possible” (p. 60). Martin Barker (2014) con-
ceptualises fantasy as existing in the zone between “relations between bodies, selfhood and
cultural permissions and forbidding” (p. 157). Instead of a line between fantasy on one side
and reality on the other, porn is thus positioned in a liminal space providing a library
against which to measure our sexual selves. Such a conceptualisation connotes a symbiotic
relationship rather than a clear separation between porn, fantasy and sexual selfhood, porn
becomes a “means through which adults, try out self in sexual-society, reimagining them-
selves through others reimagingings” (Barker, 2014, p. 146). This notion of symbiosis is also
found in Barker’s work with Clarissa Smith and Feona Attwood, focusing on the meanings
of pornography for queer people. Here the clear boundary between fantasy and reality is
troubled again by the argument that fantasies have functions in “real” life such as sup-
porting relationships or maintaining a sense of self (Smith, Barker and Attwood, 2015). We
see something similar in more recent work from Paasonen (2021a; 2021b) who sees porn as
affording “an affective resonance” that can lend its products transgressive appeal. For
Paasonen too, porn is positioned as an enabling agent in sexual selfhood and transgressions
from the restraints of normativity, by offering sexual imagery, space and potential which
resonate with the sexual realities of users rather than being wholly separate from it.
There is thus agreement between writers working on either side of the debate that porn is
not separate from our sexual reality or from sexual fantasy but rather that the three are
enmeshed, shaping and reshaping each other. Where the sides diverge, however, is in whether
this relationship generates beneficial impacts or potentially harmful outcomes. For writers
who are critical of pornography, violence against women is, as Boyle (2011) argues, a core part
of the “acknowledged story of pornography” (p. 601), but this is rarely the simplistic
relationship of cause and effect that such writers have been charged with. Rather it is a
recognition that violence against women is an undeniable reality, situating and constraining
the freedom and safety of women and girls working within the porn industry, at the same time
as violence, packaged as fantasy, is integral to the content of much commercial pornography.

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Violence against women is in many ways thus foundational to the reality through which
pornography and fantasy take shape and have meaning and the situation within which we
take up our sexual subjectivities and freedom. For the more celebratory analyses, violence
against women is often positioned outside of the reality of pornography users and thus beyond
the symbiotic relationship between reality, fantasy and porn. These analyses focus on porn’s
power to enable sexual freedoms, ignoring the potential constraints and ambiguities of porn.
This complexity can be seen in the data from women about the social functions of pornog-
raphy, particularly as a form of expectation and instruction about sex — discussed in detail by
Vera-Gray (2020) — and are further brought out by our discussion here of participants’
conflicts in using porn.

The conflicts of porn

Personal conflict is an underrepresented lived experience of using porn. Earlier work with men
has explored how continued use of pornography can sit in tension with men’s relationships with
women, and require a “moral reckoning” (Hardy, 1998); evoke guilt and shame (Jensen, 1998)
and encourage users to suspend and erode their own moral objections to women’s abuse in
pornography (Whisnant, 2010). For women, it has been acknowledged that women make
claims to personal enjoyment in porn while being politically troubled by it (Ciclitira, 2004) and
more recently, Paasonen (2021b) has suggested that, for some women, the conflict itself can be a
valuable fuel for sexual fantasy. Yet the actual nature of this conflict and how men and women
negotiate it to be able to experience pleasure from engaging with pornography remains un-
derexplored. This is particularly interesting given that experiencing a sense of personal conflict
and seeking to resolve this was one of the key shared threads in the pornography biographies of
participants in our studies. As we will discuss, women and men drew on the discourse of fantasy
in different ways to resolve this conflict, though it was largely unsuccessful for both.
Men spoke about experiencing a sense of political and personal conflict in their pornog-
raphy consumption, arising from their gendered situation as men in a broader context of men’s
violence against women. Here, men’s conflict orbited around how porn shapes their lives and
relationships with women in negative ways as well as a political and ethical tension linked to
porn’s implication in sexual violence and gender inequality. This latter tension was so prev-
alent across discussions with men, that it emerged as a “tacit knowledge” (Garner, 2016)
forming a nucleus in how men made sense of pornography and their use of it. In Nick’s words:

If I am honest with myself so I see porn as being very much about male desire
dominating in sex and this turns me on. Rape is a hidden subtext to porn, in fact I
think that is part of its attraction to men to have so much power over women.
(Nick, 25–34, White British)

Men’s conflicts with porn went beyond guilt and shame linked to taboo and transgression,
to an implied understanding of its implication in violence against women and the overlaps
between fantasy and reality, as demonstrated by Barry, Louis and Jack:

Fundamentally it is an exploitative industry and even people who feel guilty and they
think it’s because of their wives, partners or girlfriend, I think it’s because they know
it’s a creepy industry.
(Barry, 25-34, White British)

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It can be quite disconcerting and uncomfortable to think that vulnerable people are
manipulated into pornography. I’m not saying that is everyone, but I would suspect
that that it is a large proportion of the industry and that’s uncomfortable and dis-
concerting.
(Louis, 25–34, African Caribbean British)

It doesn’t really make me feel that nice. It’s painful basically, I can’t describe it in any
other way, it’s like physical pain in my gut. It feels wrong like I’m not really being true
to myself because it’s not really what I want, I’m not being true to myself. It sounds
quite grand, but it’s just, that’s how it is.
(Jack, 25–34, White British)

For women, a clear sense of conflict in their pornography consumption also arose. For
some this oriented around a similar tension to that described by the men, namely arousal at
images of women’s sexual submission and humiliation at the same time as concern for the
conditions of its production. As Makeda noted:

Some of the things that turn me on or that arouse me sexually, might be things that are
totally against my principles or my political position … I have no shame around my
use of porn in a general sense but I also I don’t really like it. I think that the way that
women are portrayed is for most part, disgusting, offensive and ought to be wiped off
the face of the planet.
(Makeda, 45–54, Black African)

A decade younger than Makeda, both Kush and Katie spoke about something similar:

A couple of times I’ve been disgusted by myself, by some of the things that I’ve found
that turn me on. I’m watching a woman gagging on a man and being slapped in the
face, and I’m disgusted but I’m turned on at the same time. I don’t like the fact that it’s
brought me to those two places in equal force. I think that’s the borderline of your
principle versus your desires.
(Kush, 35–44, African)

If I watch something on Pornhub I find myself being turned on and I come very quickly
watching it but afterwards I feel very conflicted about it. I’m enjoying watching it and I
come and then I just think that I’m participating in something that offends so much of
what I stand for. It’s not shame, I don’t feel that strongly about it but I do feel slightly
disappointed in myself. I find myself thinking, ‘What kind of feminist am I, in bed with
my phone watching this kind of thing?’
(Katie, 35–45, White British)

Though this is partly similar to some of the conflicts arising in Macleod’s (2020) study on
how feminists who watch porn discuss their ethical decision making, Macleod suggested
that these conflicts arose from the stigma attached to pornography, sex work and sexuality
more broadly. In contrast, here many women, together with the men in Garner’s (2016)
study, were explicit that this conflict most often arose in relation to how pornography was
implicated in violence against women and girls. As such, rather than the tension between the

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personal and the social, implied by the idea of stigma, here the conflict can be understood as
arising from a tension between political analysis and personal arousal; the overlapping
nature of which is a key tenet of both radical and black feminisms, traditions which centre
how political realisation of oppression arises from examining seemingly personal experi-
ences (e.g. Hanisch, 1970; Combahee River Collective, 2014 [1983]). What we find across
both our studies is pornography users expressing a struggle to separate the personal from
the political, resulting in a conflict similar to what Jensen (1998) termed the “pain of por-
nography”; a conflict with its genesis in a recognition of porn’s relationship to violence
against women. Women and men in our studies demonstrate an implicit and sometimes
explicit recognition that violence against women is an inseparable part of the relationship
between pornography and reality. It is in an attempt to reconcile the conflict between this
recognition and their personal pleasure, that the discourse of fantasy emerges.

The discursive function of fantasy

Across both of our studies, participants appealed to the discourse of “fantasy” either
directly or implicitly in close connection to articulations of conflict. When we looked at how
fantasy functioned in the accounts of our participants, we found that though it was used for
similar purposes, its relationship to reality was often framed in different ways.
Women often drew on a clear separation between fantasy and reality to talk about the
difference between what they want to see being done to the women on screen — something
experienced as arousing — and what they want to be done to women, including themselves,
in real life.

Not every image of rape in porn is actually rape, in fact you don’t want to see those,
you want to see the ones where it is acted, because it is a fantasy. We all know the
reality is shit but the fantasy can really be a turn on.
(Victoria, 35–44, White Irish)

Quite a lot of the pornography that I enjoy is about punishment and I know enough
about how bodies work to know that I don’t think it is actually pleasurable. But there
is a fantasy here, that it would be pleasurable and mind blowing and I am interested in
that fantasy. Not the actual reality of the sex.
(Vanessa, 25–34, Black British)

As made explicit by both Victoria and Vanessa, the appeal to “fantasy” enabled them to
take pleasure in what created a source of conflict; that is pornographic depictions of forms
of violence, harm or dominance being enacted against women. It worked to create a space
where the contradictions between one’s personal pleasure and political position could be
held together, a space which sits beyond usual ethical principles. Katie made the work of
fantasy in resolving her conflict explicit, claiming that in relation to porn “in a way, there is
no right and wrong, because it’s just a fantasy”.
However, for this appeal to fantasy to function successfully as a form of conflict reso-
lution women needed to evoke a clear separation between themselves as women for whom it
is a fantasy and the performers as women for whom it is a reality. It was here that many
struggled and the clear separation between fantasy and reality fell down. This is evident in
the accounts of Harper, as well as Kush who talked about the particular importance for her

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of not separating herself from representations of other women of African or Caribbean

heritage.

I know that sex workers’ conditions are really shit and a lot of women are doing things
for money and the more extreme things you do the more money you get, so I worry
about being aroused by something that they’ve been coerced into or they are being
seriously harmed by. I’m fine being aroused by someone else enjoying S&M but I don’t
want to be turned on by someone actually experiencing violence. I don’t want them to
be harmed for my pleasure.
(Harper, 25–34, White British)

I think we’ve all got our own boundaries, we’ve all got the place where we’re willing to
push. And for me, I think I have that responsibility, as a black woman I can’t afford to
ignore certain things. If it’s happening to anyone that looks like me, then that’s still my
problem.
(Kush, 35–44, African)

Women’s accounts here are reminiscent of Parvez’s (2006) discussion of how perceptions
of the emotional labour of female porn performers impact women’s enjoyment as porn
consumers. While women try to hold a clear line between fantasy and reality to reconcile a
sense of conflict between their pleasure and their principles, this is made difficult by a
struggle to fully separate themselves from the women onscreen.
Men also sought to create this space to locate their personal pleasure outside of their
value systems through creating a story of a difference between porn sex and real sex, porn
desire and real desire, or, effectively, a porn self and their real self. Though they did not
encounter the same struggle as women in terms of needing to separate gendered repre-
sentations in porn from themselves (primarily because, as men, they were rarely the object
of violence), they did talk about the ways in which their experience showed them that the
lines between reality and fantasy were blurry; that the distinction between “porn sex” and
“real sex” didn’t resonate in terms of their own lives. Many men spoke in ways that
demonstrated a knowledge of how sex, desire and selves as found in pornography shape
and are shaped by sex, desire and selves in the real world; describing the ways in which
pornography bled into real-world interactions with women as well as how real-world
interactions fed into their pornography use. Andrew, for example, spoke about fanta-
sising using photos of women he knew; using sexual fantasy to make reality into
pornography.

I look at pictures of women I know who I want to sleep with so I fantasise about them.
In some ways you shouldn’t have pictures of your friends to masturbate to but on
Facebook people have scantily clad photos and then my thought process is that I
would like to see photos of them naked.
(Andrew, 25–34, White British)

Similarly, Jim talked about using porn as a pipeline to ways of seeing and fantasising
about real-life women; using pornography to make reality into sexual fantasy:

If I’ve been out and talking to girls that I fancy and I’ve been quite drunk, or still

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drunk the next day, then I’ll be flipping back and forth between my fantasies, and the
pornography. And there’ll be orgasm after orgasm, because you can fantasise and then
go back to porn.
(Jim, 35-44, White British)

Later in the interview, Jim returns to fantasy, but rather than a boundary he carves out the
idea of “loops”, to describe what he appears to see as the “dangers” of “rapey type fan-
tasies” potently inflecting desire.

There are dangers in ‘rapey’ type fantasies, capturing women in the woods and doing
them. That might be a consensual video but you don’t actually know that as a viewer.
And I know there are things like naked women standing next to dead bodies. That’s
risky, I don’t like some of those loops.
(Jim, 35–44, White British)

Jim’s discussion of this is particularly telling when connected to his articulations of not
just a tacit knowledge but an expertise on violence against women and porn; an expertise he
attempts to strategically distance himself from at the same time as articulating. Jim’s ac-
counts here are a rejection of the earlier clear division claimed by some of the women
between representations of rape as a fantasy and the reality of rape as a viewer, demon-
strating a much blurrier line between what he sees being done to the women on screen and
what “others” may want to do to women in real life.
The boundaries men expressed around fantasy and reality are thus porous, what
Paasonen (2013) would term an “affective resonance” and what Garner (2016) has termed
“pornographic recall”. While for some such as Jim, this appeared to be a source of grati-
fication, as well as something he distanced himself from, others framed this symbiosis as an
intense source of turmoil. James and Chris for example talked about the impact of porn in
changing their reality; namely the ways in which they encounter and respond to women as
well as the nature of their sexual desire:

I think it does make you feel, to some degree, dissatisfied. This kind of constant sexual
imagery and things, it has caused problems for me in relationships. This kind of
constantly looking for this next (gestures clicking a computer mouse) instant thrill,
rather than looking for something that’s going to be more satisfying in a whole sense.
(James, 25–34, White British)

[I]t creates a discrepancy between reality and fantasy and creates expectations, maybe
not expectations but desires that can’t be fulfilled in reality. I suppose that does have
slightly negative effects, but I am a mature adult and I can think well that’s just a fantasy.
(Chris, 35–44, White British)

Chris’s account is an interesting departure from how women attempt to negotiate the
fantasy/reality boundary. For women, their conflicting tussles orbit around both themselves
and women in porn — and their struggle to try to separate the two — yet Chris’s are rooted in
individualised fictions of invulnerable masculinity. This reveals how gender organises what’s
at stake for men and women not only in their porn consumption, but also how they mobilise
fantasy/reality demarcations. At the same time as dismissing the possibility of harmful

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impacts of porn because it is “just a fantasy”, Chris recognises that the world that one en-
counters in pornography shapes what is expected or desired outside of it. This contradiction
reveals how the discourse of fantasy can become something of an arbitrary linguistic insert; an
empty lexicon functioning to gently reconcile or conceal conflict. The form of the fantasy
is lost in this utilitarian story of porn and, in this, any conflict that might arise from the
disjuncture between the porn self and the real self is concealed.

Conclusion
When we explore the overlaps in what women and men say about their use of mainstream online
porn, we find an internal tension running through consumer’s their accounts and an appeal to
fantasy as a key tool to resolve it. For women, the appeal to fantasy seeks to reconcile the
discord between holding a political vision of women’s equality and experiencing arousal in
response to images of women being dominated, punished or harmed. For men, it can function
as an empty lexicon; a formless insert to describe the instrumental place porn occupies in their
lives or a gentle discursive dodge to reconcile and negotiate a tacit knowledge that porn, and
their use of it, is implicated in violence against women. For both, “fantasy” is used to disrupt the
relationship between pornography and reality, in order to escape the acknowledgement that
porn is implicated in violence against women.
These discursive strategies, however, are only ever partially successful because, as
academic work from both sides of the debates has shown, the line between fantasy and
reality is arbitrary and tenuous. Women struggle to separate their gendered position —
their situation as “woman” — from the women they encounter in pornography. This
means that though they attempt to mark a clear distinction between what they fantasise
about through porn and what they want in reality, the line between the two is compli-
cated by the understanding that what they see in porn is really happening for and to the
women they are watching. Men speak about a different struggle, one which demonstrates
their tacit knowledge of pornography as implicated in violence against women. Their lives
show them how the distinction between “porn sex” and “real sex” is not borne out in
practice, with multiple examples of the ways in which the boundaries between the two are
blurred. The relationship between fantasy and reality in pornography is thus revealed in
the accounts of pornography consumers to be much more one of ambiguity than
dichotomy and the conflicts of porn remain.
Drawing on Bordo’s (1990) argument that cultural landscapes offer either “battle-
grounds” or “playgrounds” for identity work, we suggest from this that porn is best con-
ceptualised as a battleground for users. It is a battleground rooted in recognition of violence
against women as an inseparable part of the symbiotic relationship between pornography,
reality and fantasy, a recognition which, notably, does not need belief in a causal associ-
ation in order to be experienced as a point of discomfort and unease. This means that
arguments which link pornography only to sexual fantasy and liberalism do so at the
detriment of structural, material and gendered analyses and in effect silence critical reflec-
tions on pornography. At the same time, perspectives which frame pornography as solely a
negative manifestation and practice of power and abuse, also risk dismissing testimonies
concerning the uses and gratifications of pornography from both women and men, however
complex these may be. Such partial views of pornography as a form of freedom or con-
straint further embed polemic arguments and cyclical debates, and are complicit in pushing
porn users to conceal any internal tensions. What is needed instead is an expansion of the

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space available to explore overlaps, ambiguities and tensions in pornography consumption

— the contours of the battleground. And that’s a space that can only really be created by
pushing back on the public story that porn is just a fantasy.

Acknowledgements
Fiona Vera-Gray’s research was made possible through a Leverhulme Trust Early Career
Postdoctoral Fellowship ECF/-2015-428.

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 28
PATRIARCHAL PROTECTORS
OF THE NATIONAL BODY
Violence, masculinity and gendered
constructions of the US/Mexico border
Lucia M. Palmer

Introduction
In recent decades in the United States, the policing of immigration and the US/Mexico border
have been consistently prominent talking points politically, socially and culturally. Much of
the popular understandings of immigration and border politics are shaped in mainstream
journalistic media, via well-established news institutions across television, print and web-
based platforms. Alongside the mainstream journalistic coverage, however, nativist media
discourses about immigration and border politics have attained heightened visibility. Media
made by nativist groups and media that heavily feature nativists circulate in documentary
filmmaking, right-wing news sources, social media and increasingly in mainstream discourse.
Nativist media also have significant resonances and echoes with official state policies,
rhetoric and representations of immigration. Scholars such as Lee Bebout (2016) have
shown that state agencies such as the Border Patrol reproduce and reinforce colonising
discourses inherited from a long legacy of imperialistic practices on the US/Mexico border,
which rely on othering racialised, gendered and sexualised narratives. Tropes of savagery
and deviant Mexican masculinity, hypersexualised or victimised Mexican femininity and
noble, civilised, white US masculinity have long been leveraged by the US state in ways that
justify the violence involved in policing the border. These tropes are similarly leveraged by
nativist groups in calls for heightened border militarisation and by vigilante border patrol
groups to justify their extralegal armed patrols of the borderlands.
This chapter traces these colonising representational tropes across a mixture of media. In
particular, the chapter focuses on three primary tropes that operate to justify both state and
vigilante violence along the US/Mexico border: the savage Other, the vulnerable woman and
child and the patriarchal protector. The analysis will focus on media that are (a) created by
or prominently featuring nativist groups, which I label “nativist media”, and (b) produced
by the US nation-state, specifically public relations from the US Customs and Border
Protection agency. The aim of this chapter is to highlight the connections between nativist
representations of immigration and border politics and mainstream or official discourse,
particularly around calls for heightened patrolling/policing and justifications of violence. In
doing so, this chapter will unpack the ways that race, gender and sexuality shape popular

300 DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-33

 Patriarchal protectors

understandings of the US/Mexico border as a site of violence, requiring the protection of a

white patriarchal saviour. Ultimately, this rhetoric masks not only the violence of vigilante
groups but also the US state, in patrolling the border.

Imagining, constructing and policing the US/Mexico border

Militarised tactics have been built into the logics of the US/Mexico border since its origins
in the Mexican-American War (Dunn, 1996). However, a militarised border has increas-
ingly characterised the border region in the late 20th and 21st centuries, as border en-
forcement relies heavily on military-style operations, infrastructure and technology (Jones,
2016). Heightened militarisation is linked to direct violence against migrants at the hands of
agents of the state and of criminal organisations on both sides of the border. Additionally,
militaristic strategies such as surveillance and infrastructure build-up have made historical
crossing points inaccessible, rerouting migration routes into increasingly remote and dan-
gerous areas at the cost of hundreds of migrant deaths each year (La Coalición de Derechos
Humanos and No More Deaths, 2016; Jones, 2016). Violence against migrants in the
borderlands is also gendered, as several studies show that migrant women experience high
rates of sexual assault (Medecins Sans Frontieres, 2017; Amnesty International, 2013).
The rise of nativism, the policing of national identity and the long history of the US
nation-building project have violent consequences. Nativism is fixated with national
identity – a particular, exclusionary form of national identity that is imagined and policed
as white, and defined in opposition to identities that are non-white. In the context of the
US/Mexico borderlands, this is specifically defined in relation to Mexicans/Mexico as
Other, which has gradually come to include Central America as migration has increased
from countries such as Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Simultaneously, US
national identity is defined in terms that are gendered and sexualised, imagining an
idealised national citizen as a white, male, heterosexual subject – one who is equipped to
defend a feminised homeland.
Rosa Linda Fregoso (2003) argues that violence plays an important part in reproducing
race, class, gender and sexual hierarchies in the borderlands in the service of US empire
building. This violence manifests in intensified border militarisation and the policing and
surveillance of immigrants. For Katie E. Oliviero (2011), the US/Mexico border “is as much
a performance staging national limits and exclusionary citizenship frameworks as it is a
material boundary” (p. 679). According to Oliviero, border checkpoints are less significant
in their prevention of migration than in their visibility, becoming a “dramatic panopticon in
which the theater of security substitutes for, and is as important as, the real” (p. 679).
Mediated imaginaries of the border, immigration and the nation are fundamental in
racialised and gendered constructions of US national identity. Fregoso (2003) argues that
the US/Mexico border has been a constant presence in the history of American culture and
media and one that is specifically racialised and gendered. The US/Mexico border repeat-
edly works as a symbol for “absolute alterity”, a lawless land that evokes “eroticized
underdevelopment — an untamed breeding group for otherness and the site of unrepressed
libidinal energies” (2003, p. 48). This is a place that is occupied by hypersexualised women
and sexually aggressive criminals (Fregoso, 2003; Chavez, 2013; Bebout, 2016). Fregoso
dates this discursive history back to the US/Mexico War, when white colonisers in the newly
acquired US territory recast themselves as “native” and the occupants of former Mexican
territory as “foreign” (p. 127).

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The persistent idea that the borderlands require a US civilising force depends on the way
the border is imagined in gendered and sexualised terms. Serving this imperial project were
racist representational themes of banditry, degeneracy and depravity – those who inhabit or
traverse the borderlands are figured as sexually aggressive outlaws. Fregoso (2003) traces this
through early film history, in which Mexican men were repeatedly represented as physically
aggressive and sexually degenerate, while Mexican women were represented as alluring but
often dangerous cantina girls. Here, Mexican men and women were both threatening to the
“white purity” of the US nation-state. These representational patterns were a continuation of
a colonialist imaginary, Fregoso writes, in which white men simultaneously had access to
brown women’s bodies and were responsible for defending a feminised national body.
Similarly, Bebout (2016) looks to film history to understand the racial-sexual dynamics
of border imaginaries, in which white “Americans” “embody rugged individualism and
masculinity”, while chivalrously defending white womanhood and nationhood (p. 26).
Mexicana womanhood has been historically, within a colonialist imagination, constructed
as an ambivalent feminine figure: she is a sexy and alluring seductress, she is hyperfertile and
hypersexual, she is both dangerous and desirable (Chavez, 2013; Fregoso, 2003). Bebout
traces the trope of the “Erotic Exotic Mexicana” from colonial travel literature, through
Hollywood “Latina Spitfires”, to contemporary song lyrics; throughout these forms, she is a
figure represented as erotically alluring and sexy for a white, male gaze. In this discursive
formation, white masculinity is figured as desirable and just, and US violence and imperi-
alism are translated through “a logic of consent, exceptionalism, and supremacy” (p. 64).
These tools position the border as a place requiring white, masculine, “American” civilising.
White “American” masculinity is figured in opposition to a form of Mexican masculinity
imagined as criminal and violent. Often, this is manifested in terms of sexual violence, with
suggestions of Mexican masculinity as licentious, even a potential rapist (Fregoso, 2003).
Against this threat, the white masculine citizen subject must defend the idealised nation and
save both white and Mexicana womanhood from violent Mexican masculinity. Thus, the
Mexicana can be a threat to normative white citizenship in her imagined desirability and
excessive reproductivity (Chavez, 2013; Fregoso, 2003), while she can also be positioned as a
victim needing to be saved (Bebout, 2016; Palmer, 2021).
Fregoso (2003) argues that the woman’s body, specifically the Mexicana body, serves as an
allegory for the nation in patriarchal constructions of national identity. Metaphors of the
nation as a “mother country”, for example, position women as the reproducers of nationhood
and symbolic bodies for the national domestic. When the nation is figured through the wo-
man’s body, it is engendered as feminine, something to be simultaneously subjugated, tamed
and protected. In patriarchal imaginaries, Fregoso writes, women’s bodies symbolically draw
borders of nation, race and the home. Mexico is figured as feminine, wild and erotic, to be
civilised and conquered by the white, masculine patriarchal power of the US national project.
In this formulation, conceptual associations and affective attachments with the home are
linked to the nation (Morley, 2000). Normative constructions of national identity and
nationalism position the nation and the home as something that needs to be guarded and
defended, otherwise invaded, degraded and lost. Nativist rhetoric in particular leverages
ideas of the home in danger in arguing for stricter immigration enforcement and heightened
border militarisation, connecting the invasion of the nation to the penetration of the home,
the domestic, the vulnerable feminine.
To understand the activities of civilian vigilantes and state enforcement policies alike, the
US/Mexico border and the US national project should be understood as a racialised and

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gendered construction. Tropes of the ideal citizen and US national subject as white saviour,
patriarch and patriot have long been at play in US/Mexico border politics and rhetoric in
the United States. These operate in ways that justify the continued militarisation of the US/
Mexico border, and simultaneously render invisible violence at the hands of these white
patriarchal protectors. In particular, the patriarchal protector figures strongly in the rhet-
oric of vigilante groups patrolling the US/Mexico border, which circulates through websites
and forums (such as the Minutemen Civil Defense Corp’s now-defunct “Headquarters” site
[2010]), social media (such as Veterans on Patrol’s Facebook live streams), news appear-
ances (such as the American Border Patrol’s Glenn Spencer’s appearance on Fox News and
Friends), and documentary media (such as Chris Burgard’s 2007 Border).

Masculinity, vigilantes and state agents on the US/Mexico border

Nativist vigilantism has a long history in the US/Mexico borderlands, dating back at least to
the drawing of the geographical border after the Treaty of Guadalupe in 1848. According to
Roxanne Doty (2009), the history of the term “vigilante” developed in relation to armed
civilian border patrols, usually defined as extra-legal groups formed in response to what
they perceive as a degradation of law and order. While vigilantism is not a novel phe-
nomenon, in the new millennium US-based groups conducting armed patrols in search of
unauthorised border-crossers have become more visible in popular media and the public
sphere. From the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps, which garnered spectacular media
attention and political voice through its border camps in the 2000s, to Arizona Border
Recon, a paramilitary militia that was featured in the 2015 documentary Cartel Land
(Heineman, 2015) and that continues to patrol southern Arizona, vigilante groups attract
public interest and controversy for their armed patrols.
The Minutemen Civil Defense Corps created a media spectacle in the 2000s when they
organised military-style camps and armed patrols of the US/Mexico border. The
Minutemen’s self-defined task was to watch for “illegal aliens” and report them to the
Border Patrol (Shapira, 2013; Doty, 2009). However, as sociologists Harel Shapira (2013)
and Roxanne Doty (2009) found in their studies of the Minutemen, these patrols were
characterised by inaction and long periods of waiting, rather than persistent detection or
apprehension. Their patrols became meaningful for the volunteers through a performance
of an empowered sense of self as citizen (Shapira, 2013) and through the idea that they were
“protecting America” (Doty, 2009, p. 6). Shapira’s (2013) study of the Minutemen evidences
the ways in which the structure of the camps and the activities of the patrols were highly
gendered, performing a masculine, militarised self-identity. Their sense of citizenship and
agency was likewise gendered, as the volunteers were “looking for male spaces, spaces where
they can carry guns and be soldiers at war, spaces where the way they have learned to be in
the world through previous life experiences makes sense” (p. 46).
Although the Minutemen have disbanded, vigilantism has not ceased and armed patrols
continue to operate under similar logics of performed masculinity and US national citi-
zenship. Anti-immigrant sentiments and calls for the ever-increasing militarisation of bor-
ders also continue, as do the deaths that these militarised borders engender (La Coalición de
Derechos Humanos & No More Deaths, 2016). Violence is a fundamental part of armed
border patrols, even if no weapons are fired or wounds inflicted (Doty, 2009). This is not to
deny actual violence committed by vigilante members, such as the shooting to death of a
man and his daughter in Arivaca at the hands of Minutemen volunteers in 2009

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(Pendergast, 2018), or anecdotal accusations of violent behaviour in encounters with mi-

grants. Equally as important is the persistence of violence in seemingly less physical forms.
Violence is threatened each time an armed patrol is conducted through the weapons that are
carried, presupposing violent confrontations. Additionally, vigilante groups such as
Arizona Border Recon have been known to detain migrants that they encounter, an act of
power that depends deeply on the threat of violence.
While vigilante groups may be framed as outside of the law, as fringe and radical, their
assumptions and motivations are rooted in similar colonial mythologies that underpin more
legitimate or official border practices. US state border enforcement is similarly justified by
themes of a porous and dangerous border, a threat of criminality and depraved violence
from Mexico and Central America and an assumed need to proactively defend a vulnerable
home, nation and family.

The savage Other

The tropes that underpin nativist and US state border patrolling/policing displace violence
onto the region south of the border (primarily Mexico, but also Central America) and the
people who cross the border region (especially in the form of the demonised smuggler or
“coyote”). Vigilante group members and US state officials similarly legitimate their actions
by insisting on the threat of crime, degradation and invasion posed by “illegal aliens”. In
contemporary nativist and US state media, this operates through the trope of the savage
Other, figured as a predatory and pathological masculinity. The savage Other in these
discursive frameworks is specifically a form of Mexican or Central American masculinity
and is often expressed in the form of the smuggler.
An example of how this manifests in nativist media can be seen in The Border States of
America (2014), a documentary produced by the Tea Party Patriots. The 58-minute film fo-
cuses on the threat of the “tide of illegal immigrants” and borders that are “as porous as a
sieve”, supported largely by images of mostly male immigrants either in the process of crossing
or after apprehension. The film emphasises these immigrants’ capacities for aggression,
especially sexual aggression, with images of women’s underwear in trees (labelled “rape trees”
in nativist rhetoric) and dead bodies found in the borderlands. Further, these figures are made
to appear savage, even monstrous, through a visual fixation on surveillance footage, which
showcases endless lines of primarily male bodies walking en masse across remote terrains.
Often they carry drug packs, framing them as criminal; even if they do not showcase clear
signs of criminality, the grainy or nighttime thermal footage renders them illegible and thus
dangerous.
Nativist media sources filter into “traditional” news formats, such as a 2017 ABC15
Arizona news story featuring “illegal immigrants” crossing the Arizona border with
Mexico. The news anchor describes families marching alongside drug mules and wildlife
through Arizona territory, as grainy surveillance footage supports her words visually. The
images come from the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration lobbying or-
ganisation, and Arizona Border Recon, a border group that performs armed patrols. The
story emphasises criminality, placing it in “wild” lands and suggesting that these men are
dangerous and outside the law like the untamed animals in the same territory.
Framing border-crossers, especially male border crossers, as savage Others is also a
prominent theme of US state discourse. While CBP communications are diffused across
media platforms (social media in particular) and media organisations (agents and officials

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are often sourced in news stories, for example), its rhetoric is nowhere more concentrated than
in its public relations digital magazine Frontline. Here, human smugglers are particular objects
of vilification. Articles emphasise the large amounts of money earned by smuggling “their
unwitting migrant victims,” which is used to fund worse criminal enterprises like human
slavery, narcotics trafficking and possibly terrorism (Davis, 2021). Smugglers are described as
callous and villainous criminals who regularly put people at risk when they “lie to vulnerable
populations and prioritise profit over safety” (Copeland and Chandler, 2021). Crucially, the
vilification and othering of male immigrants and smugglers across nativist and US state media
texts depend on the victimisation of vulnerable, feminised women and children.

The vulnerable woman and child

The spectre of violence that mobilises border patrols frequently depends upon the objectified,
victimised and violated bodies of migrant women. The need for border protection is justified
as protecting the nation in both nativist and US state media, a claim that relies on the trope of
the vulnerable woman and child. In particular, the victimisation of women and children is
emphasised in relation to the threat of sexual violence. Armed patrols of the border, in this
discursive constellation, are interpreted as defending women and children against dangerous
Mexican masculinity embodied in the figure of the human smuggler and rapist.
An important thread in nativist rhetoric revolves around violence against women and, in
particular, rape (Olivero, 2011; Shapira, 2013). In documentaries, blogs and online rhetoric
created by or in support of the Minutemen, for example, sexual violence against women is
frequently cited as proof of the danger of the border, bolstering a sense of threat. Another
example comes from an armed patrol group called Veterans on Patrol, which used
Facebook’s livestream function to broadcast videos of themselves along migrant trails and
camps. The group garnered attention on right-wing media outlets such as InfoWars after
finding a homeless camp that contained items like children’s toys and an underground
structure, which the group interpreted as evidence of child sex trafficking. Later, the group
found a small human skull which they also claimed to be proof of child sex trafficking
(despite the skull being later identified as adult).
These claims are appropriated and sensationalised by nativist groups for their own
agenda, but it is important to understand that the phenomenon of sexual violence targeted
against migrant women is real. Sexual violence is a continuing danger for migrants, in
particular women, and should not be underestimated as a significant form of violence.
However, it is just as crucial to unpack and critique the ways that this violence is coopted in
order to sustain the vigilantes’ self-defined identities and justify their aggressive armed
patrols (Palmer, 2021). It is also important to keep in focus Fregoso’s (2003) crucial point
that sexual and domestic violence is a worldwide problem, which should be addressed in
ways that acknowledge the racial, gender, sexual and class dynamics of this violence, while
also working against racist stereotypes of communities of colour as inherently violent. This
rhetoric also reproduces the misleading assumption that the primary threat of violence to
migrant women comes from within migrant communities, effacing patterns of violence
experienced in communities of destination (such as the United States).
In nativist media, the menace of sexual violence is also read onto the bodies of dead
migrant women found in the borderlands (Palmer, 2021). Over the past several decades, the
United States’ “Prevention through Deterrence” strategy has resulted in thousands of
migrant deaths (Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, 2020; La Coalición de

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Derechos Humanos and No More Deaths, 2016). These deaths, both male and female, are
largely the result of exposure to extreme environments (dehydration, hyperthermia, hypo-
thermia) (Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, 2020). However, nativist media
coverage of the border and vigilante groups leverages these deaths in sensationalistic and
fetishistic ways that serve to shock, horrify and confirm fears of the border as a place of
sexualised violence and danger.
For example, in the Tea Party Patriot’s documentary The Border States of America (2014),
migrant women’s bodies are interpreted in gendered and sexualised ways that render them the
victims of Mexican men, either as rapists or callous smugglers who left them to die. Another
example comes from the documentary Border, which follows leaders of the Minutemen Civil
Defense Corps across their border region camps. This documentary is fixated on the spectacle
of dead bodies, and in particular female dead bodies, which are represented in simultaneously
abject and sexualised terms. In a paradigmatic sequence, a Minutemen volunteer describes
finding a beautiful dead woman, while images of her decaying body fill the frame. In both of
these examples, women’s dead bodies are objectified, coopted and used to bolster claims for
the need for US patriarchal protectors in the borderlands.
Customs and Border Protection similarly utilises a repetitive focus on the victimisation of
women and children to emphasise the threat of human smugglers. In a 2021 Frontline story
(Davis, 2021), for example, the text describes the threat of criminal smugglers, reinforced by an
image of migrant women and children being arrested. This makes the gendered dynamics at
play clear: the victims of human smuggling are women and children. Later in the story, an
image of a CBP officer rescuing a child from the Rio Grande River provides evidence of the
difference between the smugglers and the heroic officers, both figures depending on the victi-
mised child. The rescue missions and villainy of the smugglers are also often inflected by themes
of sexual violence. In another article, a CBP officer describes the most challenging part of his
job: “It’s the children. And the women who tell us about being raped and taken advantage of.
Smugglers have absolutely no regard for human life” (Copeland and Chandler, 2021).
In these examples, the real violence experienced by migrant women is not used to raise
awareness or mobilise support for migrant women, but rather to argue for the need for
armed policing of the border. Sexual violence is utilised to portray a vulnerable nation in
need of defence. Real violence and precarity become symbols of fear and threat that
reinforce existing colonising narratives of violent and degenerate masculinity and hy-
persexualised femininity. Tropes of rape, murder and exploitation at the hands of Mexican
and Central American men are leveraged in ways that justify and naturalise a white saviour
presence at the border, the idealised patriarchal US citizen sent to protect the nation, the
home, the domestic, as well as abject female victims of this violence.

The patriarchal protector

In the above examples, tropes of the savage other and the victimised woman or child are
used in the service of justifying civilian armed patrols, heightened border militarisation, or
both. The Minutemen volunteer describing the dead young woman in Border, for example,
was paired with rhetoric about smugglers being callous and cruel, explicitly situated against
his self-construction as moral, just and good. Veterans on Patrol’s interpretations of objects
(toys, skulls, straps, etc.) as evidence of child sex trafficking served a legitimating function
for the group’s armed patrols in southern Arizona, positioning themselves as concerned do-
gooders filling in for a negligent government. Again and again, the savage other and the

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victimised woman or child are used to bolster calls for a patriarchal protector to patrol and
guard the US southern border.
The imagined figure of the US patriarchal protector has a long legacy, traceable to the
trope of white saviourism that helped legitimate and mobilise colonialism. Bebout (2016)
describes how narratives of “white goodness” were used to justify the inhumanity of
colonialism and relied on a binary relationship with the “savage Other” (p. 109). He finds
these logics in contemporary US border protectionism, particularly in what he calls the
“Border Patrol rescue narrative”. Bebout effectively unpacks the racialised dynamics in the
“Border Patrol rescue narrative”, but gender and sexuality are also crucially at play through
the implicit dangerous masculinity of villainous smugglers, the victimised and violated
femininity of female and child migrants and the heroic masculinity on display in the figure
of the US patriarchal protector.
The CBP repeatedly presents stories involving victimised women and children, paired with
rhetoric and images of officers performing acts of rescue. A major theme that emerges across
Frontline’s stories is the representation of CBP agents as brave and courageous, positioned
against smugglers and criminals. The threats posed by the smugglers are emphasised by
framing their actions as immoral and dangerous because they exploit and endanger children
and women. In contrast, the CBP agents are constructed as heroic, vital, courageous, and
strong, defending vulnerable, feminised victims. In CBP public relations media, women and
children migrants are repeatedly represented as monolithic, mute, absolute victims, requiring
rescue from CBP agents. Thus, the work of the CBP becomes framed in terms of bravery,
protection and care, de-emphasising the agency’s daily operations involving policing,
arresting and detaining migrants. A 26 May 2021 article, for example, tells the story of CBP
officers stopping criminals because of their “sense of compassion for those who try to come to
America, just to make better lives for their families” (Davis, 2021). Directly underneath this
quote is an image of migrants hiding in a car trunk, with two children prominently visible at
the front. The suggestion is that these children are victimised by uncaring smugglers, in
contrast to the officers who act as caregiving protectors and patriarchs.
Focusing on officials and agents as heroic patriarchal protectors obscures US border
security repression and systematic or direct violence, hidden under a benevolent story of
bravery and nobility. Constructing the CBP as brave and noble fundamentally relies on
gendered narratives of violence, especially via the masculine villainous smuggler and the
feminised migrant victim. By stepping in and protecting vulnerable women and children, the
CBP officer or agent steps into the place of the patriarch, acting as protector of victimised
migrants and the violated national home.

Conclusion
Vigilante groups provide highly visible spectacles of nativist patriarchal nationalism, but
these ideologies are not exclusive to “extreme” nativist groups; the goals of vigilante patrol
groups are similarly mobilised in US state border militarisation. The underlying constel-
lation of figures – the patriarchal saviour (heroic, US masculinity), the savage Other (deviant
and criminal Mexican and Central American masculinity), and the vulnerable woman and
child (feminised, objectified and victimised Mexican and Central American women and
children) – also fundamentally underpin the practices and rhetoric of US state institutions
and agents such as Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the largest federal law en-
forcement agency of the Department of Homeland Security.

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It is important to consider the shared tropes underpinning both nativist vigilante groups
and official rhetoric and practices of the US state in order to better understand how heg-
emonic masculinity, nationalism and white supremacy operate in contemporary border
politics. Bebout (2016) argues for understanding white supremacy not just as the property
or ideology of fringe groups like the Ku Klux Klan, but as “a system of racial logics and
social relations of which we are all inheritors, and that often goes unrecognized as water to
fish” (p. 5). This system continues to live and find power not because of its manifestations in
fringe groups, but because of “everyday whiteness” manifested in the status quo (p. 5).
This chapter takes a critical focus on the lasting impacts of representational tropes
inherited from a colonising legacy of the US/Mexico border. In particular, tropes of the
savage Other, the victimised woman and child and the patriarchal protector were traced across
a mixture of media, spotlighting media produced by or heavily featuring nativist groups
(often vigilante armed patrol groups) and media emanating from the US state (in particular,
the Customs and Border Protection agency). In doing this, the goal was to place nativist
rhetoric alongside US state discourses in order to highlight their resonances and echoes and
to critique the proximity of “extreme” or “fringe” groups to the “official” or “mainstream”.
An important dynamic of the persistent colonising tropes analysed here is that they rely on
gendered and sexualised webs of signification: the savage Other is positioned as dangerous
and threatening, the victimised woman and child are pitiable and vulnerable and the patri-
archal protector is the righteous and proper civilising force for the chaotic border region.
Gender and sexuality, therefore, are essential in historical and contemporary constructions
of the US/Mexico border and fundamental aspects of continued calls for ever-stricter border
enforcement and militarisation.
Thus, while border vigilantes may appear fringe and radical, their ideological foun-
dations and practices are much closer to legitimated institutions and agents of the US
state, a proximity that is uncomfortable but crucial to recognise. The mythologies that
underpin state and vigilante border patrols are inherited from legacies of violent colo-
nising processes in the borderlands. Rhetoric that continues to position the border as
vulnerable and dangerously open legitimates border militarisation that has resulted in
systemic violence as well as direct violence. While claiming to protect the borderlands,
these narratives mask the root causes of violence against migrants from human smuggling,
an industry that depends on US border enforcement cutting off accessible crossing points
and avenues of legal migration. Instead, the issues are framed in simplistic terms of good
vs. bad, hero vs. villain vs. victim, US patriarchal protector vs. immoral smuggler vs.
exploited women and children.

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 29
MILITARISED MASCULINITY
AND THE PERPETRATION OF
VIOLENCE IN CHILEAN
DOCUMENTARY
Lisa DiGiovanni

“Palabras del espacio exterior” (“Words from outer space”) is a two-page text that forms
part of a chronicle written by Roberto Bolaño (2011) after one of his trips to post-Pinochet
Chile in 1998. Bolaño’s reflections speak volumes about the pervasiveness of violence and
militarised masculinity, conditions that did not simply appear with the 1973 coup and
disappear with the transition to democracy in 1990. Published in English in the collection of
essays and speeches Between parentheses, the title “Words from outer space” references
Interferencia secreta, a clandestinely recorded tape containing a series of military orders and
counter-orders transmitted on 11 September 1973, the day of the military overthrow of the
democratically elected Socialist government of Salvador Allende. It was the bloodiest period
in the seventeen-year-long dictatorship. That tape is analysed in depth by Patricia Verdugo,
a Chilean journalist, writer and human rights activist. What stands out about Bolaño’s
remarks on the military commanders’ words and voices is the way he traces the links
between so-called ordinary masculinity and militarised masculinity and state violence. He
writes that the voices of the commanders were vaguely familiar, like “echoes of a nebulous
fear located in some parts of our bodies” (p. 84).
While the title ironically suggests otherwise, dictatorial violence is not depicted by Bolaño
as “other”, but rather as troublingly familiar. He identifies it in the pranks of schoolboys, the
teacher’s punishing rod, the discourse of national security and the laughter of militarised men
on the tape. In the recording, “Some orders are unequivocal: there’s talk about killing on
sight, arrests, bombings. Sometimes the men who’re talking make jokes: this doesn’t bring
them any closer to us” (p. 84). Bolaño unpacks different kinds of information in these sen-
tences where the distance between civilian and military men is questioned: “Despite it all, the
humor they flaunt is familiar. A humor that one recognizes and would rather not recognize.
The man who’s talking could be my father or grandfather” (p. 84). I begin with Bolaño’s
“Words from outer space” because it captures an image of militarised masculinity and vio-
lence that I will trace through an analysis of two Chilean documentary films made by women
in the post-dictatorship: Lissette Orozco’s Adriana’s Pact (2017) and Lorena Manríquez’s
Ulysses’s Odyssey (2014) seem to echo Bolaño’s conclusion that “there’s no getting around it:
these are the voices of our childhood” (p. 86).

310 DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-34

 Militarised masculinity

Militarised masculinity is a socially constructed identity that involves a process of group

socialisation that reinforces a gender binary (masculinity versus femininity) and the notion
that dominance over others is the most authentic sign of manliness. The militarised identity
takes such perceived distinctions further, intertwining patriarchal conceptions of mascu-
linity with the power of the state to create a nationalistic and hierarchical set of power
relations upheld through violence. In tracing how these two Chilean documentaries make
visible the pervasiveness of militarised masculinity, I also explore what Cynthia Cockburn
(2004, 2012) terms a “continuum of violence”. The notion of the continuum sharpens our
awareness of the process through which violent thoughts and actions come to be seen as
“normal”. Cockburn argues, “Violence in our everyday cultures, deeply gendered, predis-
poses societies to accept war as normal. And the violence of militarization and war, pro-
foundly gendered, spills back into everyday life and increases the quotient of violence in it”
(2012, n.p.). Through an examination of Orozco’s and Manríquez’s nonfiction films, this
essay connects the dots between masculinity, militarism and violence and in so doing aims
to better comprehend the causes and consequences of mass atrocity crimes. In Chile, the
emergence of a militarised state that crushed leftist political opposition through surveil-
lance, detainment and torture was not an aberration. The Pinochet regime emerged from a
society steeped in military culture and shaped by egregious inequalities between men and
women of different classes, races and sexual orientations. Militarism, already deeply rooted,
surfaced powerfully as a backlash to the economic and social reforms of Salvador Allende’s
Popular Unity government (1970–1973). If patriarchy constituted the bedrock of militarism,
then militarism served to buttress patriarchy at a time when the social order was in question.
The military stoked conflict surrounding issues of gender and class while it simultaneously
discredited the democratic political process and framed civilian leadership as weak.
The lionisation of the armed forces and reverence for the figure of the all-powerful
militarised male, therefore, went hand in hand with what Brian Loveman (1997) calls the
“politics of antipolitics” (p. 3). Military and civilian acceptance of this ideology, Loveman
states, entailed “the denial of the legitimacy of labor protests, strikes, and political party
claims of representing diverse interests” (p. 5). These features of anti-politics cannot be
separated from assumptions about gender. Given how the right-wing government of
Pinochet so vehemently defended patriarchal power and the authority of the armed forces
to impose order, it is crucial to understand the relationship between gender, the perpetration
of violence and militarism.
Both Adriana’s Pact and Ulysses’s Odyssey were produced by Chilean women whose family
members played direct or indirect roles in the repression meted out by the Pinochet regime to
eliminate the opposition and solidify power. Their films form part of a relatively recent and
growing body of representations focused on perpetration and complicity. As Michael Lazzara
writes in 2020, while numerous films, novels, historiographies and scholarly works addressed
the experience of victims and their children, stories of perpetrators and their families have been
mostly underexplored. The comparison allows me to explore how militarised masculinity, as a
social and cultural construction, is pervasive, performative, multiple and dynamic. The idea is
not to conflate normative and militarised masculinity; rather, it is to observe how militarism
is gendered and how it permeates civilian thought. As Enloe (2000) explains, militarism and
patriarchy are systems of ideas and practices in which we all participate to some degree. By
spreading through politics and popular culture, war and violence are normalised.
Concurring with Enloe, I argue that to embrace militarised masculinity does not require
one to wear a uniform but to adopt a certain worldview. As the documentaries in this

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chapter illustrate, some of the military’s most fervent proponents were and continue to be
civilians and many are women. These films demonstrate that just as militarism is not an
entirely male domain, anti-militarism and resistance to militarised masculinity are not
inherently female endeavours. My analysis brings out how the gendered process of mili-
tarisation differs among men and women and how a younger generation of women film-
makers reflectively confront these issues through documentary. Ultimately, these films not
only constitute an audiovisual creative challenge to the violence of the regime, they offer
compelling evidence of the connection between militarised masculinity and torture.

Ulysses’s Odyssey by Lorena Manríquez

With its self-conscious style, Ulysses’s Odyssey can be characterised as a hybrid docu-
mentary, combining elements of the essay film, the historical documentary and the auto-
biographical film. It is constructed from interviews, a voice-over narrative, creative
reenactments and archival footage. Set in the decade after Pinochet was arrested on charges
of human rights violations, the film looks back on the 1970s and 1980s through the story of
division in one family. The film centres on the filmmaker’s quest to understand the vastly
different political perspectives of her father and her uncle Ulysses. Manríquez’s approach
underscores the personal and political dimensions of violence and, by extension, provides a
window to analyse the relationship between gender and militarism in the past and present.
In the opening voice-over, the filmmaker explains that her father was a dentist and an
army officer who would tell his children that Chile was the protective sword that hung from
the waist of the United States. He was the eldest son of a peasant family from southern
Chile and managed to study in Santiago, forging a path out of poverty. As in the case of
many working-class and poor men with few career opportunities, Manríquez’s father likely
saw the military not only as the most viable economic option, but also, as historian Leith
Passmore (2017) suggests, “a male rite of passage in terms of social and familial responsi-
bility, discipline, education, employment, and physical toughness” (p. 106).
Through the juxtaposition of interviews and archival footage from the Allende years and
the coup, the filmmaker draws our attention to the ideology of militarism, which maintains
that armed force is the only effective response to political conflict. Both of her parents voice
the “saviour discourse”, which established the military consolidators of the regime as symbols
of patriotism and righteousness. From that perspective, overturning the Allende government
by force was the only viable response to the weak, liberal and unpatriotic civilian-led
democracy. The saviour discourse, which played an enormous role in the widespread collusion
by the military regime, is manifestly gendered. It projected the regime’s leader, General
Augusto Pinochet, as the epitome of patriarchal masculinity. The Pinochet regime’s ideology
was shaped by militarism, as well as an ultra-conservative Catholic discourse, which, in turn,
played the role of legitimising the military regime’s violence as the unfolding of a natural
religious decree.
The filmmaker makes visible how the idealisation of the soldier is transmitted to the
imagination of children both within their families and through education. The military’s
narrative had been so normalised within her family, the filmmaker admits, that she was
shocked to learn that Pinochet had been arrested in 1998 for genocide. As the low-angle
camera captures a black-and-white photo of Pinochet in military uniform, she reflects: “It
was incredible that my childhood hero was now internationally known as an evil dictator on
the same level with Hitler”.1 Manríquez documents the steps that she took to gain a new

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understanding of history, which involved extensive research and interviews with experts
including Peter Kornbluh, the director of the National Security Archive’s Chile
Documentation Project. He played a key role in the declassification of government docu-
ments that revealed the US government’s support of the Pinochet dictatorship. The inter-
view with Kornbluh offers a critical assessment of the military regime that contrasts with
the comments, behaviours and statements of the filmmaker’s father.
Militarisation, as a process, reinforces aggressive masculinity by promoting the notion
that an honourable man’s duty is to engage in violence to protect national security, defeat
enemies and restore hierarchies of power euphemistically called traditional values. The film
shows, however, that not all men conformed to the militarised male ideal. The youngest
brother of the family, Ulysses, also studied in Santiago, but he developed a very different
political perspective, becoming a union leader and vocal supporter of the Popular Unity’s
efforts to achieve agrarian reform. After the coup, Ulysses was persecuted by the military
and subsequently forced into hiding. He found protection at the Austrian Embassy while
the paperwork for his exile in Switzerland was processed.
After thirty years of exile, Ulysses returned to a post-dictatorial Chile where Pinochetism
continued without Pinochet. In a one-on-one interview, Ulysses critiques his brother’s justi-
fication of the coup and considers those who continue to defend military repression accom-
plices in violence. With Ulysses, the filmmaker travels to Villa Grimaldi where she discovers
that one distant relative was disappeared by the regime’s agents for his ties to the Communist
Party. By intercutting scenes at the memory site with contrasting pro- and anti-Pinochet in-
terviews, the filmmaker denaturalises the violent discourses and ideologies underpinning
human rights abuses perpetrated by the regime and defended in the post-dictatorial present.
With the important exception of Ulysses, the filmmaker’s family makes evident their
conviction that the use of military force was inevitable. Without any self-reflective irony,
one family member remarks onscreen that the regime’s control eliminated violence: “Under
Pinochet, there was never a mugging or a theft. Not a single aggression. The country was
totally disciplined”. Such remarks suggest a continuum, rather than a break, of militaristic
ideologies in the post-dictatorial present. In one significant scene, Manríquez captures her
father’s vehemence: “In a war, there’s a principle that says, you have to kill them if they
don’t kill you first”. When his soft tone turns sharp, viewers observe how his perspective
depends on binary thinking bound up in, and weaponised through, a lexicon of fear. Within
these interactions, militarised masculinity is on full display. It is pervasive and performative
and hinges upon the belief that male violence is not only natural but the only effective
response to political conflict.
Like Bolaño’s “Words from outer space,” Manríquez’s documentary reflects the realisation
that the military agents involved in the coup and consolidation of the regime’s power were not
from another planet but frighteningly close to home. This realisation is made explicit when
Manríquez discovers that one of her family’s friends was Marcelo Moren Brito. He was the
head of the Villa Grimaldi (1974–1977), a clandestine concentration camp in Santiago where
approximately 4,500 men and women political prisoners were tortured. Moren Brito, like
other prominent actors in the regime including Manuel Contreras and Miguel Krasnoff, was a
member of the military network and the Chilean army intelligence unit the DINA (Dirección
de Inteligencia Nacional). They were colonels or officers, some of whom were trained at the
US-run School of the Americas. Moren Brito was also part of a death squad of Chilean army
officers who carried out the 1973 Caravan of Death that travelled from north to south ex-
ecuting members of Allende’s coalition. To the filmmaker’s dismay, her mother nostalgically

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recounts how they used to call Moren Brito “Uncle Marcelo”. In 2004, Moren Brito was
convicted of numerous human rights violations (abductions, disappearances, murder, torture)
and later incarcerated for life at Punta Peuco Prison.
The dramatic tension comes to a head when Manríquez finally asks her father directly if
he participated in the torture of political prisoners. He denies the accusations and shows no
signs of remorse. It is an unnerving moment that puts in question the future of the film-
maker’s relationship with her father. By including this scene, she places herself and the
viewer squarely at odds with the primary militarised male in the story. The gendered power
dynamics between father and daughter in this scene contrast dramatically with those
between uncle and niece. Ulysses not only offers a different political perspective but also a
different model of masculinity. Particularly vulnerable in one scene, he struggles through
tears to imagine his brother as a perpetrator of violence. The strategic inclusion of scenes
like this one, alongside contrasting interviews with male and female apologists of the
regime, demonstrates that just as militarism is not an entirely male domain, resistance to
militarised masculinity is not an inherently female endeavour.
On-screen dialogues with family members bespeak the filmmaker’s shifting personal and
political perspective towards the military dictatorship from naïve to critical; however, she
never seems to gain a lucid awareness of the impossibility of building a reconciliatory family
narrative from radically disparate ideologies. If, in making the film, Manríquez tries to glue
together her father’s militarist perspective with her uncle’s anti-dictatorial critique, then
she set herself up for failure. When she resolves to “educate” her father onscreen about the
covert participation of the CIA in the military coup and the horrors of the dictatorship,
viewers witness a strained effort to show his evolution. In a desperate final attempt to sew
up the seams of the tattered family fabric, the filmmaker appears to convince herself that her
father’s actions, whatever they had been, only bespoke his dedication to the family. To the
critical viewer, that logic only reinforces patriarchal ideology and undercuts the potential of
a coherent critique of militarised masculinity. In the final scene, Manríquez concludes that
her quest had ultimately reunited the brothers, however, viewers witness the two men
walking away from each other, taking separate paths. It is an audiovisual metaphor of their
entirely incompatible points of view, shaped by conflicting perspectives on militarism,
gender and violence, that continue to divide so many Chileans.

El pacto de Adriana/Adriana’s Pact

Connell (2000) reminds us that almost all soldiers are men, but most men are not soldiers.
“Though most killers are men, most men never kill or even commit assault” (p. 215). For
the boys and men who end up embracing militarised masculinity, either voluntarily or
unwillingly, arrogance and intolerance are not considered imperfections to overcome but
rather qualities to hone. How, then, can we understand the development of women col-
laborators or perpetrators of state violence? How does the step-by-step process of making
male and female perpetrators differ in the context of state violence and how can docu-
mentary film shed light on such difficult questions?
In the essay “Gendering the perpetrator”, Clare Bielby (2021, p.163) observes that the
perpetration of violence is “a dynamic process, a form of doing (perpetrating) rather than
being (the perpetrator) and a form of doing intimately bound up with many others, not least
the doing of one’s gender”. This perspective gains eye-opening nuance in Lissete Orozco’s
documentary film Adriana’s Pact, which is by and about women. Like Manríquez, Orozco is

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propelled by a family question. But whereas Ulysses’s Odyssey focuses mainly on men,
Adriana’s Pact raises questions about women’s involvement in acts of violence. Raised
entirely by two generations of women (grandmother, mother, aunts), the filmmaker hardly
includes male voices; however, the patriarchy, and her aunt Adriana’s place in it, looms
large. “When I was a girl, I had a strong role model in my life: my aunt Adriana”, recounts
Orozco. “In 2007, she was detained, and I found out she worked as an agent in the DINA
(Direccio
n de Inteligencia Nacional) in Pinochet’s secret police, which has often been
compared to the Gestapo of Nazi Germany. My aunt claims to have never seen or par-
ticipated in any instances of torture, but nevertheless she fled to Australia to avoid trial”.
In April 2010, three years after she was arrested, Orozco interviewed her aunt (Adriana
Rivas, nicknamed “Chany”) about her four years in the DINA (1974–1978). Orozco was a 23-
year-old film student at the time. That footage would become an essential piece in a docu-
mentary that developed over nearly a decade. Claiming herself innocent, Adriana begins by
explaining that she worked for the Ministry of Defense, a statement verified by an image of her
identification card that Orozco cuts to and foregrounds. First, she became a secretary and
translator of classified documents in English for Alejandro Burgos, who was the assistant to
Manuel Contreras. Some viewers will recognise Contreras as the notorious Chilean army
officer and head of the DINA. A photo of the young, smiling Adriana alongside Contreras
raises questions about her involvement in the collection of information, arrests, interroga-
tions, electric shock, rape, murder and disappearance of the bodies of the detainees. At the
time of filming, these were crimes of which Contreras had already been found guilty.
Adriana recalls working in “security” with Juan Morales Salgado, another DINA agent
and military colonel found guilty of human rights abuses, and affirms that those were the
best years of her life. Salgado was the director of the Lautaro Extermination Brigade, or-
ganised by Contreras and based at the clandestine extermination quarters of Calle Simón
Bolívar. He worked with a cohort of more than seventy members to systematically eliminate
the leadership of the Communist Party in Chile and in exile. Importantly, the members of
the brigade came from the four branches of the armed forces and depended on nurses and
other civilian agents like Adriana Rivas. While these women reaped certain benefits from
the dominant group in their performance as patriotic agents, they remained subordinate in
the larger patriarchal domain.
Adriana’s Pact not only raises questions about the presence of women in abhorrent acts
of torture under Pinochet but also how militarism and gender relations contribute in unique
ways to the making of women perpetrators. More broadly, the film points to how mili-
tarisation does not exclusively shape men in the armed forces. It is a larger societal process
that permeates beliefs and actions beyond the barracks. Adriana’s nostalgic reminiscence
about her decision to become a functionary of the Lautaro Brigade betrays her unbroken
deference to those military men in power and her aspiration to be among them, if not
become one of them. Her own words suggest that she used her femininity and sexuality in
the negotiation of power, but at the same time wanted to be one of the boys: “Since I was
pretty, I had a pretty body, I was friendly, I had good diction. That meant I had a good
status. I knew how to behave, how to act, so I could go anywhere. And I would be treated
like one of them”. The interview leaves no doubt that she found her own self-worth in the
promise of a higher social position among powerful military men. As she boasts about
attending to “important visitors like the army officers from Spain”, the filmmaker cuts to
a black-and-white photo that spotlights Adriana, with an ear-to-ear smile, next to an
officer whose military cap she is wearing. Such details reveal how being recruited into a

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male-dominated job that required the use of force involved a profoundly gendered thought
process shaped by patriarchy and a learned admiration for the military.
While militarisation and economic inequality contributed to the making of both male
and female perpetrators in Chile, the film reveals that with each of these contexts, women
were already marginalised, holding less power in relation to men. To recognise this is not to
offer an apology for female violence workers, but rather to gain a better understanding of
how militarism, with its dominant narratives of gender, becomes instrumental in the making
of perpetrators. Even though Adriana distances herself from past human rights abuses, her
behaviours bespeak an ongoing acceptance of militarism and reverence for militarised men.
From her perspective, the ex-military officers that were found guilty continue to be
authoritative men and respectable leaders who may have been wrongfully convicted.
Orozco positions herself, and the viewer, as an interrogator of such ideology, probing
how it has been embraced by both soldiers and civilians, men and women. In one salient
scene, she films a forty-year commemoration of the military coup where she is captured on
camera in reflective silence. The militant celebration and defence of the regime outside the
Caupolicán Theater in Santiago, involves many vociferous women. One holds a sign with a
photo of Pinochet and the words “Good Father, Good Grandfather”. Inside, a group of
men and women raise their arms in a fascist salute as they shout “Long Live Pinochet! Long
Live Franco!” As Orozco leaves the theatre, they chant, “Communists, wimps, your rela-
tives were killed for being assholes.”
In this sequence, the filmmaker effectively exposes a gendered discourse and culture of
militarism that defends state violence as a means to an end. In what follows, Adriana is
captured in an interview stating, “Torture has existed in Chile ever since I can remember …
Everyone knew it had to be done to break people. Because the Communists are tough. They
have a military education that is much better than that of the actual military. We can’t deny
that it was necessary”. Given that these scenes expose the emergence of violence from
ingrained gender norms linked to militarism and authoritarianism, the documentary allows
us to conceptualise violence in more productive ways. The film offers insight into the
gendered dynamics of militarisation in 1970s Chile and also offers a historical throughline
to the present.
Adriana’s militaristic discourse, like that of many rightwing women, emphasises the need
for “security”, protection from “chaos” and the restoration of “order”, which in her eyes
could only be achieved by the armed forces. She sees herself as a political actor and makes
clear that she found value in her pro-military activities. As Margaret Power (2002) argues in
Right-wing women in Chile, such women played a central role in encouraging the military to
stage the coup. However, as Power demonstrates, that idea ran counter to the military’s
understanding “that a woman’s fundamental duty was to be a mother and homemaker”
(p. 246). After the coup, the military dissolved right-wing women’s groups like Poder
Feminino because “they operated with a level of independence that the military found
unacceptable” (p. 242). Despite that, many continued to prove their loyalty, obedience and
even fanaticism for the military men in power.
If Adriana witnessed, and even participated in, the torture of political prisoners, then she
knew firsthand that resisting militarised masculinity would have personal consequences. In
a 2011 interview, filmed as the case developed, Orozco asked her aunt why she stayed in the
DINA, to which she responds, “Because I had no choice. I would have been killed”. Fear
may not have been the only motivation given that she conveys an anti-communist discourse
and admits to the lure of economic gain and entry into the upper echelon of right-wing

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leadership. However, viewing such factors in isolation constitutes a failure to recognise the
links. These factors are bound together and jointly figure in decisions to enforce the will of
militarised men. That is not to say that women perpetrators in the DINA lacked agency.
Even if we consider them responsible agents, women’s roles in state violence must be
understood in light of the imbalance of power in the making of female violence workers,
which occurred under the watchful eye of militarised men. The transformational effects of
fear, militaristic language and a system of rewards and punishments are all gendered and
constitute cornerstones in the creation of perpetrators and, more broadly, controlled
members of a hierarchical, patriarchal military state.
The documentary not only records the pro-dictatorship narrative, it also explains the
historical context, allowing for a more nuanced political analysis of what is represented.
This contextualisation is accomplished through voice-over narration and by intercutting
pro-Pinochet voices with a small but significant number of detractors. One key witness,
Jorgelino Vergara, claims that from 1976 to 1977 Adriana proved her equal capacity for
violence and loyalty to the militarised men above her by actively participating in torture
sessions. According to his testimony, featured in Orozco’s documentary, she would beat the
detainees with her fists and sticks and apply electrical shocks during interrogations, all
actions that Adriana vehemently denies. Journalist Javier Rebolledo corroborates Vergara’s
testimony by stating that everyone in the DINA had to participate in violence as a sign of
loyalty. Vergara and Rebolledo, among others, add layers to the narrative, making
Adriana’s claims of innocence increasingly unbelievable to the filmmaker and viewer.
Orozco, nevertheless, remains a careful listener, always trying to balance a commitment to
uncover the truth with a commitment to familial relationships. The film, which follows the
case till around 2017, has an open-ended conclusion. That year, the attorney general in
Australia agreed to the extradition of Adriana Rivas. Recall that Australia was where
Adriana had lived for over two decades before her arrest while visiting Chile in 2007 and
where she returned when she escaped while on bail. In November 2021, Rivas lost her
second extradition appeal in Australia and will be forced to return to Chile.

De-normalising the continuum of violence

One compelling scene in Adriana’s Pact brings us back to Bolaño’s “Words From Outer
Space”. In the documentary, a contemplative camera pans over a group of mourners out-
side the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago on 11 September 2013, on the
fortieth anniversary of the coup. Viewers hear a tape with sounds of bullets and com-
mentary recorded on 11 September 1973. When we analyse the scene in the context of the
entire documentary and alongside Bolaño’s words, we can trace stunning parallels. Bolaño
(2011) dares to say, “In those familiar voices we can contemplate ourselves, at a remove, as
if watching ourselves in a mirror” (p. 85). It isn’t Stendhal’s mirror, he notes, thereby
suggesting that the image is a refraction, not an exact reflection. That said, “it could be, and
for many who hear the tape it surely will be precisely that” (p. 85). Bolaño, like many men,
is repulsed by hypermasculine theatrics and sickened by killing; however, he is careful to
recognise that such acts are not from another world, but uncomfortably close to his own.
In their documentaries Manríquez and Orozco echo Bolaño’s realisation, but whereas
the former attempts to end on a reconciliatory note, the latter closes with an unsettling and
open-ended collective reflection: “The relationship can’t be destroyed, it transforms … As I
become conscious of this historical puzzle, I look to the future more than that past. The

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puzzle is incomplete, but I ran out of possibilities. I hope that this will be a starting point for
others who deserve to find these hidden pieces”. Orozco positions her documentary as an
intervention in a broader political debate about impunity, and perhaps for that reason, it
received significantly more attention in Chile in comparison with Manríquez’s film. That
said, both documentaries effectively render visible the pervasiveness of militarism and
authoritarianism, even beyond the barracks, and their link to patriarchy and torture.
Whether or not it was their goal, they expose how the perpetration of violence is a gendered
process and how documentary film can be a tool in the broader attempt to de-normalise the
notion that violence is the most effective “solution” to political conflict.

Note
1 Both films are subtitled.

References
Bielby, C. (2021) ‘Gendering the perpetrator — gendering perpetrator studies’, in Knittel, S. and
Goldberg, Z. (eds) The Routledge international handbook of perpetrator studies. New York:
Routledge, pp. 155–168.
Bolaño, R. (2011) Between parentheses. Translated from the Spanish by N. Wimmer. New York: New
Directions.
Cockburn, C. (2004) ‘The continuum of violence: A gender perspective on war and peace’, in Giles, W.
and Hyndman, J. (eds) Sites of violence: Gender and conflict zones. Berkeley: University of
California Press, pp. 24–44.
Cockburn, C. (2012) ‘Don’t talk to me about war. My life’s a battlefield,’ 50.50, Open Democracy, 25
November. Available at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/dont-talk-to-me-about-war-
my-lifes-battlefield/ (Accessed: 19 September 2022).
Connell, R. W. (2000) The men and the boys. St. Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin.
El pacto de Adriana (2017) Directed by L. Orozco [Film]. Meikincine.
Enloe, C. (2000) Maneuvers: The international politics of militarizing women’s lives. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
La odisea de Ulises (2014) Directed by L. Manri
quez and M. Picker [Film].
Lazzara, M. J. (2020) ‘Familiares de colaboradores y perpetradores en el cine documental chileno:
memoria y sujeto implicado,’ Atenea, 521, pp. 231–248.
Loveman, B. (1997) The politics of antipolitics: The military in Latin America. Wilmington, DE:
Scholarly Resources.
Passmore, L. (2017) The wars inside Chile’s barracks: Remembering military service under Pinochet.
Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Power, M. (2002) Right-wing women in Chile: Feminine power and the struggle against Allende:
1964–1973. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

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 30
WOMEN’S ACTIVIST
FILMMAKING AGAINST
GENDERED VIOLENCE
IN PAKISTAN
Rahat Imran

Introduction
“Honour-revenge”, “honour-killing”, “honour-rape”, “forced marriages”, “acid-attacks”,
“stove-burning” and “female genital mutilation” are practices of pre-meditated physical,
sexual and psychological violence against women, which are – like all forms of domestic
violence – bound up in gender norms and culturally-specific understandings of appropri-
ately gendered behaviour. It is significant to note that all of these acts of gender violence and
maltreatment are generally either perpetrated directly by men, or carried out with male
consent and support, and primarily in men’s interests. The Human Rights Watch reports on
honour-related crimes in Pakistan:

Almost 1,000 women are murdered in Pakistan in the name of honour each year —
killed on the grounds of “unacceptable” amorous relationships, defiance of physical or
cyber-gendered spaces, brazenness in dressing and language or perceived immorality.1
(Bandial and Dad, 2020)

Despite growing resistance, media attention and feminist interventions for stricter state
legislations and punishments, violence against women globally continues to increase (BBC,
2016). In tribal and patriarchal societies like Pakistan where gender-discriminatory parallel
legal systems can hold sway over the subjugation of women’s rights, freedoms and safety,
this situation can be compounded by legal loopholes, socio-cultural constraints and state
negligence. For example, in the tribal areas of Pakistan, patriarchal tribal customs, tradi-
tions and honour codes continue to dictate an oppressive parallel legal system known as the
jirga and panchayat (tribal juries and councils), headed by tribal chiefs and supported by
feudal landlords. Under the guise of custom and tradition, these tribal councils have been at
the forefront of supporting and carrying out horrific human rights violations and gender-
specific punishments such as karo kari (honour killings), swara (giving away of minor girls
in forced marriages as compensation to settle disputes or avenge murders) and honour-rape
to settle scores (Imran, 2016). Notably, the actions of these tribal councils are in conflict

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-35 319

This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 license.
 Rahat Imran

with – sometimes longstanding – national policy, such as Pakistan’s ratification of the UN

Convention of the Rights of the Child (1990) which prohibits child marriages, or the
Marriage Restraint Act 1929 and the Pakistan Penal Code (Articles 310 & 338- E) which
also prohibit and criminalise the sale and underage marriage of girls (Berti, 2003).
Pakistani independent women filmmakers Samar Minallah and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy
have used the documentary film medium to bring crucial attention to various forms of
physical violence and victimisation of women in Pakistan and press for state intervention
for legislative and policy changes to ensure safety and justice for women. Appropriating film
scholar Thomas Waugh’s concept of the “committed documentary” and the interventionist
“socio-political positioning” (1984, p. xiv) of the filmmaker in the process of change itself,
this chapter discusses the activist and “legislative” role their representative films have played
in instigating legal reforms in Pakistan (Nichols, 2001, p.70). Specifically, I examine issue-
oriented depictions of women’s victimisation in Minallah’s documentary film Swara: A
Bridge Over Troubled Waters (2003) and Obaid-Chinoy’s two documentaries, Saving Face
(2011) and A Girl In the River: The Price of Forgiveness (2015). A contextual discussion of
these films highlights the gendered nature of extreme forms of violence inflicted on women
in the name of so-called “honour” and revenge, while tribal customs and practices, patri-
archal mindsets, legal loopholes and state apathy have served to protect male perpetrators
of women-specific violence and murders.

Swara: A Bridge Over Troubled Waters ( Samar Minallah, 2003)

Anthropologist and filmmaker Samar Minallah, has been at the forefront of leading
advocacy projects and making activist documentary films for over two decades. Minallah is
a Pakhtun woman whose familiarity with the socio-cultural traditions, contexts and
regional languages (Dari, Pashto) in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province of Pakistan
has facilitated bonding with her subjects and encouraged them to speak of their ordeals on
film. Under the auspices of her non-governmental organisation, Ethnomedia &
Development, Minallah’s film productions sit alongside research projects and advocacy
campaigns all of which focus on women, children and human rights issues and are intended
to raise awareness of injustices and push for socio-legal interventions.2 Her films focus on
issues of gender rights in the tribal areas of the KP province, a region that has been his-
torically associated with rigid socio-cultural customs and notions of “honour” that par-
ticularly affect the status and treatment of women in these communities.
As the lead researcher for the first statistical study on the tribal custom of swara in
various districts of KP, Minallah drew attention to how honour and revenge are used to
justify forced marriages. At the time of her research in the early 2000s, swara was largely
unacknowledged in public discourse in the country at large and so Minallah’s work had a
powerful impact. The study detailed cases where a jirga (tribal council) gave a two-month-
old girl in marriage to a one-year-old boy; girls were promised in marriage to men subs-
tantially older than them; and even unborn girls were promised as compensation between
disputing groups as a peace-making deal to resolve feuds, redeem so-called “honour” and
avenge murders (Ethnomedia, 2006, p. 57). Minallah comments:

Swara is known to many in Pakistan as an alternative dispute resolution mechanism

whereby disputes (often murders) are resolved by traditional peace-keeping institu-
tions (jirga, local council of elders) without having to invest time and money in lengthy

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judicial processes. The price of this dispute settlement is paid by the women/girls from
the family of the aggressor who enter the household of the bereaved family, by way of
unceremonious wed-lock, to remind the aggressors of the injustice their men bestowed
upon the bereaved family.
(Ethnomedia, 2006, p. 2).

In addition to producing a written report based on this research, Minallah used this
research as the basis for her award-winning documentary, Swara: A Bridge Over Troubled
Waters in order to challenge these culturally entrenched tribal customs.
In the film, it is revealed that under these forced marriages, the “swara” female is destined
to a life of emotional, psychological and physical torture in her in-laws’ home as the
daughter of the enemy household (Imran, 2016, p.162). We learn that, ironically, the
practice is enacted by a woman from the aggrieved family who selects a girl from the ag-
gressor’s/murderer’s home to be given away as swara on reaching maturity. The arrange-
ment is celebrated by slaughtering goats and festivity while the actual marriage ceremony is
not commemorated. Additionally, should the feud involve the murder of an influential
person, more than one female can be offered as swara as a status symbol.
Focussing on the legal dimensions of the tribal custom, Islamic scholars interviewed in
the film explain that the marital union imposed on minor girls, whose consent to the
marriage is absent from the deal, amounts to nikah-bil-jabr (forced marriages) which are
forbidden by Islam, hence illegal in religious terms (see also Khel, 2003). They point to the
Sharia provisions of the Diyat (blood money) and Qisas laws (execution of the murderer)
for murder and revenge. In contrast, swara is no more than an illegal tribal practice that is
enforced under the tribal code of conduct of the Pukhtuns, known as Pukhtunwali.3 In a
counter-argument a tribal chief brazenly defends the custom stating that when the Sharia
laws of Qisas and Diyat are not seen as sufficient to avenge a crime, “tribal wisdom” is
enforced by giving away girls and women as swara so that they may unite the feuding
families through their offspring who will connect both households permanently. Defending
the custom, another tribal elder expresses his contempt for swara girls and women:

I may accept a swara girl as payment for my son’s murder, she will get food and
clothing but I will find it very difficult to have any feelings of kindness towards her in
my heart. I will not accord her any marriage ceremony. I will simply whisk her away
by hand or on horseback. She is the price for my son’s death and will be treated
accordingly. This is our custom. Of course I will taunt her and humiliate her. After all,
she is the price paid for my son’s death.

Minallah contrasts these statements in support of the practice with biographical represen-
tations and compelling testimonies from victims. These stories are accompanied by visuals
which highlight the youth and vulnerability of tribal girls who may become potential vic-
tims, for example, contrasting their small stature relative to authoritative male adult figures
and centring their pained and confused expressions (Figure 30.1). The repeated use of such
images underscores the extreme cruelty of swara as an illegitimate practice that uses young
females to conciliate crimes committed by adult men in the tribal communities.
Swara was successful in placing the custom of swara as a gender-specific practice on the
national and international radar through screenings on national television channels and at
conferences and workshops. The film is thus an example of what Julia Lesage (1990) calls

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Figure 30.1 Emphasising vulnerability in Swara (Samar Minallah).

the feminist consciousness-raising documentary film, playing a strategic role in raising

awareness of women’s issues and struggles for an activist purpose (in this case, with a view
to policy reform). Notably, the film has been shown in various districts and far-flung areas
within the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, as well as aired on various Pakistani television
channels such as the state-owned Pakistan Television, Peshawar and PTV World, and
independent channels such as Geo Television and the ARY channel. It has had public
screenings at a range of festivals, in Pakistan – including Mateela Film Festival (2004) and
Kara Film Festival, Karachi (2003) – as well as internationally at Regent Park Film
Festival, Toronto (2003), South Asian Film Festival, Nepal (2003), South Asian Human
Rights Film Festival, New York (2004) and The South Asian Film Education Society
International Film Festival, Vancouver, Canada (2013). It has also screened on university
campuses in the UK (Sussex, 2004) and USA (Pittsburgh, Syracuse and Columbia, all in
2004) and as part of the Amnesty International USA On Campus Film Festival (2004). It
has been included in the Amnesty International New York archives because of the strong
influence it has had in communication for social change (Author’s email correspondence
with Minallah, 2021) and has received worldwide acclaim and awards, among them the
prestigious Perdita Huston Activist for Human Rights Award in 2007.
Such international acclaim, coupled with raising awareness through national media and
advocacy campaigns, placed pressure on the government for decisive action and legal

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reforms. Minallah’s committed stance, filing a petition for Public Interest Litigation in the
Supreme Court of Pakistan in 2003, and persistent campaigning against the custom (also
practiced under the names of Khoon Baha, Sung Chatti, Irchai, Ivaz and Vanni in other
tribal regions of the country), played a significant “legislative role” (Nichols, 2001, p.70) in
the criminalisation of the custom. The film made legislative history as, taking suo moto
notice, the Supreme Court of Pakistan used the film as evidence to pass benchmark legis-
lation in 2005 that criminalised swara as victimisation of women (Ethnomedia, 2006, p.126).
The state law now treats the practice of offering and accepting by way of compensation any
child or woman against her free will as a criminal offence under Section 310-A inserted into
the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) (Ethnomedia, 2006, p.25). Additionally, the Federal Shariat
Court of Pakistan also declared the custom of swara as an un-Islamic practice (Asad, 2021).
Testifying to the utility of documentary cinema in the service of human rights and social
change, Minallah’s film remains a pioneering Pakistani activist documentary film made by a
woman filmmaker that aided in the criminalisation of an ignored gender-discriminatory
custom. Minallah estimates that, based on the petition filed by her, around 70 girls had been
saved from swara marriages in cases where the Supreme Court of Pakistan intervened, while
many others continued to be recovered as cases were reported to the police (Author’s email
correspondence with Minallah, 2021).

The activist films of Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

Minallah is not alone in using her filmmaking to challenge gender-based violence in
Pakistan. In this section, I turn my attention to the films of Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy whose
films Saving Face (2011) and A Girl In the River: The Price of Forgiveness (2015) have
tackled the issues of acid-throwing and honour-based violence respectively.
Acid throwing has been on the rise in Pakistan in recent years (Orujova, 2022). Commonly
known as “acid burning” or “acid throwing” this practice entails throwing acid on a woman’s
face and body to disfigure her as violent revenge for a number of reasons or perceived
transgressions. These may include insufficient dowry, infertility or inability to produce a son,
bringing so-called “dishonour” to the family, suspicion of extra-marital or illicit romantic or
sexual relations, rejected marriage proposals or simply a husband’s desire for a second
marriage (Women Without Borders, 2010). While this violent practice has received consid-
erable attention and coverage in Pakistani media, Obaid-Chinoy’s documentary film Saving
Face (2011), recipient of the Oscar award for Best Documentary (Short Subject) category in
2012, was instrumental in drawing worldwide attention to the issue (Chow, 2012).
Supported by the Acid Survivor’s Trust (ASF) in Pakistan, Saving Face revolves around
the stories of two severely disfigured Pakistani female victims of acid attacks, Rukhsana
and Zakia. The film follows their struggle in the process of rehabilitation, seeking justice
and undergoing reconstructive surgery by a UK-based Pakistani plastic surgeon, Dr
Mohammad Jawad, who returns to Pakistan to treat them for free. As the survivors’ stories
of acid attacks unfold, we see highly disturbing images of their physical disfigurement and
permanent damage to their bodies.
We learn that when 39-year-old Zakia attempted to divorce her husband, a drug addict
and alcoholic, he retaliated by dousing her with acid, deforming her face beyond recognition
and blinding her in one eye. The second victim, Rukhsana, 25, narrates that she was burned
with acid by her husband and then set on fire by his sister and mother. However, her ordeal
did not end with this attack as she had no choice other than to continue living with her

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husband because of her pregnancy. It is significant that the husbands of both victims deny
attacking them and instead place the blame on the women themselves for their
disfigurement.
While the acid attack victims receive medical attention, in a parallel development we see
Pakistani woman parliamentarian, Marvi Memon, move a bill in the National Assembly
seeking legislation for the protection of women against acid attacks. During the course of
the film, we see the unanimous and successful passage of the bill into law.4
In Saving Face for the first time we see Pakistani female victims of acid attacks not only
receiving reconstructive surgery but also justice as Zakia’s husband is convicted of assault
and sentenced to two life sentences under the new Acid Control and Acid Crime Prevention
Bill 2010 and The Prevention of Anti-Women Practices (Criminal Law Amendment) Bill
2008, that legislates severe punishment for physically harming women with corrosive
substances.
Obaid-Chinoy used the international success of her film as a platform to work with an
anti-acid campaign, Project SAAVE (Stand Against Acid Violence) with an aim to screen
her film at various forums worldwide to spread public awareness, involve rights organisa-
tions and mobilise public opinion for justice and reforms (Robbins, 2012). It is particularly
significant that, given the enthusiasm with which Obaid-Chinoy’s achievement has been
received within Pakistan, Saving Face has been dubbed in regional languages for screening
as an educational tool on local TV channels, as well as in educational institutions and other
venues in villages and towns across Pakistan for consciousness-raising, and encouraging
social activism against acid-attacks (Agha, 2016).
Significantly, Saving Face renewed the urgent need for accountability, stringent laws and
swift prosecution of offenders, underscoring the legislative and pedagogical value of doc-
umentary cinema as a cross-cultural tool in the service of consciousness-raising, justice and
social change. As a tribute, in 2012, the then president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari,
conferred the second most prestigious national civilian award, the Hilal- e-Imtiaz (Crescent
of Excellence) on Obaid-Chinoy in recognition of her activist documentary (The Daily
Dawn, 2012).
While acid attacks are usually carried out on women as acts of revenge by rejected
suitors, husbands and in-laws, honour killings are committed by close male relatives such as
fathers, brothers, uncles and cousins to uphold so-called family and tribal “honour”. It is
estimated by official figures that over a thousand females are subjected to honour killings
each year in Pakistan, although the number may be higher as not all cases are reported
(Hussain, 2016). Women may be accused of bringing honour violence on themselves due to
allegedly “dishonourable” conduct, which could include an alleged affair, extra-marital
sexual relations, elopement, desire for divorce or even employment. All male members of a
woman’s immediate, extended and marital family in a tribal and feudal setup can claim the
power to commit these murders as justification for redeeming so-called family and tribal
“honour” (Hassan, 1995). Although men can also be victims of honour killings, normally it
is women who are targeted as the symbols of so-called family, tribal, and religious
“honour”. As H.Q. Shah (1998, 4) explains:

Honor is a male value derived and viewed against the index of a woman’s body.
Although honor is located in material wealth, the language and expression of honor
resides in the body. In fact honor and shame are two parallel states, honor is mas-
culine, shame is feminine. Just as men have honor, women have shame. A woman’s

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shame summarizes her public reputation and social position in much the same manner
as honor does for men … . Killing and violence, therefore, are not crimes, but are
defenses against dishonour.

Obaid-Chinoy’s documentary film, A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness (2015) tells
one such story focused on the ordeal and testimony of a 19-year-old girl, Saba, in the city of
Gujranwala, Pakistan, who survived an honour killing attempt by her father and uncle for
marrying a boy of lower social status out of choice. The film exposes the loopholes in the legal
system itself that enable men to murder women with impunity on the pretext of a “moralistic
stance” which centres patriarchal perceptions of family “honour” (Hayat, 2002, p.91).
Saba recounts her father and uncle taking her from her in-laws’ house hours after her
marriage to a secluded place by a river, beating her, shooting her in the face and hand and
throwing her in a gunny sack in the river to die as punishment for bringing what they
perceived as “dishonour” to the family. Miraculously surviving the brutal attack, Saba
managed to return to her husband. Taking the matter to court, we see in the film that Saba
is able to have the perpetrators jailed. However, despite her reluctance, she is eventually
coerced by family and social pressure and drops the case against her father and uncle for the
sake of upholding “family honour”. Given that Pakistani law provides for a murderer’s next
of kin to forgive the crime (although in this case, the victim survived the attempted murder),
Saba is directed by a lawyer to state that she had implicated her father and uncle “in a state
of anger” and now forgives them. The case is hence withdrawn. Needless to say, this legal
provision has been instrumental in facilitating culprits of honour-killings to evade pun-
ishment and go scot-free.
We see Saba’s father and uncle freed from jail and treated by their neighbours and
community as “honourable” men who upheld family honour by punishing a woman from
their family for eloping and contracting a marriage against their wishes. What is significant
is that, ironically, this act of negotiated compromise and forgiveness was enabled by the
Pakistani law itself that did not consider these acts as attempted murder, but rather pro-
vided leniency and legal cover in facilitating compromise and resolution through a pardon
by the family members of the victim and the perpetrator themselves (Imran, 2016). The film
ends with Saba’s reconciliation with her family as a result of her compromise.
Winning in the Best Documentary (Short Subject) category at the 88th Academy Awards
held in February 2016 in the US, Obaid-Chinoy’s film garnered tremendous attention both
at home and worldwide for the crime of honour killing, renewing national debate and
activist intervention for legal reforms (Selby and Rodrigues, 2019). In 2016, the then
Pakistani Prime Minister, Mian Nawaz Sharif, invited Obaid-Chinoy to screen her film at
the prime minister’s house, pledging his government’s resolve to enforce stringent legal
measures to curb the practice (The News International, 2016). Resultantly, because of
continued pressure on the government, the Criminal Law (Amendment) (Offences in the
name or pretext of Honour) Act of 2016 repealed the loophole that allowed offenders to
seek forgiveness (BBC, 2016). However, despite the changes in law, honour killings continue
to be committed in the tribal regions in particular where family and tribal honour govern
women’s conduct and freedoms through the parallel tribal legal system of the jirga and
panchayat (tribal juries and councils). Saba’s story demonstrates these contradictions well.
Whilst her safety within her community hinges on her withdrawal of the case against her
family members, the global circulation of her story in Obaid-Chinoy’s film has been
instrumental in pushing for legal change at a national level. The film shows that, within her

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community, Saba’s compromise upholds the family honour by accepting the legitimacy of
the men’s actions; but on a national and international stage the circulation of Obaid-
Chinoy’s film challenges that, placing shame not on Saba but on the perpetrators and the
structures which enable their violence. What this means for Saba personally is not some-
thing the film can address, but this does suggest some of the inherent tensions in this kind of
activist film. In using the personal story to push for structural change, what happens to the
individual once the cameras stop rolling?

Conclusion
As all three short films discussed here share horrific first-hand personal experiences and
ordeals recounted by victims of shocking acts of emotional and physical violence enacted on
the pretext of honour and revenge, they not only lend credence to the urgency for legal reforms
and stern law-enforcement measures but also to the power of depicting real-life stories
through the documentary medium to muster resistance and activism against state apathy.
Minallah and Obaid-Chinoy stand out as pioneering and representative activist Pakistani
women documentary filmmakers whose films have worked as a form of “consciousness-
raising” (Lesage, 1990, p.224) by promoting awareness about horrific forms of violence
against women that require urgent attention and legal reforms. They have forced account-
ability for state apathy and gender biases in the law-enforcement system that have led to
significant legislative changes. Broaching gender-specific topics of forced marriages, acid
attacks and honour killing on film, biographical accounts of female victims, and the award-
winning prominence and international acclaim of their productions, are factors that have
collectively contributed to establishing the utility of documentary cinema as an activist tool
for resistance, cross-cultural communication and social change in Pakistan.
It is no small victory that the three films discussed here have served as catalysts for
legislative reforms in a country beset with patriarchal and gender-discriminatory mindsets
that condone violence against women on the pretext of so-called “honour”.

Acknowledgement
The article was written during the author’s Post-doctoral Research Fellowship at the
Department of Film and Screen Media, University College Cork, Ireland (2020–2022) and
has received funding for Open Access publication from the European Union’s Horizon 2020
research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement
No 837154.

Notes
1 For more detail on violent crimes against women in Pakistan see Human Rights Watch’s 2020
summary: https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2021/country-chapters/pakistan (Accessed:12 February
2022).
2 For details on Minallah’s background as a freelance writer, human rights activist, documentarist,
and her advocacy projects, visit: https://samarminallahkhan.com. (Accessed: 10 February 2022).
3 Elsewhere, Samar Minallah points out that not only is the practice of swara un-Islamic but it is
also against the basic principles of the Pukhtunwali code which considers women as a symbol of
honour who are meant to be kept away from the sight of strangers, and more so from the gaze of
enemies ( Ethnomedia, 2006).

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4 It is pertinent to mention here that in a significant move in December 2011 the then President of
Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, signed into law the much-awaited Criminal Law (Second Amendment) Bill
2011. An outcome of persistent pressure and demand from rights organisations and activists, this Bill
includes The Acid Control and Acid Crime Prevention Bill 2010, and The Prevention of Anti-Women
Practices (Criminal Law Amendment) Bill 2008, which prohibits forced marriages, gives women
inheritance rights and legislates severe punishment for physically harming women with corrosive
substances. The Bill also legislates a punishment of 14 years to life imprisonment for crimes involving
the disfiguring of human organ/body by a corrosive substance ( The News International, 2011).

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 PART 3

Gender-based violence online

 GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE
ONLINE
Introduction to Part 3
Susan Berridge and Karen Boyle

There is a fundamental distinction between how we have thought about gender, violence
and the media so far and the focus of Part 3: namely, that this section considers how media
and communications technologies do not simply represent gender-based violence but can
themselves be used in abusive ways. It is also worth noting here that Part 3 is more con-
sistently focused on gender-based violence than other sections and this may be a reflection of
the more mobile constructions of gender in online spaces. For instance, much violence
online attacks individuals based on the perception of their gendered identity, which may or
may not match their embodied identities – though obviously, this does not apply in the same
way in relation to public figures.
The consideration of the role of media and communications technologies in abusive
practices is not unique to digital media. The radical feminist critique of pornography, for
instance, has long insisted that pornography does not simply represent violence against
women, but that its production depends on material violence (Garner and Vera-Gray,
Chapter 27; also Cole, 1993; Dines, 2011). In the #MeToo era, there has been increased
attention to abusive production practices in mainstream entertainment forms – as Li’s
chapter in Part 1 demonstrates – however, the relationship between these practices and on-
screen representation is less clear-cut in these contexts than in pornography. Given the
emphasis of the current collection on fact-based media, these debates have remained largely
beyond our purview so far, though we return to them towards the end of Part 4 (Holland
and Hewett, Chapter 56). The essays in Part 3 thus provide this collection’s most sustained
engagement with how media forms can themselves be used in abusive ways.
Whilst previous sections have included geographically located case studies, perhaps
unsurprisingly, explorations of gender-based violence online have not typically been so
marked by national boundaries. In some ways, this is reflective of the more permeable
boundaries in online space. However, it is also indicative of the fact that much foundational
work is still taking place in relation to gender-based violence online, helping us to con-
ceptualise and name specific forms of online abuse (see chapters by Powell, Ging, McGlynn
and Harmer) and reflect on possible interventions (Salter, Powell, Are and Gerrard). This
work draws on existing feminist theorisations of gender and violence offline – such as Liz
Kelly’s (1988) notion of the continuum and subsequent revisions to it (Boyle, 2019) – but

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-37 331

 Susan Berridge and Karen Boyle

there is also a concern with the new dimensions of this violence and, specifically, how the
architecture and affordances of particular platforms shape online abuse (see chapters by
Jane, Banet-Weiser and Maddocks, Semenzin and Bainotti).
Responding to gender-based violence online also poses particular challenges for
nationally based legislatures (McGlynn) as well as platforms and users (Jane, Salter, Are
and Gerrard). As the reference to national legislatures suggests, nation and location do not
completely disappear in Part 3 and can also be important in situating online abuse in
relation to offline contexts. In Chapter 40, for instance, Satu Venäläinen, demonstrates how
perceptions of Finland as a gender-equal nation are mobilised in discussions on men’s rights
to construct men as victims of an equality discourse “gone too far”.
These examples also demonstrate the enduring importance of intersectional approaches
to understanding gender-based violence online and highlight that the relationship between
online and offline spaces is at stake throughout Part 3. As many chapters illustrate, despite
the increasingly porous boundaries between online/offline contexts, online gender-based
violence remains poorly understood and is often not taken as seriously as physical forms of
abuse in the material world. Several chapters call for more attention to be paid to victim/
survivors’ and practitioners’ experiences to illuminate the very real harms of technology-
facilitated forms of abuse (see Powell, McGlynn, Semenzin and Bainotti, Salter, Colliver,
Are and Gerrard). In turn, scholars highlight the way in which ineffective responses by, and
regulation of, the tech industry leaves users to manage this abuse themselves, with highly
detrimental impacts on well-being and their ability to fully participate in public life
(Colliver, Harmer, Esposito).
Many of the chapters in this section identify new forms of gender-based violence emerging
in, and facilitated by, specific online spaces. At the same time, researchers push back on
“technological determinist” framings, arguing for the need to situate these developments in
relation to longer traditions of patriarchal power imbalances that are rooted in normative
constructions of gendered sexuality. These traditions are illuminated in chapters that explore
the manosphere and networked misogyny. The logic of these homosocial masculine spaces
reinforces extreme gendered power hierarchies, with users intimidating, threatening and
humiliating women (Ging, Semenzin and Bainotti), undermining feminist efforts to address
gender-based violence (Venäläinen) and/or perpetuating homophobic discourses (Andreasen).
The section begins with chapters by Anastasia Powell and Debbie Ging, both of whom
situate their discussion of online gender-based violence in relation to older and more
familiar histories of men’s violence against women. In Chapter 31, Powell – approaching
these issues from a criminological perspective – provides an overview of different forms of
abuse captured under the term “technologically-facilitated intimate partner violence”. The
word facilitate is key: intimate partner violence is not caused by media and communications
technologies but takes on distinctive shapes through their affordances. She calls for this
abuse to be seen as part of a wider continuum of men’s violence against women in order to
envision holistic responses that combine legal, social and technical considerations. In
Chapter 32, Ging – working in media and internet studies – similarly advocates for urgent
and holistic solutions to online anti-feminism and misogyny in the manosphere. Using
examples ranging from incel forums to #Gamergate, Ging explores the new possibilities
offered to online men’s rights formations to silence, intimidate and harass women and girls,
and to radicalise and recruit men and boys. In these ways, she argues that they re-establish
male power through the constant re-articulation of its loss, echoing Kathryn Claire Higgins’
arguments about the representation of white male vigilantes in Chapter 7.

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By drawing attention to the structural nature of online misogyny and making connec-
tions to hegemonic constructions of masculinity and gendered sexuality, Ging challenges
the normative idea that the rise of technologically-facilitated gender-based violence is
predominantly a result of individual “bad actors”, an analysis which is extended by Emma
A. Jane in Chapter 33. Jane argues that attention needs to turn away from “bad actors” to
the architecture of surveillance capitalism, while still remaining attentive to the complex
relationship between technology and wider socio-cultural and socio-economic factors.
Jane’s chapter also provides a potent sense of the harms associated with technology-
facilitated gender-based violence, harms which span online and offline worlds and women’s
engagements with private and public spheres. Whilst Jane takes on the complex systems of
the digital world, her argument resonates with classic feminist analyses of how gender-based
violence is structurally enabled, formed and legitimated, and thus cannot be effectively
ended by focusing only on individual perpetrators (the “bad actors” of her title) and their
interpersonal relationships.
In Chapter 34, Sarah Banet-Weiser and Sophie Maddocks also highlight the dynamic
nature of online misogyny but do so with reference to how this has played out on a specific
platform: TikTok. Taking TikTok’s recent ban on misogyny as their starting point, they
explore the structural, cultural and technological conditions that enable hatred of women
and girls to continue to flourish on the site, in diffuse, affective, but still highly dangerous,
ways. Their case studies move from overt trivialisations of domestic violence, through to
more subtle internalised misogyny, demonstrating insidious ways in which misogyny on
TikTok continues to circulate and evade detection. In doing so, they emphasise the limi-
tations of platform bans as a way to address complex, structural problems.
The next two chapters explore the non-consensual dissemination of intimate images. At
the centre of Clare McGlynn’s chapter is a question of terminology – what is at stake in the
naming and framing of particular forms of men’s violence against women? McGlynn
identifies a key tension here: as feminist scholars, we need to use the dominant language of
the public domain to make our work comprehensible, yet that language is often unfit for
feminist purpose. Specifically, McGlynn focuses on the limitations of the term “cyber-
flashing” to describe the dissemination of non-consensual images of penises or “dick pics”.
“Cyberflashing” makes invisible the gendered nature of the violence, which is typically
perpetrated by men and experienced by women. The reluctance to use terms like “dick” or
“penis” in some mainstream media as well as policy contexts – and the subsequent reliance
on gender-neutral terms (“genital”, “sexually explicit”) – is continuous with the reluctance
to name male violence discussed in so many chapters in this collection. This framing, she
argues, has significant implications for public understandings of the nature of this abuse,
making it difficult to develop appropriately focused legal and policy responses.
Silvia Semenzin and Lucia Bainotti share this concern with the legal implications of the
inadequacy of existing, apparently gender-neutral, understandings of non-consensually dis-
seminated intimate images. Their chapter draws on findings from a covert digital ethnography
of Italian groups and channels on the popular messaging app Telegram. They demonstrate
how the platform’s architecture – where it is possible for users to be relatively anonymous, to
form large homosocial groups, and where content moderation is devolved to users – creates a
conducive context (Kelly, 2016) for the proliferation of online gender-based violence. They
outline common types of non-consensually disseminated intimate images found on Telegram,
gesturing to emerging challenges including the automation of dissemination, artificial intel-
ligence, immersive virtual realities and metaverses. These developments have worrying

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implications for the possible real-world identification of women represented in the images.
Ultimately, they call for greater platform regulation and responsibility to curtail non-
consensually disseminated intimate images online.
In Chapter 37, Michael Salter also considers how terminology can obfuscate the gendered
and sexualised nature of particular forms of online violence, focusing on online child sexual
exploitation. Salter explores media coverage of major US law reform efforts designed, in part,
to address online child sexual exploitation. In the initial media reporting around these re-
forms, Salter notes that the media were the critics of the moral panic, rather than its pur-
veyors, often occupying a sceptical position on the prevalence of child sexual abuse online.
This is an interesting contrast with the media-generated moral panics around abuse by women
and girls (Andersen, Silcox and Scott, Chapter 8; Ndhlovu, Chapter 11) and within minority
ethnic communities (Gill, Chapter 9; Käkelä, Chapter 10) discussed in Part 1. This is perhaps
reflective of the extent to which perpetrators of online child sexual exploitation remain
invisible and unmarked in gendered and racialised terms. Yet, Salter also points to the
important role critical technology journalism has played in exposing the political economy of
online child sexual exploitation, asking crucial questions about who benefits from a lack of
regulation. The final twist is that, as Salter argues, alongside the work of investigative jour-
nalists to expose these mechanics, a libertarian seam in mainstream media has continued to
mobilise certain sexual and gendered subjects in these debates to prop up the might of the tech
industries and defend the unregulated control of online environments and infrastructure. This
comes at the expense of considerations of the experiences of victim/survivors of online child
sexual exploitation, and the gendered and sexualised nature of this crime.
Like many other chapters in this section, Chapter 38 by Ben Colliver captures the
ambivalence of online contexts, here in relation to trans experiences. On the one hand, as
Colliver outlines, online spaces can be essential for trans people in terms of community-
building and accessing information, but on the other, these are spaces where transphobic
abuse is pervasive, everyday and, as a result, normalised. Colliver is concerned with what is
distinctive about online transphobic abuse (such as the incitement to self-harm, and the
coordinated and generic nature of attacks) as well as recognising how online transphobia
interacts with offline forms of abuse. Colliver pays attention to both direct, or targeted
abuse, and to the impacts of witnessing the abuse of others. His interviewees suggest that the
pervasive and predictable nature of online abuse makes it more manageable than its offline
equivalences. However, “managing” that abuse has concrete repercussions for trans peo-
ple’s abilities to network and engage online as trans people.
Chapter 39 by Maja Brandt Andreasen explores homophobia on 9gag, focusing on
memes relating to actor Kevin Spacey, who was reported to have sexually assaulted men
and teenage boys, and whose public response to the first of these reports was to come out as
gay. 9gag is a homosocial masculine online platform with an assumed heterosexual male
address and there are parallels here with Semenzin and Bainotti’s work on Telegram in Italy
or Kaitlynn Mendes and Euisol Jeong’s (Chapter 50) later discussion of Soranet in South
Korea. Like these other sites, 9gag privileges anonymity and a lack of moderation, creating
a conducive context for online violence. What is distinctive about 9gag is the emphasis on
humour – a mode that often escapes critical analysis. Andreasen explores how memes about
Spacey use humour to discursively construct sexual violence in relation to homosexual
masculinity, positioning Spacey as a hypersexual gay man and paedophile.
The next two chapters share a concern with the ways in which equality discourses are
mobilised online to undermine women’s experiences of abuse. Both Satu Venäläinen and

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Guy Harrison and Melody Huslage focus on how the meaning of women’s experiences of
abuse – predominately from men – is negotiated in user-generated content: comments
sections in Venäläinen’s case, and tweets in Harrison and Huslage’s. In Chapter 40,
Venäläinen explores the discursive positioning of men as victims and women as perpetrators
of intimate partner violence on the most popular Finnish forums. Her chapter renders
visible the contradictory nature of this rhetoric, in which men’s victim status is used to
maintain and reinforce existing patriarchal power relations and, simultaneously, to discredit
feminist efforts to address men’s violence against women. Venäläinen emphasises the dis-
cursive and affective force of this rhetoric, which in turn has the power to influence public
understandings of issues such as intimate partner violence in a way that reinforces the
dominance of white, heterosexual masculinities.
In Chapter 41, Harrison and Huslage explore the limitations of “gender equality” dis-
courses through a case study of the gendered online harassment levelled at English football
pundit Karen Carney in response to her tweet about the performance of an English men’s
club. As they discuss, these discourses are co-opted in a way that renders the gendered
nature of online abuse invisible. This then places the onus for managing this harassment
onto individual women and lets clubs, sports and media organisations off the hook in terms
of implementing structural changes to address gendered hate speech. Instead, Harrison and
Huslage argue for an approach to this abuse which centres gender equity, acknowledging
the historical marginalisation of women, trans and non-binary people in sports media and
taking the prevalence of online misogyny into account.
The following two chapters share a concern with the implications of online gender-based
violence in terms of the ability of women to fully participate in public life, this time with a
focus on politics. In Chapter 42, Emily Harmer presents “online othering” as a way of
thinking about how online discourse can work to signal who does and does not belong, both
in particular forums (her focus is on the comments section of UK newspaper Mail Online)
and sectors (politics). For many readers in a UK context, Harmer’s choice of case study will
be surprising: she focuses on responses to a story about former Conservative Home Secretary
Priti Patel, a politician well known for her anti-immigration stance, most infamously in
relation to her policy to send people seeking asylum in the UK to be “processed” in Rwanda.
That someone known for racist policies can still be subjected to racism and sexism should not,
of course, be news. The value of “online othering”, Harmer argues, is that it allows us to keep
in view behaviours which are not always straightforwardly visible as abuse, which exist on a
continuum with the more easily recognisable forms of abuse in comments sections, such as
that explicitly directed against journalists (Gardiner et al., 2016).
Chapter 43 by Eleonora Esposito is also concerned with cyberviolence against women in
parliament, exploring what is distinctively gendered about this kind of abuse, both in its
quality and quantity. Drawing on examples from Australia, the UK, the US, Italy and
India, she identifies the different types, and intersectional nature, of cyberviolence directed
at female parliamentarians, including body shaming, image-based sexual violence, rape and
death threats. She highlights the way in which this online violence is often trivialised and
dismissed, particularly due to its occurrence in the virtual realm and in a context in which
violence is largely accepted as a “cost” of being a politician. However, her chapter em-
phasises the material consequences of this abuse on women’s full participation in politics,
operating to dissuade women from pursuing political careers as well as shaping voters’
attitudes and understandings of women in parliament.
The final chapter by Carolina Are and Ysabel Gerrard explores the feminist potential of

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social media content moderation. Their chapter offers an in-depth exploration of the ex-
isting problems with content moderation, including the precarious and harmful labour
conditions of commercial content moderation workers; uneven definitions of what con-
stitutes “harmful” content and lack of clarity over community guidelines, which fail to pay
attention to local, cultural and contextual specificities. By focusing on two case studies – the
experiences of young transgender TikTok users who were de-platformed and/or blocked in
2021 as a result of other users disapproving of their content; and shadowbanning and
account deletion by Instagram in response to legislative reforms in the US – they turn to the
way content moderation in itself can be seen as an act of violence. Like Salter, Are and
Gerrard call for more attention to be paid to victim/survivors’ voices when considering
platforms’ responsibilities. However, their reading of specific legislative reforms differs.
Reading Salter and Are and Gerrard’s chapters together highlights the unresolved nature of
some of these debates, whilst also pointing to the way that the potential, and limitations, of
legislative reform or community-driven alternatives vary for different groups. The question
of who benefits from, as well as who is harmed by, online abuse remains crucial to un-
ravelling these tensions and to the different approaches – legislative, regulatory, user-
generated – to effective prevention as well as to justice for victim/survivors. This concern
with justice unites the two chapters, despite their different interpretations and solutions.

References
Boyle, K. (2019) ‘What’s in a name? Theorising the inter-relationships of gender and violence’,
Feminist Theory 21, pp. 19–36.
Cole, S. (1993) Pornography and the sex crisis. Toronto: Second Story Press.
Dines, G. (2011) Pornland: How pornography has hijacked our sexuality. Boston: Beacon Press.
Gardiner, B., Mansfield, M., Anderson, I., Holder, J., Louter, D. and Ulmanu, M. (2016) ‘The dark side
of Guardian comments’, The Guardian, 12 April. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/
technology/2016/apr/12/the-dark-side-of-guardian-comments (Accessed: 18 November 2022).
Kelly, L. (1988) Surviving sexual violence. Cambridge: Polity.
Kelly, L. (2016) ‘The conducive context of violence against women and girls’, Discover Society, 1
March. Available at: https://archive.discoversociety.org/2016/03/01/theorising-violence-against-
women-and-girls/ (Accessed: 18 December 2022).

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 31
TECHNOLOGY-FACILITATED
ABUSE
Intimate partner violence in digital society
Anastasia Powell

Introduction
Intimate partner violence (IPV) refers to physical, sexual, psychological, emotional abuse, as
well as stalking and controlling behaviours, by either a current or former intimate partner (see
e.g. WHO, 2014). It is among the most common forms of men’s violence against women, with
over a third of women having experienced physical and/or sexual violence from an intimate
partner, or non-partner sexual violence, in their lifetime; and over a quarter of women (aged
15 to 49 years) who have ever been in a relationship, having experienced physical and/or
sexual IPV since the age of 15 (WHO, 2018). IPV is widely recognised as a form of gender-
based violence and an urgent human rights issue; disproportionately impacting women’s
safety, as well as their liberty and equal participation in public and private life (WHO, 2019).
Communications and surveillance technologies have been increasingly utilised as tools in
the hands of perpetrators of IPV. Nationally and internationally, such forms of technology-
facilitated IPV have gathered increasing policy, programme and research attention. This
chapter provides both an overview of the nature of technology-facilitated IPV, as well as
some key conceptual developments towards understanding the familiar and unique aspects
of these harms. In the following section, I provide a brief discussion of the impacts of
technologies on shifting experiences and understandings of crime and violence. Next, I
consider some of the common manifestations of technology-facilitated abuse towards
intimate partners, focusing on sexual and image-based abuse; economic abuse; stalking and
monitoring and coercive control. Then, I draw these discussions together to suggest future
directions for understanding and responding to technology-facilitated abuse. Finally, I
conclude by arguing the need for integrated research into IPV that takes account of tech-
nologies within a wider array of abusive tactics; in turn, informing legal and policy
responses that address technology-facilitated abuse more holistically.

New media, new crimes?

Significant changes in how we communicate and relate with one another since advances in
digital and communications technologies have had substantial implications for the means,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-38 337

 Anastasia Powell

opportunity and reach of criminal behaviours (Yar, 2005). From the internet, to compact
phone and camera devices, to user-generated content and social media; as technologies have
become increasingly mobile, so have their utility in a range of interpersonal harms, ex-
ploitation and abuse (Powell and Henry, 2017; Powell, Stratton and Cameron, 2018;
Stratton, Powell and Cameron, 2017). Many scholars have sought to account for the role
that these technologies play in enabling both new and familiar crimes.
The conventional cybercrime literature typically distinguishes between cyber-dependent
crimes that would not occur were it not for new technical capabilities (such as unauthorised
system access or “hacking”), and cyber-enabled crimes (see Wall, 2007). Cyber-enabled
crimes can occur with or without technology, these include interpersonal harms such as
bullying, sexual exploitation, stalking and partner violence. However in a pivotal article,
“Virtual criminality: old wine in new bottles?”, Australian criminologist Peter Grabosky
(2001) suggested that much cybercrime or technology-facilitated crime is “fundamentally
familiar” albeit often “committed in a completely different way” (p. 243). Indeed, as
Grabosky (2001) and others (Clough, 2010; Henry and Powell, 2015; Yar, 2005) have
discussed, the difference that technologies make are, in many cases, differences of access,
reach and scale. In essence, technologies enable perpetrators to more readily access their
victims through multiple media and/or points of contact; reach them 24/7 and across geo-
graphical distances; and maximise the scale of contact such that victims may be bombarded
with abuse (or, in some cybercrime contexts, many multiple victims are harmed). As such,
there has been a shift within criminological thinking away from the fetishising of the
“cyber” spaces which seemed (at least in the 1990s and early 2000s) to be far removed from
most people’s daily lives and, if harms occurred there, could be readily avoided.
Contemporary criminologists instead recognise that digital technologies are increasingly
embedded in our lived experience of all aspects of society. In effect, we live in a digital
society – an integrated and mutually producing sphere of technologies and society – a whole
that is larger than the sum of its parts (see Powell, Stratton and Cameron, 2018). When
viewed through this lens, not only can we see that societal inequalities and ills continue
through our digital engagements, but we must also recognise that “turning off” the tech-
nology is no longer a viable solution for avoiding “cyber” victimisation. There are no longer
separate spheres of “society” and “digital” existence that we can choose to enter and leave
at will. To avoid technology in a digital society is to be denied full and equal participation in
public and private life (Powell, Stratton and Cameron, 2018).
Technology-facilitated abuse towards an intimate partner is an example of a familiar harm
that is being committed in a greater variety of ways. Where once a perpetrator of IPV might
have needed some technical prowess and/or resources for surveillance equipment, the em-
bedded nature of connected technologies in contemporary digital society increases the rep-
ertoire of abusive contacts for a wider capability of offender. Various data-gathering and
connected technologies, collectively referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT), produce a
social milieu in which extensive data generation, sharing and monetisation are taken for
granted (Ustek-Spilda, Powell and Nemorin, 2019). From tools such as “find my smart-
phone”, to the electronic door lock that documents the various comings and goings of a
household, to “safety” apps that alert others when a designated safe zone has been left, to
simply sharing the passcode to your device with a loved one – there are plenty of
unsophisticated ways to contact, monitor and track a person with or without their knowledge.
In addition to common features of devices and software applications that may be misused
for abusive communications, monitoring and tracking, there is a range of technologies that

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are purpose-built for partner abuse and sold for a profit. “Spyware” or “stalkerware”, for
instance, can be installed (whether surreptitiously or through coercion) and used to gather
data from a person’s smartphone or other devices, such as their location, application usage
and communications (Dunlap, 2012; Harkin and Molnar, 2021; Khoo, Robertson and
Deibert, 2019; Parsons et al., 2019).
There is no place and no time when a victim of IPV cannot be reached. Indeed, as
feminist criminologists have described, women’s experiences of technology-facilitated abuse
are characterised by spacelessness (Harris, 2018) and omnipresence (Woodlock, 2017). The
perpetrator is able to transcend borders and boundaries such that victim/survivors are
vulnerable to abuse at any place and at any time, in turn creating a sense of perpetual
contact (Fiolet et al., 2021; Harris and Woodlock, 2019; Woodlock et al., 2020b). In this
context, the underlying nature of IPV – being entrenched in patriarchal power and control –
arguably remains unchanged. Indeed, it is amplified through the access, reach and scale of
abusive tactics that technologies enable.

Technology-facilitated IPV and abuse

Technology-facilitated abuse has become somewhat of a catch-all term for a wide range of
unwanted and harmful behaviours enabled by communications and other technologies. In this
section, I discuss some of the manifestations of technology-facilitated IPV, focusing on sexual
and image-based abuse; economic abuse; stalking and monitoring; and coercive control. In
doing so it is important to acknowledge that these are not always discrete categories – such
behaviours can overlap in the assemblage of abusive tactics of current or former intimate
partners. Nonetheless, I find it useful to consider the role of technologies in such manifesta-
tions of abuse that are commonly discussed with respect to IPV more broadly.

Sexual and image-based abuses

The use of technologies in the context of sexual violence and abuse does not always result in an
in-person rape or sexual assault. Yet there are many overlaps between in-person sexual vio-
lence and a wider range of sexually abusive behaviours assisted by communications and
surveillance technologies. Research has increasingly highlighted key concerns regarding the
use of images (both photography and video) in documenting sexual assault; the non-
consensual taking, distribution or threats to distribute intimate imagery; sexual coercion and
exploitation via live video communications; as well as the misuse of dating applications and
other platforms to set-up a sexual assault (e.g. Fisico and Harkins, 2021; Maddocks, 2020;
Martin, 2021; Powell, 2009; Powell, 2010a, b, c; Powell, 2022; Reed, Wong and Raj, 2020;
Sandberg and Ugelvik, 2017; Snaychuk and O’Neill, 2020). In the context of intimate partner
abuse, many perpetrators engage in such forms of technology-facilitated sexual violence
(Powell, 2010c; Powell and Henry, 2017; Powell, 2022). For instance, abusive partners may
record private imagery of the victim undressing, bathing and/or toileting, or coerce unwanted
sex acts to be performed and documented (such as via video or photographs).
Image-based sexual abuse, which refers to circumstances where nude or sexual images are
taken, created, distributed, or threats are made to distribute them, without a person’s
consent (Powell and Henry, 2017; Powell, Henry and Flynn, 2018), is a further tool utilised
in IPV. Such abuse occurs in a wide range of relational contexts, but an increasing number
of studies shows that women in particular experience these harms in the context of an

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intimate relationship and often alongside multiple forms of repeated abuse (Beechay, 2019;
Dardis and Richards, 2022; Henry et al., 2020). Although both men and women appear to
experience image-based sexual abuse in similar proportions, the nature and impacts of these
experiences are gendered in particular ways (Henry et al., 2020). For instance, image-based
sexual abuse can represent a further abusive tactic used by perpetrators of IPV to manip-
ulate, control and exert power over a victim/survivor (Eaton et al., 2021). The threat itself of
distribution of a nude or sexual image, whether it was originally created with permission or
in a context of coercion, can loom large over victims of IPV, instilling anxiety and perpetual
vigilance; as they may not know if or when the threat has been realised or may be repeated
(McGlynn et al., 2021). Furthermore, once an image or images are distributed, they are dif-
ficult to retract; representing a continuing and ongoing form of abuse for victim/survivors. In
some instances, victims have described receiving harassing communications including
demands for sex, even visits to their house, by strangers who are responding to photos posted
online alongside the victim’s personal information (Bates, 2017; Beechay, 2019).

Economic abuse
Economic abuse and control have long been identified by practitioners working in IPV. Also
often referred to as financial abuse, it is little surprise that these harms may often also fall
under technology-facilitated abuse, given that so much of our financial access and manage-
ment occurs through digital platforms and electronic accounts. Though there are a range of
definitions throughout the literature, Postmus and colleagues (2020) suggest that it “involves
behaviors that control, exploit, or sabotage an individual’s economic resources including
employment” (p. 262; see also Postmus, Plummer and Stylianou, 2016). Commonly docu-
mented tactics of economic abuse include: preventing access by the victim to their money or
shared money; allocating a restricted allowance to the victim; monitoring the transactions of
the victim and/or admonishing them for their transactions; purposively damaging the victim’s
credit rating (such as through identity fraud and taking out loans or other debts in the victim’s
name); and sabotaging their employment or education to impact on their job security and/or
earning potential (Haifley, 2021; PenzeyMoog and Slakoff, 2021; Postmus et al., 2020). The
damage and impacts of economic abuse on victim/survivors of IPV can be severe and long-
lasting; in turn both a consequence of, and compounded by, women’s economic inequality in
society more broadly (Postmus et al., 2020).
Of course, economic control can and does also occur without the direct need for techno-
logical tools and devices (such as women being given a cash allowance only for instance); with
the role of digital platforms and electronic accounts varying in line with the tactics of abuse
utilised. Major banks have increasingly sought to establish policies, staff training and cus-
tomer hotlines for identifying and better responding to economic abuse (Postmus et al., 2020).
However, much research has highlighted how invisible these harms can be (PenzeyMoog and
Slakoff, 2021) as well as the difficulties women themselves may face in recognising economic
forms of abuse within broader patterns of coercive control (discussed further below).

Stalking and monitoring

Much of the early research on partner violence and technology sought to uncover the use of
these tools predominantly by male perpetrators in the context of stalking and monitoring
behaviours (e.g. Southworth, 2003; Southworth et al., 2005; Southworth et al., 2007). In

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many jurisdictions these behaviours can be encompassed under generic offences of stalking;
which typically refers to repeated behaviours, such as following, contacting, or publishing
content about a person, which causes apprehension or fear for their safety, or has the
intention to cause them fear or harm (physically or psychologically, see Powell and Henry,
2017). So-called “cyberstalking” then, refers to such behaviours with the aid of technologies,
in which “following” extends to monitoring and tracking a person online. Indeed, intimate
partner stalking has long been assisted by technologies including through repeated calls or
messages, interception or monitoring of a victim/survivor’s communications (such as e-mail,
phone, SMS and more recently social network sites and chat platforms), tracking a victim’s
whereabouts (via an array of location technologies), and offensive or threatening material
sent via digital communications (Brown, Reed and Messing, 2018; Woodlock, 2017). Many
such behaviours could also be understood as forms of emotional abuse which in and of
themselves are rarely crimes unless they meet the threshold of repeated behaviours causing
or intending to cause fear or harm as above.
However, stalking and monitoring in the context of IPV can also be less overt with the
use of digital and surveillance technologies including unauthorised access to the victim/
survivor’s data (including monitoring their web browsing history), impersonation of the
victim online, and publishing private identifying information (“doxxing”). For instance,
such behaviours can be used to create fake social media or dating profiles, or take over a
victim’s online social accounts in order to post private or misinformation about them,
humiliating them and/or ruining their reputation (Brown, Reed and Messing, 2018).
Perpetrators of IPV may also engage third parties to assist in their stalking and monitoring
abuse; such as by enlisting others in their online social network to report back on the
victims’ activities and whereabouts, or posting the victims’ contact information on online
forums inviting others to engage in anonymous harassment (Powell and Henry, 2017).
Additionally, abusers may use geo-location technologies, such as Global Positioning System
(GPS) and Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID), as well as “spyware” or “stalkerware”
(as discussed earlier), to monitor and follow a victim/survivor (Chan, 2021; Dunlap, 2012).
RFID devices have been found planted in cars, in clothing items such as shoes, and in
children’s toys or belongings, in order to stalk the victim/survivor and their children
(PenzeyMoog and Slakoff, 2021).

Coercive control
Controlling behaviour is a widely acknowledged feature of IPV, and technologies have
certainly expanded the repertoire of tools for abuse. According to Evan Stark’s (1994, 2007,
2012; Stark and Hester, 2019) original concept of coercive control, strategies such as iso-
lation, intimidation, threats, shaming, gaslighting, surveillance, stalking and degradation,
have the effect of entrapping women; preventing them from freely exercising their inde-
pendence and participation in public and private life. Coercive control then must be
understood, not as a discrete incident of abuse (the lens through which so much of our
criminal justice response relies) but instead, as a holistic pattern of abusive behaviour.
Stark’s concept is clear in identifying the overwhelmingly gendered nature of coercive
control: while there may be instances of partner assault involving both men and women, or
women against men, patterns of coercive control are characterised by gendered inequalities
and target a person’s gender identity (Stark, 2009). Though each individual act might be
defined as a minor offence, or perhaps not even criminalised, the pattern of relentless

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control leaves a victim/survivor in a highly restrictive space in which she is constantly

monitoring and adapting her behaviour in order to avoid abuse (Stark, 2007, 2012). Some
jurisdictions have criminalised coercive control itself, in turn enabling the criminal justice
system to intervene in these patterns of abuse.
Digital coercive control refers to the “use of digital devices and digital media to stalk,
harass, threaten and abuse partners or ex-partners (and children)” (Harris and Woodlock,
2019, p. 533; see also Dragiewicz et al., 2018). It is arguably less a novel or new form of
abuse but rather a concept that helps to emphasise the totality of impacts on victim/sur-
vivors of IPV when they are subject to an immersive set of tactics of power and control.
Digital coercive control then, can feature any aspects of the above behaviours of sexual and
image-based abuses, economic abuse, stalking and monitoring, and may also (though not
always) be associated with physical violence and/or sexual assault.

Towards technology for justice?

Unfortunately, the extent and seriousness of IPV are frequently measured foremost with
respect to physical violence and sexual assault.1 Though there has been a shift in policy in
several jurisdictions towards recognising the harms that less visible forms of abuse have on
victim/survivors. Recognition of emotional and financial abuse for instance, alongside
recent debates regarding coercive control, has arguably highlighted the “constellation of
tactics” (Reed, Tolman and Ward, 2016) that abusers use both alongside, or without,
physical forms of harm. Yet societal understandings of the seriousness of non-physical
forms of abuse seemingly lag behind the realities experienced by victim/survivors and
practitioners. This is evident both through community attitudes surveys in some countries,
such as Australia (Webster et al., 2018; Webster et al., 2019; Webster et al., 2021), as well as
in criminal justice responses that minimise women’s experiences (Barwick, McGorrery and
McMahon, 2020; Robinson, Pinchevsky and Guthrie, 2016).
Technology-facilitated IPV has likewise faced challenges in being recognised as a serious
and harmful pattern of abuse. Research with services responding to IPV, for instance, has
documented the difficulties in gaining police and court responses towards such abuse (Afrouz,
2021; Flynn, Powell and Hindes, 2021; Woodlock et al., 2020a). Yet, as the discussion here has
highlighted, it is not so much a different form of abuse, but rather represents many familiar
tactics of abuse that are simply also enabled across a range of digital tools and devices. If then,
as I have suggested throughout this chapter, technology-facilitated IPV is an extension of
familiar patterns of abuse and control, what is to be done about it?
As a problem with social, criminal and technical causes, it follows that a combination of
social, legal and technical solutions are warranted. In the first instance, these may be
advanced by ensuring that existing domestic violence policy and programming are updated
to include technology-facilitated IPV. It is clear from research with domestic violence ser-
vice providers that there is a need for greater training of community services and criminal
justice responders (including both within police and courts) to ensure that the nature and
risks of technology-facilitated IPV are fully understood and responded to (Afrouz, 2021;
Flynn, Powell and Hindes, 2021; Woodlock et al., 2020a). The law itself also needs to keep
pace with changes in technologies and their misuse for abuse; sometimes new laws or
procedures are required to provide avenues for justice for victim/survivors, such as has
been the case with image-based sexual abuse for instance (Henry et al., 2020). Arguably,
such measures require the integration of knowledge of the nature, impacts and remedies for

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technology-facilitated IPV to be more fully integrated within domestic violence responses

more generally.
Nonetheless, there remains the question of technical measures. There have been a range
of technology-enabled responses developed to assist with victim/survivor safety and justice.
Many of these have developed foremost in response to addressing the risk of physical
assault to victim/survivors of IPV. For example, through home security systems, proximity
monitoring of perpetrators or providing personal safety alarms to victim/survivors to
quickly trigger a police or personal security call-out (Bartels and Martinovic, 2017; Prenzler
and Fardell, 2017). There are, however, some developments which are more targeted to-
wards addressing less overt forms of technology-facilitated IPV. Victim/survivors can be
provided with new devices such as clean and safe smartphones for instance, and women’s
refuges installed with technologies to detect and block any unknown software transmitting
data over the property’s Wi-Fi network.2 There has also been a growing number of private
security services offering to examine homes for hidden surveillance and/or tracking devices,
and advising victim/survivors on how to monitor their technology for signs of interference
(Harkin, 2019). There are critical questions regarding ensuring the safety and privacy of
victim/survivors, and indeed avoiding the commercial exploitation of women’s safety needs,
which this emerging sector still needs to address (Harkin, 2019).
There are further ways in which technology companies in particular could play a more
proactive role towards considering victims’ safety and autonomy, such as by building such
considerations into the design process itself (PenzeyMoog, 2020; PenzeyMoog and Slakoff,
2021). Eva PenzeyMoog (2020) suggests that technologists utilise the “Framework for
Inclusive Safety” to design against the potential misuse of their products by domestic
violence perpetrators. In particular, she suggests that technology designers engage in pro-
cesses such as Lewis’ “Black Mirror Brainstorm” : in which designers consider the possible
ways their product might be misused for harm, and design solutions to protect against such
worst-case scenarios (also Soltani, 2019). Arguably, good corporate social responsibility in a
digital society must increasingly address the ethical and social consequences of technology
(Coeckelbergh, 2018), such as its use in violence and abuse.

Conclusion
It has been important for research to identify the rapidly developing ways in which tech-
nologies have been utilised in abuse. These behaviours have too often been minimised;
whilst services, policy and legal responses have continued to have many gaps in providing
responses. But ultimately, rather than reinventing our frames of analysis, much of the
nature, impacts and remedies for such harms are able to be understood within our existing
knowledge of IPV.
Though the elucidation of technology-facilitated IPV has been an important focus of
research as well as legal and policy development, arguably there is now a need for a greater
integration of research into IPV that takes account of technologies within a wider array of
abusive tactics. Such research is vital to more fully grasp and encompass the embedded
nature of technology in violence and abuse, in turn informing legal and policy responses
that address technology-facilitated abuses more holistically. There is little doubt that
technical responses can be of assistance in addressing technology-facilitated IPV, yet these
cannot occur in the absence of social and legal measures addressing domestic violence and
the underlying causes that remain at its core.

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Notes
1 This is reflected in decisions about the “newsworthiness” of IPV: see Lombard ( Chapter 1), and
Burrell and Dhir ( Chapter 2), this volume.
2 Such as the WESNET and Telstra “Safe Connections” program offered in Australia, see: https://
phones.wesnet.org.au/safeconnections/

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 32
TACTICS OF HATE
Toxic “creativity” in anti-feminist men’s rights
politics
Debbie Ging

Introduction
A 2014 survey found that 1 in 10 women in the European Union reported having experienced
online harassment since the age of 15, including receiving unwanted, sexually explicit emails or
SMS messages, or offensive, inappropriate advances on social networking sites (FRA, 2014).
The same research suggested that up to 90% of “revenge porn” victims are female, and that
this number was increasing. Subsequent studies confirm this. In 2017, the Pew Research
Center in the United States found that, while men experience slightly higher levels than
women of online harassment (including name-calling and physical threats), women are much
more likely to experience severe types of gender-based or sexual harassment. A Pew Research
Center survey from 2021 indicates a continued increase: 33% of women under 35 say they have
been sexually harassed online, compared to 11% of men under 35.
While these surveys are not directly comparable, we can nonetheless infer a steady up-
ward trajectory of women being targets of sexual or gender-based abuse online. Across
Europe, 9 million girls have experienced some kind of online violence by the time they are 15
years old and 1 out of 4 young women reported being stalked or sexually harassed at least
once (UN, 2015). Beyond Europe, 73% of women had experienced online abuse, with 18%
experiencing serious internet violence (UN Women, 2015). In Ireland, a Women’s Aid study
(2020) found that one in five women aged between 18 and 25 have experienced intimate
relationship abuse and half of the young women abused by a partner experienced online
abuse including the non-consensual taking or sharing of intimate images.
This situation worsened during Covid-19: according to a survey conducted by UK charity
Rights of Women (2021), 15% of women who experienced sexual harassment at work reported
an increase in online harassment whilst working from home during Covid-19, and nearly 1 in 3
women who had reported sexual harassment to their employer said that the process of re-
porting had been negatively impacted by the pandemic. Rates of online abuse and harassment
among young people also increased: since the beginning of the pandemic, in the UK, 25% of
girls have experienced at least one form of abuse, bullying or sexual harassment online (Plan
International UK, 2020). In a recent Irish study (RCNI, 2021), girls were 1.92 times more
likely to have experienced online sexual harassment than boys.

348 DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-39

 Tactics of hate

Meanwhile, a growing body of literature, led in particular by UK-based feminist edu-

cation scholars, is analysing the scale, nature and impact of rising rates of online and offline
gender-based and sexual violence in educational contexts (Mendes, Horeck, and Ringrose,
2022; Ringrose, Regehr and Milne, 2021). Importantly, this work shows that increased
screen time intensifies risks of gender and sexual violence for many young people. A recent
study conducted by Ringrose, Regehr and Whitehead (2022) found that girls aged 11–18 in
the UK are bombarded with unwanted “dick pics” on social media platforms to such an
extent that this has become not just commonplace, but even a sign of desirability or pop-
ularity among girls. In Ireland, related research also indicates that receiving unwanted “dick
pics” has become entirely normalised (Ging and Castellini da Silva, 2022). Most worryingly,
the research shows that schools lack sufficiently nuanced policies at the intersection of
digital literacy, e-safety and sexual harassment (Ringrose, Regehr and Milne, 2021) and that
reporting to social media companies is ineffective.

Why is online misogyny on the rise?

To many people, the scale and intensity of anti-woman hate online seems both shocking and
inexplicable. Mainstream media discourses frequently attribute misogynistic attacks to a
minority of trolls. Toxic masculinity has become something of a catch-all term to describe
such behaviours, but is rarely explained and frequently misunderstood as an essentialising
concept that characterises masculinity generally. As gender studies scholars point out,
however, toxic traits are learned by boys from both individual men and institutions that are
invested in the subjugation of women.
Characteristics of the current socio-economic conjuncture are also a significant factor. As
Michael Kimmel (2017) has argued, the neoliberal restructuring and destabilisation of the
labour market in most western economies has engendered among many white men a deep
sense of “aggrieved entitlement”, whereby the collateral damage caused by neoliberal capi-
talism is attributed to women and minority groups rather than understood in class terms. This
may be felt at a personal level but must also be understood as potentially strategic, perfor-
mative and political. According to Eugenia Siapera (2019), misogyny is not so much a sen-
timent as it is a strategy used in times of structural “crisis” to exclude women from the means
of production. It has also become a key recruitment tactic of the alt-right and far-right (Evans,
2018; Johanssen, 2021). As Kimmel (2018) has shown, what holds together the “paranoid
politics” of political extremism is a rhetoric of masculinity, emasculated by big government,
“globalism” and various perceived threats to western civilisation.
In media and internet studies, there is a greater focus on the role of platform politics and
the technological affordances of social media in networking, amplifying and rewarding online
hate directed at women and other groups. Much of this work investigates the role of algo-
rithms and platform architectures such as YouTube recommender functions in facilitating
pathways to radicalisation (Ribeiro et al., 2021; Ging and Murphy, 2021) and it overlaps
theoretically with other literature on digital radicalisation in the context of the alt-right
(Evans, 2018; Roose et al., 2022). While recognising the crucial role played by technology in
facilitating and gamifying hateful behaviours, as well as in creating echo chambers, filter
bubbles, and radicalisation pathways, media and internet studies scholars have tended to
adopt a techno-social approach, which considers the complex interplay between technology
and a range of socio-cultural and socio-economic factors. Thus, work on the manosphere and
online misogyny by Jane (2018), Massanari (2017), Ging (2019) and Marwick and Caplan

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(2018) is closely concerned with the “algorithmic politics” (Massanari, 2017) of social plat-
forms and their attendant communicative cultures, but always in the wider context of patri-
archal power relations, hegemonic masculinity and theorisations of misogyny as structural.
Crucially, all of these studies reveal that the digital hate of women is multifaceted,
multimodal, political and personal, structural and agentic. Most importantly it cannot be
separated from real-world misogyny and violence, operating instead across a continuum of
behaviours that are co-constitutive of one another (Massanari, 2017). The perpetrators of
digital hate optimise the technological affordances of social media and mobile phone
technology to engage in death and rape threats, stalking, coercive control, image-based
sexual abuse, sextortion, doxxing, hacking and coordinated “pile-ons”, thus eliminating any
meaningful online/offline distinctions. The problem, therefore, is not merely one of trolling,
“hate speech” or verbal abuse, confined to the realm of the virtual, but rather a multitude of
deeply invasive and harmful practices designed to intimidate, silence and suppress women.
All of these expressions are part of a broader discursive strategy to exclude women and to
re-establish male power through the constant articulation of its loss. As Howson (2006) has
noted, hegemony must constantly hybridise in order to ensure its continued legitimacy as a
historical bloc, and the digital is a vital asset in this endeavour.

Who are the “new” misogynists?

Contemporary men’s rights differ considerably from their pre-internet predecessors in a
number of important ways (Ging, 2019). Firstly, their focus has shifted away somewhat from
issues such as fathers’ rights, divorce, child custody and the feminisation of education to issues
related to male sexual entitlement, false rape allegations, male circumcision, body image and
personal suffering. This trajectory from a collective politics underpinned by public demon-
strations, petitions and so on, to one driven by affect, feelings and personal storytelling has
been facilitated by the communicative affordances of social media, as well as by the pervasive
influence of evolutionary psychology on men’s rights thinking. According to the manosphere’s
interpretation of this already disputed field, 80% of women are sexually attracted to only 20%
of men. This “rule” of hypergamy, whereby women seek out the strongest genes for repro-
duction, means that alpha males have unlimited sexual access to women, leaving beta males to
compete for the “leftovers”, and incels with no access to sex whatsoever. While this state of
affairs is attributed primarily to evolutionary psychology, feminism and the sexual revolution
are also blamed for affording women sexual choices and freedoms.
Much of this thinking on the “sexual marketplace”, in which individuals have a certain
sexual market value (SMV), is derived from a subgroup of the manosphere known as Pick-
Up Artists (PUAs), dedicated to teaching heterosexual men the art of sexual conquest.
Notorious pick-up artists such as Roosh V and Julien Blanc, operating in the US and
Canada, have devised a range of controversial techniques and vocabularies based on
principles derived from evolutionary psychology such as negging (giving a back-handed
compliment) and kino escalation (gradually increasing physical contact). Not all subgroups
in the manosphere are sympathetic to PUAs, as evidenced by the establishment of websites
such as PUAHate.com in 2014.
According to Bratich and Banet-Weiser (2019), the incel (involuntary celibate) community
developed partly in response to the failed promises of PUAs. Incels have arguably attracted
the most media attention due to a number of high-profile killings by self-professed members
of the community. However, although much incel site content is deeply misogynistic and

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frequently contains violent fantasies, incels are predominantly socially isolated individuals
who have little contact with women online or offline. Characterised by low self-esteem and
self-loathing, incels believe they are losers in the genetic lottery and rail against women,
feminism and Chads (alpha males) for their lack of sexual success. They can be broadly
divided into two groups: those who try to “ascend” through physical self-improvement
(including “gymmaxing”, jaw exercises, and taking steroids) and those who have taken the
Black Pill, thus resigning themselves to a life of sexual failure. The latter frequently talk about
suicide and encourage others to take their lives.
Other groups within the manosphere include MGTOWs (Men Going Their Own Way),
Trad Cons (traditional conservatives) and No Fappers (who promote abstinence from
masturbation and pornography). MGTOWs have little in common with PUAs or incels
since they are a separatist group who have actively chosen to live their lives free of women.
Trad Cons align with American Republican agendas around the hetero-patriarchal family,
Christianity, the military, gun ownership and anti-abortion, but have versions in other
countries such as British anti-feminist Eurosceptic Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad).
Although originating predominantly from the US, manosphere ideology has spread rapidly
to other countries and has been mainstreamed through platforms such as Urban Dictionary
(Ging, Lynn and Rosati, 2020) and by high-profile figures such as Canadian psychologist
Jordan Peterson, conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich, and most recently British-American
kickboxer turned TikTok influencer, Andrew Tate. Tate has achieved worldwide fame, and
to date, his videos have been watched more than 12 billion times (Das, 2022).
Despite their many differences, the disparate formations of the manosphere are drawn
together through the unifying philosophy of the Red Pill (TRP), a motif for the process of
personal enlightenment which occurs when one recognises that the world is a liberal, mis-
andrist and gynocentric conspiracy. Misappropriated from the 1999 Wachowski sisters’ film
The Matrix, the concept of the blue /red pill has become pervasive in the online culture
wars, now expanded to describe a range of other processes of “enlightenment”. There is also
considerable overlap between the manosphere and the alt-right and far-right, who rely on
narratives of white masculinity under siege by feminism and immigration to indoctrinate
new members. Much of this overlap revolves around the Great Replacement theory,
whereby western men, emasculated by feminism, are perceived to be in danger of being
replaced or “cucked” by men from other “races” with higher birth rates.
While it is difficult to determine the precise size or influence of the manosphere, it is clear
that male supremacist ideas are gaining traction. A recent analysis has revealed that there
has been a six-fold increase in UK web traffic to websites that promote incel culture.
According to the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, the UK web traffic data to three of
the largest incel sites has seen a surge from 114,420 monthly visits to 638,505, from March
to November 2021 (Ball, 2022). According to Ribeiro et al. (2021), many users are active in
manosphere communities, with newer communities – MGTOW, incels and TRP – receiving
significant migratory influxes from older ones. Ribeiro et al. (ibid.) also found that these
newer communities are considerably more toxic and misogynistic, indicating a tendency
toward increasingly extreme content.

What are their key communicative and rhetorical characteristics and strategies?
The manosphere first came to public attention in 2014 with #Gamergate, a systematised
campaign of online harassment against female figures in the gaming industry, masquerading

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as a debate about ethics in games journalism. This was a turning point in that it served as a
manual for “bad actors” in how to use orchestrated pile-ons, bad-faith arguments and sock-
puppet accounts to advance an ideological agenda. It triggered a series of online culture
wars and events that would lead to alt-right figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Steve
Bannon, Gavin McInnes and Richard Spencer gaining prominence, and ultimately to the
2016 election of Trump as US President. According to Mortensen (2016), #Gamergate’s
leaderless, anonymous structure enabled it to swarm-attack anyone who criticised it, yet
avoid individual responsibility for harassment. #Gamergate effectively established a cata-
logue of tactics that have since become dominant in men’s rights politics, namely sabotage,
surveillance, sexual shaming and indoctrination. All of these strategies are bolstered by the
technological affordances of online platforms, such as bots, which rapidly amplify content.
Similarly, phenomena such as brigading (gaming a vote by grouping together to boost or
decrease ratings artificially), herding (aligning attitudes or behaviours without centralised
coordination) and astroturfing (the use of fake grassroots efforts aimed at influencing public
opinion) help to spread false-flag campaigns as well as to maximise the reach of propa-
ganda. In addition, MRAs are well-versed in rhetorical strategies such as sealioning (trolling
that involves persistent requests for evidence or basic information), gaslighting and
strawman fallacies.
Sabotage, including economic sabotage, is perhaps the most pervasive tactic in the male
supremacist playbook. It includes doxxing, hacking, DDoS (distributed denial of service)
attacks, image manipulation (including deepfakes), swatting attacks, swarm attacks, fake
rape reports and false-flag campaigns. Since #Gamergate, there have been a number of
false-flag campaigns initiated on 4chan, designed to bait feminists into adopting increasingly
extreme positions, thereby causing in-fighting, provoking outrage amongst conservatives
and turning moderate and liberal feminists off the movement. One example is
#EndFathersDay, when 4chan/pol/ users used a fake Twitter account to try to get the
hashtag trending. Also in 2014, trolls used similar tactics to make #BikiniBridge trend. This
campaign encouraged women to post selfies of their bikini bottoms, showing the gap caused
by protruding hip bones. The trolls created fake celebrity accounts to promote the hashtag,
and fake anti-BikiniBridge reactions to stir up controversy, thus simultaneously ridiculing
female narcissism and provoking anger among feminists. These campaigns demonstrate that
online attacks against women go far beyond individual slurs and threats; while the nature of
the attacks is often personal, their overall objective is part of a broader ideological strategy
to portray western feminism and LGBTQI+ rights as degenerate, self-indulgent cults that
infantilise women and threaten western civilisation.
In addition to false-flag campaigns designed to provoke and ridicule feminist outrage, a
number of initiatives have also sought to destroy women’s careers or professional reputa-
tions. As Emma Jane (2018) has demonstrated, gendered cyberhate can manifest as a form
of workplace harassment or what she refers to as “economic vandalism”. Jane’s work draws
on interviews with 52 ordinary Australian women, conducted between 2015 and 2017 and
working in a variety of roles. Of the 52 interviewees, 43 reported at least one gendered
cyberhate experience that had an adverse economic impact including lost productivity;
missed work opportunities; retreating from the internet; diminished mental well-being;
being blamed for attacks and inadequate response by employers and police. In another,
more recent, example of economic sabotage, MRAs orchestrated a mass reporting of online
sex workers or “camgirls” to the US inland revenue service, on the grounds that these
women were alleged not to be declaring earnings from their pay-per-view videos for tax

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(Copland, 2021). Although it is unlikely that many successful reports were made to the IRS,
the campaign caused Instagram and other social media companies to block many of these
women’s accounts.
Sexual shaming is another key tactic, operating at the intersection of personal relationships
and anti-feminist men’s rights politics. In a 2014 event known as #TheFappening, some 500
female celebrity nudes were hacked from iCloud accounts and widely circulated on Reddit
and 4chan. Three years later, a similar incident occurred, and was dubbed the Fappening 2.0.
In 2020 in Ireland, a Discord server was deleted when it was discovered that 500 Irish men had
downloaded up to 140,000 nude images of women and girls without their consent. Given the
ubiquity of free, hardcore pornography online and the fact that many of the actors targeted by
the Fappening had already appeared naked in mainstream films, it is noteworthy that these
images should have such high cultural capital. However, as recent research (Ringrose, Regehr
and Whitehead, 2022) on the transactional value of nudes among teenage boys has demon-
strated, images that involve the highest degree of trust and privacy violation are the most
sought-after: firstly, because they confer the highest status on the sharer and secondly because
their consumption is a fantasy enactment of domination over – and often revenge against –
women. These events serve as a powerful reminder that nudes are rarely just about sexual
gratification, and that the deliberate and strategic sexual subjugation of women remains a key
part of heteropatriarchal peer relations.
The political economy of sexual imagery also reveals a deeply entrenched sexual double
standard in heterosexual relations, whereby men photographed in sexual acts are applauded,
while women are slut-shamed and ostracised. For women, therefore, the threat of exposure
and shaming is constant and is continually being enhanced by new technological features. As
Renold and Ringrose (2018, p.1070) have shown, mobile digital technology devices and
networks have extended the affective capacities of the human body, enabling a range of
practices which they maintain constitute a form of “coercive non-consensual phallic touch”.
Thus practices of “phallic tagging” – boys tagging themselves in girls’ selfies, tagging their
friends in non-consensually shared nudes of girls, asking girls to send photos of body parts
with their (the boys’) names written on them and tagging photos of random female body parts
with girls’ names – all facilitate new formations of sexual objectification, shaming and control.
In these part-human, part-digital assemblages, the female body becomes “broadcast for wider
phallic consumption and public shaming via endless ritualized speculation (Salter, 2015)”
(Renold and Ringrose, 2018, p.1070). Similarly, the practices of upskirting and creepshotting
have exploited new digital affordances in the service of misogyny (Thompson and Wood,
2018), while features such as Airdrop make it easier to digitally harass and intimidate women
in public spaces, and deepfake technology significantly enhances the potential for sextortion
and various forms of image-based sexual abuse (IBSA).
Too often, the multiple facets of IBSA are portrayed in the media and even in policy
responses as the actions of a “few bad apples”, “boys being boys” or a case of “sexting gone
wrong”. However, these acts must also be understood as collective actions designed to
secure male hegemony. Henry and Powell (2016, p.4) explain that motivations for IBSA are
more complex than mere “revenge” or jealousy in that they mirror other forms of abuse and
control, including “coercion, blackmail, fun, sexual gratification, social status or monetary
gain”. The key currency on 4chan/b, a haven for MRAs and incels, is illicitly acquired
sexual imagery of real women. Whether these images are actually taken during real sexual
experiences or procured from other sites is a moot point as the primary objective is the
collective degradation of and projection of violent sexual fantasies onto women generally.

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This weaponisation of DIY pornography is consciously gender-political and has complex

outcomes in addition to sexual shaming and subjugation, including professional reputa-
tional damage.
The final strategic category is that of indoctrination, which is of particular importance to
this analysis as it demonstrates how the various tactics described above are becoming
increasingly prevalent in young people’s lives through processes of mainstreaming and ra-
dicalisation. Conspiracy theories have particularly strong affective appeal in times of
uncertainty about the veracity of political and scientific institutions, or what Harambam
(2020) refers to as “epistemic instability”. As the masculinity studies theorists referred to
above have argued, disruptions to white male privilege – both perceived and real – have
moved many young men toward the right. Economic instability, climate crisis, and the
Covid-19 pandemic, combined with widespread anti-immigration propaganda, have created
the perfect storm in most western nations for the alt-right and far right to push the Great
Replacement narrative, in which white men are positioned as the new victims of a gynocracy
ruled by liberal globalists.
The false-flag campaigns discussed above also demonstrate that the technological af-
fordances of social media make it easy to amplify disinformation, and most red pill com-
munities revel in the confusion between sincerity and parody that characterises so much
online communication. Parody and irony thus become convenient escape clauses, as well as
rhetorical dog whistles to communities of disenfranchised men who are looking for alter-
native narratives. As Andreasen (2020, 2021, and this volume) has shown, humour plays a
vital role in spreading anti-feminist and racist sentiment to these networks, most frequently
in the form of memes, GIFs and videos. The participatory cultures that develop around the
creation and sharing of memes not only create a strong sense of in-group cohesion (Miltner,
2014) but also introduce – and in turn, normalise – extreme political ideas under the guise of
edgy “banter”.
In a study of the red pill pipeline conducted by Robert Evans (2018), 39 of the 75 fascist
activists studied credit the Internet with their red-pilling, with YouTube the most frequently
discussed website. Evans observed a steady spiral from YouTube personalities to “the_-
donald” subreddit to 4chan’s /pol/ board and eventually to fascist Discord servers.
Similarly, YouTube influencers such as Jordan Peterson introduce young men to a range of
anti-feminist and evolutionary psychology concepts, acting as a gateway to more extreme
content promoted by its recommender algorithm. A recent study in Australia (Reset
Australia, 2002) used avatar accounts to document how YouTube’s algorithms promote
misogynist, anti-feminist and other extremist content to Australian boys and young men.
The study also shows that liking and watching this recommended content results in
increasingly extreme manosphere and incel content being recommended. The increased
mainstreaming of anti-feminist content is further supported by research on Urban
Dictionary (Ging, Lynn and Rosati, 2020), which showed that between 10% and 14% of the
platform’s entire dataset is misogynistic or anti-feminist in nature.
These processes of mainstreaming and algorithmic radicalisation would appear – at least
partly – to explain why girls and young women are experiencing increasing levels of sexual
abuse and harassment in Ireland (RCNI, 2021), the UK (Ofsted, 2021) and elsewhere, in
both school and university contexts. Red pill concepts, such as the belief that false rape
claims against men are prevalent, have also become more common, especially in the context
of pushback from boys against in-school interventions on consent and sexual harassment
(Ging and Ringrose, 2022). In “post-truth” contexts, feelings increasingly drive a politics of

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emotion (Ahmed, 2013), whereby men’s affective performances of victimisation gain trac-
tion (Allan, 2016). In these contexts, it becomes increasingly difficult to find counter-
radicalisation strategies to tackle the shared sense of injustice, disentitlement and victimi-
sation that many young men claim to experience.

Conclusion
The internet has revealed to us the scale and extremity of misogyny. It has also facilitated
new ways of perpetrating abuse and harassment and has significantly amplified anti-woman
hate and violence. Perhaps most worryingly, as we move into the era of Web 3.0, a new set
of affordances underpinned by virtual reality, automation and artificial intelligence, will
create new possibilities for sabotage, sexual shaming, surveillance and indoctrination by
male supremacist formations. However, it is also important not to over-emphasise tech-
nological determinist perspectives. Too often, these forms of misogyny are associated ex-
clusively with niche platforms and subcultures, rather than as phenomena that are deeply
intertwined with the same patriarchal structures and gender relations that cause more
traditional forms of sexual violence. All of these harms exist on a continuum and are un-
derpinned by a set of assumptions about masculinity that society urgently needs to tackle,
for example: that men are entitled to sex; that women are earned; that sex is a form of
achievement which confers status on men; that men have an uncontrollable sexuality; and
that women are objects with transactional value to be rated, shared and shamed.
However, digital hate and violence against women (and LGBTQI+ people) are also
much more than a catalogue of acts perpetrated by individual men; they are part of a
sustained and collective project to shame and subjugate all women, to discredit feminism
and reinstate male privilege through the articulation of its loss (Carroll, 2011). As such, the
manosphere’s tactics of digital hate must be understood in the context of broader attempts
being made to roll back progressive agendas, for example, the attempts to have gender
studies, critical race theory and LGBTQI+ content removed from schools and universities
(Gimson, 2019). As Apperly (2019) has pointed out, gender theorists have become “a
convenient proxy to criticize the European Union, decry the West and galvanize religious-
conservative sentiment”. Although the manosphere’s digital witch hunts (Siapera, 2019)
frequently rely on personal attacks, they are not private or individual, but rather systemic
and ideological, and only in recognising them as such can we successfully tackle this
problem through educational, legal and platform governance-related interventions.

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 33
BAD ACTORS OR BAD
ARCHITECTURE? RETHINKING
GENDERED VIOLENCE ONLINE
Emma A. Jane

Introduction: the more things change

This chapter begins with two accounts of rapes in virtual worlds. The first occurred in an
online loungeroom where a perpetrator forced the avatars of other participants to engage
sexually with him, assault each other and perform sexually violent acts on themselves. One
was made to stab a steak knife into her anus while another had to eat their own pubic hair.
The second assault occurred in an online lobby where a virtual reality researcher reported
being gang-raped by a group of male avatars with male voices seconds after she arrived. As
she tried to escape, she said her attackers took photos, yelling “don’t pretend you didn’t
love it” and “go rub yourself off to the photo”.
These two incidents share many similarities. Both involved tech-savvy early adopters
exploring cutting-edge digital worlds. Both generated debate about the reality status of
rapes in which no physical bodies touched. And both mobilised urgent calls for action. The
two case studies sketched above also have a critical difference. The first occurred in 1993 in
a small online community hosted in an experimental database within a Xerox research
computer in Palo Alto (Dibbell, 1993). The second played out in 2021 in a beta version of
Horizon Worlds, the $USD10 billion virtual-reality social media platform hosted by Meta
(formerly Facebook) (Patel, 2021; Kastrenakes and Heath, 2021).
In other words, nearly three decades have passed since the first widely publicised account of
virtual rape. Three decades to grapple with the dispiriting but surely unsurprising fact that –
much like racism, bullying and fraud – sexual violence would not remain in the “meat world” the
moment humans moved online. Three decades to consider and implement effective protections,
deterrents and remedies. Instead, global prevalence studies suggest technology-facilitated
gender-based violence (TFGBV) is getting worse.
Having archived and researched gendered cyberhate since the late 1990s – first as a
feminist media commentator and, from 2006, as a doctoral candidate and then as an aca-
demic – this lack of progress is both concerning and confounding. Why, despite widespread
awareness of the nature and impact of TFGBV, is gendered cyberviolence still so prevalent?
Are the modest interventions tried thus far not extensive enough, or are they the wrong
kind? And what might we do instead?

358 DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-40

 Bad actors or bad architecture?

In this chapter, I argue that one problem may be a dominant framing of the problem
itself. In much popular media discourse, TFGBV is framed as primarily a problem of bad
actors – illustrated by the routine characterisation of internet antagonists as “vile trolls”,
“warped incels”, “online creeps” and so on. Non-government organisations (NGOs) and
intergovernmental groups, meanwhile, are more likely to highlight what could be char-
acterised as negligent actors (such as big tech magnates who ignore, underplay, or disavow
harms linked to their platforms), and ignorant or irresponsibly slow-moving actors (such as
policymakers who fail to craft and enforce better legislation). While obviously complicit, my
case is that bad and other sub-optimal actors are not the underlying drivers of problems
such as TFGBV. Instead, the contemporary prevalence and severity of gendered cyber-
violence can be more usefully conceived as arising from a far larger and more complex
problem: the architecture of “surveillance capitalism” itself (Zuboff, 2019). Additionally,
techno-social systems are complex systems whose self-organisation, nonlinearity, feedback
loops, and emergent properties preclude prediction, control, and certainty. This further
problematises the focus on bad actors as primary causal agents and as the primary locus for
effective remedies.
In the next section, I begin by detailing the increasing prevalence and severity of TFGBV,
and the limits of law and platform self-regulation as potential interventions. I then discuss
the way surveillance capitalism emerged to both accommodate and exploit the founding
ideal of a free and open internet and situate TFGBV as one of many social harms arising
from attention economics. Finally, I sketch some possible paths forward using theory and
intervention paradigms drawn from complex systems theory.
My overall argument is that, while no framing of issues arising from complex systems
will ever be perfect or final, a powerful root cause of problems such as TFGBV can be found
by looking to the architectures of digital infrastructures rather than only (or primarily) at
the various species and sub-species of sub-optimal actors connected with these domains.
Framing matters because it brings certain things into focus and obscures others, nudging us
towards particular patterns of sensemaking and intervention generation (Dorst, 2015,
2017). It is particularly critical in scholarship because orthodox disciplinary conventions
and lenses can become blinders that impede rather than promote scholarly progress (Jane
and Vincent, 2020). As Winther writes in relation to the cognitive bias known as the law of
the instrument, “Sometimes, when scientists or philosophers have a hammer, everything
looks like a nail” (2014, p.20).
The bad actor/bad architecture metaphor used in this chapter has limitations. The term
“architecture” may imply structures that are solid and static whereas the apparatus of
attention economics discussed here are in constant flux. Neither is the actor/architecture
distinction offered as an aetiological or ontological binary. The actions and lack of actions
of bad, negligent, ignorant and irresponsibly slow-moving actors indubitably play a role in
gendered violence online. Indeed, one reason the architectures of the internet are flawed is
precisely because of the enormous influence they grant to individual bad actors. Also, the
reflexive feedback loops between actors and architectures mean the two are so tightly en-
twined that focussing on one at the expense of the other will only ever offer a partial
snapshot. My decision to persist with the actor/architecture metaphor borrows from “frame
creation” methods in the field of design (Dorst, 2015, 2017) and is offered as a thought
experiment rather than an incontrovertible diagnosis. By inviting a reframing of the causes
of TFGBV, my hope is that this might extend our collective capacity to generate more
effective interventions.

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 Emma A. Jane

This chapter’s recommended reframe is offered not as a replacement but as a supplement

for more familiar theoretical lenses such as those acknowledging the forces wielded by
patriarchal oppression, systemic racism, neoliberal ideology and so on. My case is that
reframing the underlying drivers of TFGBV may help produce more astute, effective, and
inclusive feminist analyses and activism because it properly classifies the system in which the
problem is situated. In addition to facilitating the generation of more domain-appropriate
interventions, acknowledging the interconnections between ostensibly disconnected digital
harms could pave the way for critical dialogue and resource-sharing between feminist
scholars and activists, and those addressing broader online information environment dys-
functions (see Sylvain, 2021).

Bad actors
There currently exists a plethora of terms used to describe the technology-facilitated abuse
and harassment of women. In this chapter, I use “technology-facilitated gender-based vio-
lence” (TFGBV) as it captures: a range of technological devices and contexts; the experiences
of transgender, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming people; and the recognition that – far
from being “just words” or “just virtual” – TFGBV involves real acts of real violence which
cause a range of significant harms to individuals, communities, economies and democratic
ideals. Regardless of which term scholars decide to use, however, the acts captured should be
contextualised as part of a continuum of gender-based violence that both reflects and further
reifies the historically rooted oppression and inequitable treatment of women and girls.
After a sluggish start (see Jane, 2017a), there is now a wealth of global studies into the
prevalence, severity and harms of gendered violence online. While synthesising this research
canon is complicated, there is good evidence that isolated drive-by attacks on women on
what was once known as the “Information superhighway” rose slowly from the late 1990s
before spiking around 2010, and then again in 2014 during the coordinated global attacks
on women dubbed “GamerGate” (Jane, 2017a, p.5). Since then, TFGBV has become more
prevalent, more rhetorically extreme and threatening, more harmful and more inextricably
interwoven with physical violence in the “real” world (to the extent that the online/offline
distinction even remains relevant) not least in the misogynist hate speech mass-produced by
members of so-called “incel” communities online (see Ging, this volume). However, it is not
the headline-grabbing lone shooters but the quotidian, everyday, perversely banal preva-
lence of harassment of and violence against girls and women in digital domains that speaks
to the true dimensions of the problem. For a recent snapshot, consider 2020 survey results
showing that 58% of 15- to 25-year-old women from 22 countries reported being cyber-
stalked, sent explicit messages and images, or abused online (Plan International, 2020, p.16).
In 2021, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) analysed data from 51 countries and found
that nearly 40% of women aged between 18 and 74 had personally experienced online
violence and 85% of women had witnessed it perpetrated against other women.
Popular media debates about whether online sexual violence is “real” have a long history
and are frequently used as an opportunity to further malign those who speak publicly about
their experiences. For instance, the virtual reality researcher who reported being gang-raped
in Horizon Worlds says that within an hour of a UK media article being published about
the attack, she received death threats and abusive comments on social media and via email
(Patel, 2022). Given that the raison d‘être of virtual reality is to create sensory verisimilitude
between the user and computer, TFGBV in “metaverses” is likely to be associated with

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increasingly severe repercussions – especially given the rollout of ever-more immersive add-
ons such as haptic devices, which engage users’ sense of touch. Even without these features,
however, TFGBV can have a severe – and embodied – impact on targets that affects their
psychological health, livelihoods, reputation and physical safety (Jane, 2017b, pp. 53–75).
Of those women surveyed by the EIU (2021) who had experienced online violence in the
previous year, 7% had lost or had to change their jobs, 35% reported mental health issues,
one in 10 experienced physical harm as a result of online threats and nearly nine in 10
reported restricting their online activity in a way that limited their access to employment,
education, healthcare and community. In 2022, meanwhile, research conducted by the
Australian government’s eSafety Commissioner found one in three women surveyed ex-
perienced online abuse in a work context and that many reported taking a backwards step
professionally, avoiding leadership positions, and self-censoring as a result (eSafety
Commissioner, 2022).
In addition to harms to individuals, TFGBV is linked to detrimental societal impacts
such as:

• compromised media freedom: almost a third of women journalists report self-censoring

on social media (Posetti et al., 2021, p.13);
• an undermining of democracies: TFGBV is discouraging women from becoming
involved in politics or standing for re-election (Di Meco, 2019; Mijatovi
, 2022);
• economic losses such as those resulting from lost productivity: gender-based cyber vio-
lence is estimated to cost European Union countries between €49 to €89 billion annually
(Lomba, Navarra and Fernandes, 2021, p.232)); and
• the thwarting of more general efforts to reduce the inequity of digital divides: men are
21% more likely to be online than women globally, costing an estimated $USD1 trillion
in GDP in 2020 alone (Web Foundation, 2021, pp. 3–4).

Against this background, legislation relating to issues such as cyberbullying, cyberstalking,

cyber-harassment, image-based abuse and cyberhate has since been introduced – or is in the
process of being introduced – in a growing number of nations. However, as McGlynn
discusses in this volume, this legislation has not always centred harm or contextualised
TFGBV in the context of systemic violence perpetrated against women in all spheres of life.
Further, many digital harms do not involve unlawful acts, while those that do are difficult to
prosecute due to jurisdictional issues, offender identification and a dearth of specialist ex-
pertise and technological tools to ensure evidence collection meets the high standards of
proof required to secure criminal convictions (Vincent and Jane, 2017).
While some contemporary legislation does show promise, in other jurisdictions, new laws
have been criticised as being little more than penal populism and “political theatre”
(Douglas quoted in Klein, 2021). In Australia, for instance, a proposed “anti-trolling” social
media bill has been criticised by legal scholars as primarily benefiting those with the wealth
and resources to launch defamation cases while potentially depriving victims of redress
(Klein, 2021; Karp, 2022).
Large social media platforms have responded to increasingly scathing criticism by making
assorted changes to their algorithms and community standards, along with lofty public
promises in the name of greater safety and protection for users. These have had little impact
on the prevalence and severity of TFGBV and fall well short of demands made by human
rights groups and other advocacy bodies. Since 2017, for instance, Amnesty International has

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attempted to hold Twitter accountable for its multiple failures with regard to protecting
female users from violence and abuse. In 2021, the platform had fully implemented only one of
Amnesty’s 10 recommendations (Amnesty International, 2021). Ganesh and Moss, mean-
while, argue that Silicon Valley’s digital architects recognise that gendered online harassment
is neither easy nor profitable to address, and note that “no efforts to minimize harassment
have effectively scaled through Big Tech interventions” (2022, p.98).
Facebook – identified as the top location for TFGBV in a number of studies from dif-
ferent countries (Hicks, 2021, p.2) – has been at the centre of multiple controversies relating
to digital harms. These include the 2018 Cambridge Analytica data scandal, along with
broader criticisms relating to mass surveillance, privacy and security breaches, racial bias,
copyright infringements, political manipulation, hate speech and conspiracy theory prop-
agation and “shadow profiling” (harvesting data from users who don’t even have Facebook
accounts) (Brandom, 2018). In 2021, commentators suggested Meta was facing a “big
tobacco moment” when one of its former data scientists, Frances Haugen, leaked troves of
internal research showing the company knew its products harmed users and societies –
including facilitating deadly violence in developing nations – but kept these findings secret
in the interests of maximising growth at all costs (Haugen, 2021; Haugen, Harris and
Raskin, 2021). Continued scepticism about big tech’s pledges to do better is well-founded
because, as I discuss in the next section, making significant structural changes is contra-
indicated to continued profit-making.

Bad architecture
In April 2018, Mark Zuckerberg was questioned by the US Congress about the misuse of up
to 87 million Facebook users’ data for the purpose of building what Cambridge Analytica
whistleblower Christopher Wylie called a “psychological warfare mindfuck tool” in order to
assist Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign (Lapowsky, 2018; Wylie quoted in
Cadwalladr, 2018). During this appearance, the Republican senator Orrin Hatch asked –
seemingly in good faith – how it was possible to sustain a business model in which users didn’t
pay for the service. Zuckerberg was observed to smirk as he replied, “Senator, we run ads”
(Burch, 2018). Yet, “we run ads” is a misleadingly simplistic characterisation of how Meta and
other large platforms make money. For example, the algorithms and Artificial Intelligences
(AIs) that inform the messages and target the recipients of these ads are deliberately covert
and inherently incomprehensible. Their workings are poorly understood not only by elderly
politicians but by paid-up members of the digerati including some of the technologists tasked
with monitoring and modulating the behaviour of these increasingly autonomous systems.
Zuckerberg was correct to state that big tech companies are able to offer their platforms to
users ostensibly free of charge while charging advertisers for access to these users. Yet the
ubiquitous surveillance and vast data-mining possible in digital domains make this type of
informational capitalism markedly different from the traditional market variety. Researchers
have known for many years that the traces of human behaviours, communication, and social
interactions proliferating in digital environments can be used to make accurate predictions
about people’s future behaviour as well as to gain insight into a suite of other personal details.
(In 2013, it was shown that Facebook “Likes” alone could automatically and accurately
predict personal attributes such as sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, political views,
intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age and gender
(Kosinski, Stillwell and Graepel, 2013).) This has incentivised platforms to collect and store

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vast reservoirs of data that are strategically deployed via algorithm- and AI-powered ranking
and recommendation engines and “intentionally … addictive user interfaces” (Fedtke, et al.,
2022, p.71). The aim is to maximise the time users spend on platforms and are exposed to
targeted marketing. On Zuboff’s account, surveillance capitalists unilaterally claim human
lives and experiences as “free raw material” which can be cheaply harvested and translated
into data for trading on lucrative “behavioral futures markets” (2019, p.8).
Given that economics involves studying scarce resource allocation and a signal charac-
teristic of the present era is near infinitely abundant information, the key limiting factor of
surveillance capitalism is human attention – that is, the state in which cognitive resources
are focussed on some things at the expense of others. Human attention is a zero-sum game.
The cutthroat competition in the attention economy, therefore, arises not just because
platforms are competing against each other, but because they are competing against all non-
screen-based activities, including – as Netflix CEO Reed Hastings once admitted – sleep
(quoted in Raphael, 2017).
Moreover, an ample body of work demonstrates the many ways that – far from being
neutral or superhumanly objective – technology reflects, reinforces, and can amplify existing
oppressions and inequities. Data is encoded with gender, ethnic and cultural biases (Zou
and Schiebinger, 2018) which live on in digital platforms and become “part of the logic of
everyday algorithmic systems” (Crawford, 2016). Specific instances of these can be viewed
via crowd-sourced and publicly accessible spreadsheets furnishing verified lists of global
incidents related to AI, algorithmic and automation harms including those relating to sex-
and gender-based bias and misogyny in contexts relating to recruitment and domestic
violence (AAAIC, 2022). Yet, aside from relatively general observations about technology’s
integration and amplification of systemic gender stereotypes and oppression, there is a
dearth of research that critically examines contemporary surveillance capitalism using an
exclusively gendered lens.

It’s complexcated
Responding to digital harms – including TFGBV – is a daunting prospect given the ever-
deepening chasm between exponential technologies and the incrementalist institutions
governing our everyday life. As the technology analyst Azeem Azhar puts it understatedly,
“the future is coming at us at quite a rate” (Azhar and Euchner, 2022, p.16). Formulating
and implementing interventions is made more difficult by corporate secrecy and obfuscation
(the algorithms animating social media feeds are frequently protected as trade secrets and
are unavailable on publicly accessible registries), and the inevitable “black box” effect of
complex algorithms and deep learning.
A potentially fruitful way forward involves recognising that both the harms and benefits
of digital ecosystems arise from complex – as opposed to merely complicated – system
dynamics. Complicated systems have large numbers of moving parts that behave in well-
understood and relatively predictable ways. Complex systems, in contrast, are constantly
evolving – impossible to ever fully comprehend, steer, or predict. Their perpetually inter-
acting parts involve circular feedback and “feedforward” loops that give rise to abrupt,
paradoxical, and disproportionate outcomes including what might seem like self-fulfilling
prophecies: high-level systems “self-reflect” and react to what they “think” about themselves
or what is thought about them (San Miguel et al., 2012, p.250). Examples of complex
systems include brains, oceans, riots, economics and human-technology interactions.

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Differentiating between complicated and complex systems is critical because interven-

tions that suit problems arising in the former are likely to be ineffective or may even backfire
completely if applied to the latter. Legacy government toolkits are mostly designed for
governance in complicated rather than complex systems. As such, they are increasingly ill-
suited to solving novel problems in complex technological, economic, ecological and social
assemblages (Kreienkamp and Pegram, 2021, p.782). One suggestive proposal is to sup-
plement inherited global governance system design with adaptive design principles explicitly
oriented to working with (rather than against) complexity (Kreienkamp and Pegram, 2021,
p.787). Complex systems-appropriate mechanisms include “probing” (conducting small-
scale experiments to investigate how a system responds (Snowden and Boone, 2007)) and
the use of leverage points where “a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in
everything” (Meadows, 1999). Given that even slight changes in complex systems can have
cascading effects producing emergent outcomes that confound orthodox notions of cause
and effect, the mission is not to find the correct answer but one which is not too wrong; to
focus not on formulating fail-safe plans with defined outcomes but on adapting experi-
mental management modes that are safe to fail (Snowden and Boone, 2007).
Further, regulatory theory offers a range of governance responses extending well beyond
the “impoverished” view of regulation as mere “rule compliance” (Kolieb, 2015, p.137).
Rather than “anti-trolling” laws, more expansively conceived and effective government
responses could include mandates relating to technology company monopolies and ethically
conflicting portfolios (such as Google’s mission to organise all the world’s information
while also operating as a precision surveillance ad broker, and military and intelligence
contractor (Simonite, 2021)). Further regulatory possibilities utilising a spectrum of reward-
persuade-punish principles could include:

• ensconcing value-sensitive design (VSD) principles into curricula for technologists;

• investing in integrity design teams who propose using urban planning principles to help
govern online spaces (after all, “the physical city … doesn’t solve problems by surveilling
and arresting everybody” (Massachi, 2021));
• ensuring platforms adhere to the values of the rule of law in terms of consent, predict-
ability and procedural fairness (Suzor, 2019);
• curbing precision surveillance and micro-targeted advertising;
• enforcing chronological rather than engagement-based rankings for social media news
feeds;
• curtailing the vastly inordinate influence small groups of “power users” exert on content
ranking algorithms; and
• introducing “friction” points – the digital equivalent of traffic speed bumps – making it
slightly harder for users to share inflammatory content rapidly.

Insights drawn from case studies such as the digital government ethos of rough consensus,
civic participation and radical transparency that emerged during student protests in Taiwan
in 2014 could also prove helpful (Tang, Harris and Raskin, 2022), as would appraising the
effectiveness (or otherwise) of proposed or yet-to-be-implemented new regulations relating
to digital governance such as the sweeping antitrust provisions contained in the EU’s
Digital Markets Act. Once again, however, such interventions would need to be tested in a
constant deploy-monitor-recalibrate cycle to account for the unpredictability of complex
system dynamics.

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These types of top-down interventions should also be supplemented with bottom-up

resistance to generate non-monopolistic information and communications technologies
informed by intersectional feminist values and marginal perspectives. As Ganesh and Moss
observe,

“There are small and resolute communities of autonomous feminist tech infrastructure
developers and technologists who are trying to exist outside these systems by literally
architecting their own hardware, data storage, and servers, as well as the values that
come with small infrastructures, such as slowness, care, and repair”.
(2020, p.100, internal citations omitted)

Movements associated with data feminism, feminist data sets, feminist open-source inves-
tigations, and feminist principles of the internet “which speak directly to matters of en-
cryption and anonymity in the context of gendered harassment” (Ganesh and Moss, 2022,
p.100) also show promise. Still, there remains a dearth of research that critically examines
contemporary surveillance capitalism using an explicitly gendered lens. There is a pressing
need for feminist scholarship to investigate further how the digital architectures fuelling
racist hate speech, political extremism and conspiracy thinking are similarly proliferating
and amplifying misogyny.

Conclusion
Despite a proliferation of international activism, research and various attempts at policy
and platform reform, gendered violence online remains an intractable problem causing
grave, intersectional harms at the global level. In this chapter, I have argued that continuing
to call for more, different or better-policed laws focused on bad actors is an understandable
but ultimately unhelpfully surface-level approach that – among other problems – proposes
solutions better suited to complicated rather than complex systems. While “after-the-fact”
punishment should still have its place, persisting with a patchwork of mostly ad hoc and
minimalist policy and policing measures risks a situation in which such problems continue
or – as we have seen in the case of TFGBV – become even more prolific and aggravated.
Hoping big tech will evolve more of a corporate conscience and engage in rigorous self-
regulation, meanwhile, seems likely to involve a Godot-grade wait. As such, I have argued
in favour of a paradigmatic shift in the framing of gendered violence and other technology-
related harms by advocating for a complex systems approach focused primarily on the
business model and design principles used by the tech giants dominating our digital eco-
systems. An essential opening move is to correctly identify the systems involved as complex
systems and engage in reframing if misclassification has occurred. Only then will it be
possible to begin domain-appropriate experiments in search of the types of “pattern-based
management” techniques that lend themselves to interventions in complex systems
(Snowden and Boone, 2007).
Responding to complex global problems such as TFGBV is profoundly challenging and
requires the combined and concerted efforts of multiple stakeholders, including scholars.
Yet, researchers are in both the best and worst position to investigate problems associated
with platforms and other emerging digital technologies. On the one hand, we are equipped
with a range of theoretical, methodological, and disciplinary tools that support precision,
rigour, and the unearthing of evidenced-based interpretations and interventions. On the

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other hand, the very processes that support our suitability and trustworthiness as expert
inquirers – ethics committee applications, peer-reviews and re-reviews and agonisingly slow
publication processes – are a poor match for Silicon Valley’s “growth at all costs” mantra
and the literally exponential speed of technological development (Azhar, 2021). There are
also informational asymmetries (such as big tech’s secrecy and opacity), as well as asym-
metries of ethics and experimentation (in that internet-based companies conduct potentially
harmful human experimentation such as A/B/n split tests at scale without users’ consent
(Jiang, Martin, and Wilson, 2019)). As such, serious consideration should be given to the
creation and funding of the scholarly equivalent of rapid-response units to better keep pace
with the high-speed development and extravagant research budgets of the objects of our
analysis. (Amazon, for instance, spent $USD36 billion on research and development in
2019 alone (Azhar, 2021).) If academic researchers’ governing and funding bodies fail us in
this regard, we are likely to find ourselves continuing to bring analogue butter knives to
digital gunfights.

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 34
NETWORKED MISOGYNY
ON TIKTOK
A critical conjuncture
Sarah Banet-Weiser and Sophie Maddocks

Introduction
In February 2022, the social networking site TikTok updated its community guidelines to
explicitly ban misogyny from its platform (Prang, 2022). Alongside deadnaming, mis-
gendering and the promotion of conversion therapy, misogyny is now officially prohibited
on the site. Since the earliest days of the internet, hatred of women has found a home online.
Still, it has taken decades for male-dominated technology companies to recognise the
severity of networked misogyny – and even today, this recognition is limited (Brison and
Gelber, 2019). For decades, online misogyny has shamed, silenced and humiliated women
and girls (Jane, 2016). We saw this in the virtual rape of female avatars in 1990s chat rooms,
and we continue to see it today in the virtual groping of women by male avatars in the
metaverse (Eisinger, 2017; Zitser, 2022). We see it in death and rape threats, deepfake image
abuse and relentless trolling (Sobieraj, 2020; Citron, 2019; Valenti and Friedman, 2020;
Maddocks, 2020; Semenzin and Bainotti, this volume). Today, online misogyny is receiving
more public visibility, but even as platforms like TikTok begin to ban misogynistic beha-
viours, hatred of women online persists in diffuse and dangerous ways.
Here, we consider the broad context of networked misogyny, which we define as the
structural, cultural and technological conditions through which misogyny circulates. As many
feminist scholars have documented, the current decade is one in which distinctly networked
misogyny has taken hold, which Kate Miltner and Banet-Weiser describe as “a basic anti-
female violent expression that circulates to wide audiences on popular media platforms” (2016,
p.172). The affordances of media platforms allow for amplification of this content, through
what philosopher Kate Manne describes as “the system that operates within a patriarchal
social order to police and enforce women’s subordination and uphold male dominance” (2018,
p.33). The heightened visibility of networked misogyny, often centred around a space in online
culture called the “manosphere”, offers a significant plane in the conjunctural logic of con-
temporary mechanisms of controlling and disciplining women.
As is now well-documented, extreme-right movements use misogyny as a core logic to
their politics, not merely a strategy or tactic. These movements are frequently based on
misogyny as a set of discourses and practices that aim to “reset” the gender balance back to

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-41 369

 Sarah Banet-Weiser and Sophie Maddocks

its “natural” and authentic patriarchal relation (Banet-Weiser, 2018). Using misogyny on
TikTok as a case study, we argue that we are experiencing a historical conjuncture in which
networked misogyny has become newly diffused and disguised. A resurgence of misogyny
across public life, the commodification of feminism, compulsory self-representation on
platforms and the rise of image-based social networking have all combined with the iso-
lation and anxiety wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic to create the historical conditions for
a constantly networked misogyny that evades detection. As a networked phenomenon,
misogyny should be understood not as isolated to digital spaces, but embedded across
media platforms, material conditions and structural forces. The present conjuncture,
defined as a period during which formerly distinct forces combine to create economic,
cultural, or political shifts, is one where misogyny is not an epiphonema to white nation-
alism, micro-fascism, homo- and transphobia, anti-immigration and anti-Black racism, but
is rather at the centre of these forces (Bratich, 2022; Bratich and Banet-Weiser, 2019;
McRobbie, 2020).
Thus, it is essential to position misogyny as an intersecting and entwined set of social,
cultural and economic forces. “Banning” misogyny on a digital platform recognises it as a
specific harm, but a platform policy cannot fully address a force that is practiced and ex-
pressed structurally. Positioning misogyny at the centre of the contemporary conjuncture
means considering it as dynamic and constantly moving. Melanie Kennedy, in her analysis
of girlhood and visibility through TikTok, relied on Angela McRobbie’s (2020) call for
feminist media scholarship to be more “tentative” in its claims to avoid collapsing our
complex historical moment into the “catch-all” labels of postfeminism and neoliberalism
(Kennedy, 2020). Networked misogyny is constantly manifesting in new ways, moving
across networks and entering new spaces (Banet-Weiser, 2018), and the online platform
TikTok is but the latest stop. In this chapter, we add our tentative analysis to this con-
versation by considering TikTok’s disguised and diffused relations of misogyny.
However, it is not just that misogyny has adapted both to the online context and the
heightened visibility of feminism. Popular feminism has also shifted under the neoliberal
logics of visibility. Feminists’ focus on inequality and structural oppression has been co-opted
into hollowed-out discourses that enclose feminism’s radical goals, making it seem safe,
marketable and popular (Banet-Weiser, 2018, p.16). Mythologies about the relative openness
of digital media platforms, fuelled by technological optimism about broad access and avail-
ability, work to enhance misogyny and online violence against women, not challenge it. The
ideology that everyone has a voice on digital media, that will be heard, mobilises utopian
visions of how technology can free us (Eubanks, 2011; Robinson et al., 2020). Many feminist
thinkers have also embraced this idea, positioning #MeToo as “consciousness-raising” and
highlighting its stories’ publicity as key to their political function (Mackinnon, 2019). While
digital activism may be one of the most important advances in feminism, as Jessie Daniels
argues, it is also “in crisis and unsustainable” (2016, p.51).

The unique affordances of TikTok

Here we turn to TikTok. A relative newcomer in the ever-growing social media landscape,
TikTok emerged in 2018 after the Chinese company, Bytedance purchased the video
streaming app, Music.ly. According to Forbes in 2021, TikTok is the world’s most popular
web domain (Moreno, 2021). TikTok expanded from the mainly musical format of Music.ly
to include a broader range of short videos, from music to politics to feminism. TikTok, like

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other social media platforms, curates content for users based on prior histories. Unlike
Instagram, individual videos are shared more on TikTok than individual profiles. TikTok is
especially popular for the Gen Z demographic, though it became popular across demo-
graphics during the various Covid-19 lockdowns (Moreno, 2021).
We argue that TikTok is an essential online platform to consider in this historical moment
for various reasons. First, the platform’s scale: TikTok has more than 100 million monthly
active users in the US (Sherman, 2020). Second, it is wildly popular among youth (Littleton,
2021). Third, it is a multimodal platform that combines the affordances of text-based Twitter,
image-based Instagram, and sound/video-based YouTube. Finally, for our purposes, TikTok
is a hub for girls. As Kennedy has documented, popular media outlets claim that “teenage
girls rule the internet right now” (2020, p.1069), and the rise of the platform during the Covid-
19 pandemic has raised “girls’ bedroom culture” to the top of our newsfeeds.
The notion of girls’ “bedroom culture” was first articulated by McRobbie several dec-
ades ago (McRobbie and Garber, 1976). McRobbie positioned bedroom culture as a space
where girls could imagine themselves attached to male pop stars (among other things) and
indulge in that imagination without being humiliated. Kennedy expands this logic to
understand girls’ use of TikTok today. The idea that TikTok has merely replaced bedroom
culture with a “digital bedroom” belies how misogyny structures online culture; as Kennedy
argues, “In digital spaces like TikTok, such risk of humiliation and degradation – whether
in relation to the expression of sexual desire or in terms of one’s self-representation – is very
much present and embedded within the architecture and ethos of the platform, in the
metrics of likes, visibility via shares, and in the critiques within the comments” (2020,
p.1071). Like many other online platforms, the broad dismissal of TikTok as anything but a
fun tool where girls can be “unfiltered” misses what Kennedy calls the “insidious political
and ideological work” the platform does (2020, p.1072). Thus, aside from the scale, pop-
ularity and digital affordances of the platform, there are other reasons why it is important to
study TikTok in the context of gendered violence.
TikTok includes discursive content (audio/text) and performance, not just physical
appearance or posing for a photo. In this sense, it moves away from “picture perfect” dis-
courses and towards disclosure and storytelling, rewarding relatability and performance over
“Instgrammable” aspirational lifestyles (Abidin, 2020). One way that TikTok becomes
“relatable” is through the circulation of exciting new forms of feminist activism that seem to
transcend the marketable, aspirational popular feminist traps. Many feminist TikTok trends
are squarely focused on critiquing male supremacy as a structure of domination; for example,
many creators are developing viral content that educates users about critical race theory,
white supremacy, capitalism and indigenous and black feminisms.1 However, white TikTok
creators within these trends often get the most views (Rosenblatt, 2021; Mitchell, 2021).
Misogyny and misogynoir pervade the discourse articulated in online spaces and the design of
spaces themselves (Noble, 2018; Sobieraj, 2020; Massanari, 2015; Bailey, 2021). As many
scholars have carefully documented, the convergence of platform politics, algorithmic bias,
insufficient legal systems, the emergence of popular feminist movements (including #MeToo)
and neoliberal capitalism form a complex and often contradictory conjuncture that shapes
both networked feminisms and networked misogyny. Even though TikTok is a site of both
feminist and misogynistic discourses, when we searched “feminism on TikTok” on Google’s
search engine, prominent results were squarely misogynistic: the top three videos had titles like
“top 22 hot women on TikTok destroy feminism”. This exemplifies the in-built “algorithmic
oppression” that promotes white male supremacist discourses online (Noble, 2018).

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While its technical affordances provide the potential for more diverse presentations of
the self and less privileging of users’ physical characteristics, the platform is moderated in
ways that still privilege a narrow range of creators who promote normative beauty stan-
dards. TikTok has come under much criticism for actively filtering out content from black
creators and creators perceived to be ugly, disabled or poor (Biddle, Ribiero and Dias, 2020;
Mitchell, 2021). Thus, like with other social media platforms, TikTok activists have figured
out ways to “hack” the app by hiding their politics behind more “acceptable” content; for
instance, in 2019, 17-year-old human rights activist Feroza Aziz posted a make-up tutorial
in which she used her audio commentary to raise awareness of Muslim Uyghurs being
confined to detention centres in China.
TikTok, more than image-based platforms such as Instagram, is capable of capturing a
particular ambivalence that frames young women’s participation online, as affective and
potentially activist possibilities are balanced by the pervasive logics of beauty, surveillance and
judgement (Gill and Orgad, 2022). Perhaps this is because TikTok virality doesn’t stem from
having a coherent persona or online identity: instead, users’ posts, not their profiles, go viral
(Haenlein et al., 2020). As well as developing their own style, this incentivises TikTok creators
to participate in as many new trends as they can so that their content continues to achieve
maximum exposure – positioning even popular feminism itself as a trend. TikTok’s organi-
sation of communities through the repetition of specific trends and their associated hashtags
creates a “perceptible but shifting collective emotional tone” (Southerton, 2021, p.3252).
Perhaps ironically, the way TikTok organises communities around this kind of “shifting
collective emotional tone” can mean that misogyny is expressed more affectively than ag-
gressively. After all, TikTok has officially “banned” misogyny, offering a technological “fix”
that is fairly easy for more covert forms of misogyny to avoid, either through supposed
parody, the participation of young women (as explicitly misogynistic videos are predomi-
nantly attributed to men), or comedy. While aggressive misogyny still exists, the trends we
analyse here possess an emotional tone of subtle and diffused misogyny. Compulsory self-
representation online and the rise of image-based social networking platforms, combined with
the isolation and anxiety wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic, have led to significant increases
in image-based abuse: the non-consensual creation and/or distribution of intimate images.
Because personal images can be produced, edited, stolen and distributed quickly, image-based
abuse has become a widespread tool of misogyny online. Although referred to in the media
most often by misnomers such as “revenge porn” or “deepfake porn”, image-based abuse is
not always sexual. It may involve sharing or threatening to share images of a woman without
her hijab, or content depicting an incident of domestic violence (Maddocks, 2019). In all its
manifestations, this is a life-ruining harm that causes adverse emotional, physical, economic
and psychological outcomes (CCRI, 2013; Citron and Franks, 2014, p.351; Bates, 2016).
Alongside the aforementioned isolation and anxiety from the pandemic, the resurgence
of misogyny across public life and the failure of popular feminism to challenge patriarchal
systems have created the historical conditions for newly diffused, disguised and image-based
forms of misogyny online. These new nodes in the network of misogyny are illustrated in the
virality of sexist trends on TikTok.

Tentative conjunctural analysis

Popular misogyny and popular feminism co-occur at a time when self-representation on social
networks has become a vital part of our identity management. In today’s “non-optional”

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internet, much of our online engagement has become a form of self-representation, and it
typically takes place on corporate-controlled “stages” that demand our self-exposure (Perry,
2018). Feminist scholars have argued that this compulsory exposure is also fraught with
gendered norms of idealised beauty and authenticity for women (McRobbie, 2020; Gill, 2017;
Dobson, 2015; Kanai, 2019). But it is more than striving for an idealised feminine perfection;
this compulsory exposure has become increasingly image-based, through social networking
sites like Instagram and Snapchat, video-sharing platforms like YouTube and TikTok, and
distinctly image-based cultures of meme and selfie sharing. This ocular centrism demands that
we share personal images to manage our identities online.
The case studies that follow move through different manifestations of misogyny, from
very explicit trivialising of domestic violence to a more subtle sexist self-branding and body
shaming. Whilst the first might be addressed in the context of TikTok’s misogyny ban, the
latter two are less likely to be considered in violation, thus demonstrating the limitations of
“banning” misogyny from a platform.

The “pretend to punch your girlfriend” trend

In this TikTok trend, a user (typically an adolescent or adult male) pretends to punch their
girlfriend and films her reaction. The “pretend to punch you girlfriend” trend includes a
couple – typically a man and a woman – in a confined space (often a bedroom or car). The
videos begin with a confrontation, for example, the woman taking the man’s cell phone.
This escalates into an argument, with the man ultimately attempting to punch the woman.
The climax of the prank is the woman’s reaction to the threat of being hit. Typical reactions
span crying, freezing and verbal or physical retaliation. It appears that the girlfriend is “in”
on the joke in most instances. She has planned the prank alongside her boyfriend, knowing
he will not hurt her. However, in some videos, the girlfriend is unaware that her boyfriend’s
threat is part of a prank. While most who participate in the trend present themselves in
heterosexual relationships, there are also versions of this trend in which non-heterosexual
couples pretend to hit each other. Most of these videos are made by “couple accounts”:
social media accounts made by couples in their teens or early twenties that follow the
minutiae of their daily lives and relationship dynamics.
This trend is part of a broader pattern in which dating abuse is used as fodder for viral
pranks. In a similar trend, TikTok creators ask people if they would punch their girlfriends
for a million dollars. By making a joke out of dating violence and positioning girlfriends as
“in” on the joke, widely condemned behaviours become ironically acceptable. Thus, dating
violence is represented as a thing of the past even as it is normalised in the present. This
trend illustrates the layering of networked misogyny on TikTok. At its core, this trend is
misogynistic because it trivialises violence against women. A second layer of misogyny
baked into this trend is the way women are expected to react to the threat of violence from
their boyfriends. In most videos, the girlfriend retaliates physically and verbally, threatening
to punch the boyfriend back.
This trend communicates the false idea that rates of dating violence are the same across
men and women, putting them on an equal footing to “fight it out”. This gestural equality
disguises the power dynamics of dating violence that are explicitly signalled in the trend’s
call for users to pretend to punch their girlfriends. While there is evidence of mutual violence
in teen dating relationships, women experience much higher rates of dating violence over the
course of their lives (Swahn et al., 2008; Miller et al., 2010). The girlfriends in each prank

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embody Rosalind Gill’s description of postfeminist women as “autonomous agents no longer

constrained by any inequalities or power imbalances” (2007, p.153). Divorced from the reality
of endemic violence against women, girlfriends in this trend are expected to protect themselves
from their boyfriend’s aggression by fighting back. This expectation harms women because it
contributes to the familiar myth that a woman is only a credible victim if she fights back
against her abuser.
A third layer of misogyny baked into this trend is its exposure of the girlfriend to public
scrutiny and shame. Public shaming is a key disciplinary mechanism of misogyny and
feminism online. In commodified forms of contemporary feminism, girls and women are
always already shamed and self-disciplined. The culture of compulsory self-representation
requires them to submit to shame to enter digital media spaces: “Exposing oneself to public
shaming is the cost of doing business in the digital world” (Banet-Weiser, 2018, p.68). For
example, to be perceived as “feminist” girls must love their bodies in a culture that hates
them. In this prank, the woman must defend herself against the threat of violence, and find
it funny while doing so.
Finally, this trend is misogynistic because it co-opts feminist opposition. Even couples
that condemn dating abuse are incentivised to participate in this trend to prove that their
relationship is not abusive. For example, in many videos, the couple’s relationship is
deemed healthy if the girlfriend does not flinch when her boyfriend tries to hit her, because
she knows he would never actually hurt her. Under TikTok’s post-based logic of exposure,
couples seeking to challenge or condemn this trend are also incentivised to participate in it,
link to its hashtag, or “duet”: this is when creators use a split-screen to comment on another
video while it plays. As well as the humour it provokes by design; this content also provokes
outrage, an emotion that spreads content even faster and further (Berry, 2014).
Consequently, attempts to critique or subvert this trend still serve to amplify it.
The layers of misogyny within the “pretend to punch your girlfriend” trend serve to
normalise violence against women, promote victim-blaming myths, expose women to public
shaming and enclose the potential for feminist critique. The visibility of this trend also
exposes users to potentially triggering content. This is encapsulated in a comment on this
trend from a survivor of abuse: “My fyp [for you page] is really trying to get me into full-
blown PTSD panic attack today”. TikTok’s recent decision to remove misogynistic content
from its “for you page” may stop users from being triggered and may reduce the prevalence
of trends such as this on its platform. However, the diffuse misogyny expressed in trends
like “previous owners” and “pick me girl” is harder to detect.

The “previous owners” trend

“Previous owners: 2, Miles: 9, Year: 2001, Model: Fake Blonde”. Captions like these appear
on videos shared as part of TikTok’s “previous owners” trend. Emerging in the summer of
2021, this trend sees predominantly adolescent girls list themselves as if they were used cars.
Using this metaphor, they share how many romantic partners they have had, the extent of
their sexual experience, their age, and a summary of their physical characteristics. This trend
usually involves the creator dancing in the background to Earth, Wind and Fire’s “Let’s
Groove Tonight” while their “specifications” are listed on the screen. In a society where
women are constantly rated and classified by others, these users seek to categorise them-
selves through what they perceive to be a fun and playful trend. For some, this trend is
empowering because their participation in it is ironic: they seek to subvert cultural norms

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that present sexually active girls as “owned,” “damaged” or “used up” (Mahan, 2021). For
others, this trend represents a deeply objectifying sexualisation of girls, because they are
asking to be sold, bought and ultimately owned. This contradiction between sexual agency
and sexual objectification illustrates a daily challenge that girls navigate under the condi-
tions of networked misogyny. Social norms encourage girls to be confident and sexually
assertive – while fearing and pathologising girls’ sexual agency. As Amy Shields Dobson
explains, active, assertive and sexually desiring representations of teen girls have become
popular in recent years as well as public panic around girls’ sexualisation (2015, p.24). These
girls’ “heterosexy” self-representation is condoned and condemned simultaneously.
To navigate this bind, girls are expected to do labourious self-branding on social media,
including participating in trends such as “previous owners”. By encouraging girls to cate-
gorise their sexuality before men do it for them, this trend illustrates the way in which male
dominance encoded on social media platforms “misdirects” women who seek to challenge
male power (Megarry, 2018). The expectation that girls will “display their life projects”
within these limited frames makes it difficult for them to take up “alternative, more com-
plex, and critical subject positions” (Harris, 2004, p.11). Just like participants in the “pre-
tend to punch your girlfriend” trend who sought to condemn dating abuse, many who don’t
ascribe to this “heterosexy” performance of normative female sexuality felt compelled to
challenge this trend from within. Many creators tried to queer this trend by fitting their non-
normative sexual preferences into the “specification” list, or by dressing and dancing
in ways that avoid conventional hyper-sexualisation. But ultimately, their sexual self-
representation is confined by this trend’s narrow parameters. Male sexuality remains pri-
vate, while the girl is the “marked” case, exposed to potential shame.
From the global circulation of non-consensual pornography to networks for grooming
and trafficking, girls’ and women’s bodies are routinely bought and sold online. The
“hetero-sexy” self-representations in the “previous owners” trend regurgitate familiar tropes
of sale and ownership, forming one more node in a networked misogyny that trades in and
on women’s bodies.

The “pick me” girl trend

In 2018, the hashtag #TweetLikeAPickMe opened a space for satirical commentary on the
behaviours of “pick me” girls. The “pick me” girl is a girl who ascribes to sexist beliefs and
acts out stereotypical gender norms to achieve male validation. In 2021, the “pick me”
hashtag became popular on TikTok, and it has since accumulated over 1.5 billion views. In
these videos, girls and women mock “pick me” girls for the ways that they promote sexist
norms and seek male validation. For example, a “pick me” girl may say that she prefers
hanging out with men because women are “bitchy” or “dramatic”, or may laugh at sexist
jokes or argue that feminism has “gone too far”. Due to their own internalised misogyny,
“pick-me girls feel they need to distance themselves from other women to be more attractive
- to be ‘picked’ by men” (Rosenbluth, 2021, n.p.).
The trajectory of the “pick me” girl trend exemplifies the pervasiveness of networked
misogyny. What began as a tool to shed light on internalised misogyny soon became a
weapon of woman-hating: encouraging girls and women to criticise each other for the most
minor behaviours. As Amy Rosenbluth (2021) argues, berating women is antithetical to
feminism, and educational content that explains internalised misogyny could undoubtedly
offer a productive solution. However, the affordances of TikTok and the culture of

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networked misogyny make it all too easy to corrupt a budding feminist conversation.
Misogyny structures our reception of girls’ media production online, often framing it as
cringe-worthy, risky, or dangerous (Dobson, 2015). In the “pick me girl” trend, girls in-
ternalise this norm by producing media that critiques each other’s choices as cringe-worthy,
risky or dangerous. Rather than exposing the sexist behaviour of their male and female
peers, this trend encourages girls to focus only on the behaviour of their gender, and ulti-
mately to pathologise each other.
This is the “funhouse mirror” of misogyny: the process through which the politics of
feminism is distorted and shaped to serve the purposes of misogyny (Banet-Weiser, 2018,
p.113). This trend also illustrates Angela McRobbie’s (2020) “perfect-imperfect-resilience”
cycle. This cycle “bridges the gap between feminism and capitalism” by creating a palatable
and profitable feminist rhetoric (McRobbie, 2020, p.61). This maps onto the “pick me” girl
trend because it expects girls to be constantly surveilling their own and each other’s per-
formances of feminism on social media in ways that produce highly profitable content for
platforms.

Conclusion: beyond the misogyny ban

This chapter does not seek to criticise the women and girls who participate in the “pretend
to punch your girlfriend”, “previous owners,” or “pick me girl” trends. We heed Akane
Kanai’s warning that scholars are too quick to diagnose girls’ “management of social
contradictions” as a repudiation of feminism (2019, p.173). Instead, we seek to focus on
how misogyny structures, pervades and corrupts girls’ and women’s attempts to self-
represent on TikTok.
Despite being misogynistic by design, platforms like TikTok have become essential
refuges for women and girls experiencing misogyny and gender-based abuse (Sobieraj, 2020,
p.99). In comments reacting to the “pretend to punch your girlfriend” trend, many users
express empowerment and joy at seeing girls fight back against a potentially abusive boy-
friend. In these comments, they ask questions about how to deal with dating abuse and
share experiences of violence. In the “previous owners” trend, sexually self-possessed
adolescents seek to reclaim the words “slut” and “whore”, pursuing what Miller-Young
(2014) calls “erotic sovereignty” on their terms. In the “pick me girl” trend, creators call out
the internalised misogyny that drives women towards sexist attitudes and behaviours.
This complex and contradictory environment is made clearer through tentative con-
junctural analysis. As our self-representation on platforms becomes ever-more compulsory
and image-based, we are forced into ready-made “trends” that expose and shame, even
when we engage with them via irony and critique. At a time when the harms of networked
misogyny are finally gaining recognition, we urge technology companies and policy-makers
to acknowledge the misogynistic logics that shape their platforms and diffuse through their
user-generated content, and most importantly, to implement victim-centred strategies for
prevention and regulation.

Note
1 For example, see https://www.tiktok.com/@witti.indi/video/6954104977220586757?is_from_
webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id6922495198803150342. https://www.tiktok.com/@
thepoliticaleconomist/video/6925041577278639366

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 35
NAMING AND FRAMING THE
HARMS OF CYBERFLASHING
Men sending non-consensual dick pics
Clare McGlynn

Introduction
In recent years, women have been increasingly calling out the everyday harassment and abuse
they experience online. Having been trained to minimise men’s harassment and intrusions into
our daily lives, brushing off experiences that leave us feeling disturbed, uncomfortable and
fearful for our safety, women have had enough. More and more women are challenging men’s
harassment and intrusions; challenging the taken-for-granted “safety work” that all women
engage in to minimise the threat of men’s abusive practices – managing our behaviour, rou-
tines, interactions, visibility and conduct in online and offline spaces (Vera-Gray, 2018; Vera-
Gray and Kelly, 2020).
In this context, attention has turned to cyberflashing – where a man sends an unsolicited
penis image to another, commonly a woman. This can be an image of the man’s own penis,
or someone else’s, with the original not being germane to the impact and effect as the origin
will often be unknown. Women experience cyberflashing on the train, in the supermarket,
queuing for coffee and in their everyday interactions online (McGlynn and Johnson, 2021).
For many, it is an annoyance, an irritation, but perhaps something they feel they should
simply shrug off. But the significance and impacts of cyberflashing must not be minimised.
It can also be experienced as violating, deeply disturbing and threatening: Why would
someone send this? Who are they? What might happen next?
The prevalence and harms of cyberflashing are increasingly recognised in public debate, with
many campaigns, particularly across England and Wales, recommending a new criminal
offence to clearly cover these abuses. For example, the English Law Commission has recom-
mended a new criminal law offence covering some forms of cyberflashing where specific motives
of the perpetrator can be proven (McGlynn, 2022; Law Commission, 2021). This recommen-
dation has been included in the UK’s Online Safety Bill which is being debated in Parliament at
the time of writing (summer 2022) and may become law in 2023 (Ng, 2022). Such measures are
part of the growing international recognition of the need for legislative action, with recent
offences introduced in Singapore and some states in the US (McGlynn and Johnson, 2021).
Cyberflashing, therefore, is increasingly recognised as a harmful behaviour deserving of
public attention and action. However, there is a real risk that as public debate intensifies,

380 DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-42

 Naming and framing harms of cyberflashing

and as we move towards significant actions such as new criminal sanctions, public un-
derstanding of this behaviour reduces due to a reluctance to accurately name and frame
these behaviours. The problem being targeted is men sending unsolicited penis images,
mainly to women. This is a gendered harm, with men predominantly the perpetrators,
and the victims commonly women. Further, the extent and nature of the harms experi-
enced are gendered, in large part because the images are of penises. However, public
debate largely eschews such realities, rarely naming men as the problem, and even less
identifying the harmful images as being of penises. Specifically, there are a plethora of
terms being used to describe these practices, such as referring to genital images, indecent
images, explicit images and similar.
This obfuscation, and reluctance to accurately name and frame this form of abuse, has
potentially significant ramifications, impeding public debate and possible policy and legal
responses. If we do not identify the specific harm, we are less likely to take the required
action to prevent it and ensure redress. Accordingly, this chapter begins with a brief outline
of the gendered nature of cyberflashing to establish the nature of the behaviours being
discussed. It then examines recent public debates in England about the harms and law
reform possibilities of cyberflashing to demonstrate the ways in which not naming harms
accurately impacts the framing of the issue. Ultimately, it is argued that this framing, and
reluctance to name the harms, will adversely impact policy and legal responses and that,
perhaps, we need to reconsider the terms currently being used.

Context: nature, prevalence and harms

Cyberflashing is the term used to describe the sending of an unsolicited penis image to
another (Gallagher, 2019; Hayes and Dragiewicz, 2018; McGlynn and Johnson, 2021). The
growing body of research into online abuse and cyberflashing reveals that cyberflashing is a
common experience, with women, and young women in particular, facing the highest rates
of victimisation and disclosing the most negative impacts (Amundsen, 2020; Mandau, 2020;
Marcotte et al., 2021; McGlynn and Johnson, 2021, pp. 12–14; Oswald et al., 2020). Studies
consistently find that around half of younger women (18–25) have received unsolicited penis
images (YouGov, 2018; Marcotte et al., 2021). Amongst under 18s, the incidence is even
higher, with Jessica Ringrose, Kaitlyn Regehr and Sophie Whitehead (2021) finding that
76% of girls had received an unsolicited penis image. Further, data from police reports show
that the majority of those reporting cyberflashing are under 30 and that reports are
increasing (Bowden, 2020; Gallagher, 2021). Moreover, evidence suggests that the incidence
has increased further since the Covid-19 pandemic began as online abuse has risen con-
siderably, with black and minoritised women particularly affected (Glitch and EVAW,
2020). This intersectional context is vital to understanding the prevalence and experience of
online abuse and cyberflashing (Harris and Vitis, 2019).
Cyberflashing takes place across all the main social media platforms including Twitter
and Instagram, as well as across dating and hook-up apps, and direct to smartphones via
airdrop and Bluetooth technology (McGlynn and Johnson, 2021). While we know there is
this range of ways in which women experience cyberflashing, survey evidence thus far has
not uncovered which platforms or means of technology are most commonly used. However,
we do know that there are high levels of this kind of abuse in dating and hook-up apps with
some, such as Bumble, taking specific action to tackle cyberflashing via interventionist
technology (Bumble n.d.).

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Cyberflashing is not experienced uniformly, and there are gaps in knowledge, particularly
in relation to men’s experiences. Marcotte et al. (2021) surveyed gay and bisexual (but not
heterosexual) men, who disclosed a high incidence of being sent unsolicited penis images,
but only a small minority of men disclosed negative impacts (see also Matthews et al., 2018).
Importantly, while it is often assumed that the sending of unsolicited penis images is
commonplace and accepted on some dating and hook-up apps predominantly used by men
seeking sex with men, the community guidelines of such apps state that consent should
always be secured before sending explicit images (Grindr, 2022). There are, therefore, dif-
ferent contexts for these behaviours, particularly for male sexual minorities, though the
predominant focus of this chapter is on the experiences of women who have been sent penis
images by men without their consent.

Men’s motivations
In seeking to understand the nature of cyberflashing, a range of different motivations have
been examined with the most common framing depicting men’s behaviour as transactionally
motivated, underpinned by the hope that sending an unsolicited penis image will result in
sexual images in return, or instigate sexual activity (Mandau, 2020; Oswald et al., 2020). In
particular, Mandau’s (2020) research with young people found that boys drew on typical
gendered constructions of heterosexuality to explain their sending of unsolicited penis
images, perceiving this to be a way of complimenting or hooking up with girls, or securing
reciprocal nude pictures (see also Ricciardelli and Adorjan, 2019).
For some perpetrators, motivations may be closer to those who perpetrate physical
flashing, that is some form of sexual gratification based on exhibitionism (Hayes and
Dragiewicz, 2018; Green, 2018; McGlynn and Johnson, 2021). Approximately one-
quarter of Oswald et al’s respondents reported that sending penis images excited them
sexually (2020). Even if this is a relatively small proportion of men motivated by sexual
gratification, the nature of this sexual arousal is particularly disturbing. For exhibi-
tionists, sexual gratification commonly comes as an “expression of anger, particularly in
cases involving male offenders and female victims”, and the reaction of the victim is
central to their excitement, especially “heightened by the victim’s fright” (Green, 2018,
pp. 207–208).
Therefore, we also need to understand cyberflashing as a behaviour sometimes intended
to harm or negatively affect women (Thompson, 2016, 2019; Ringrose and Lawrence, 2018).
A UK survey found that 30% of men thought women would find penis images distressing,
and a quarter, threatening (24%) (YouGov, 2018). Oswald et al. (2020) found that signifi-
cant numbers of cyberflashers hope to provoke negative reactions, including fear (15%).
Others admitted that sending penis images gave them a feeling of control over the recipient
(10%), and that they liked to make people angry by sending penis images in response to a
disagreement (eight per cent).
Underpinning this range of motivations is a sense of masculine entitlement, a desire for
exercising power and control (Hayes and Dragiewicz, 2018) and a form of homosocial
bonding between men (Burkett, 2015). It can be a performance or reassertion of masculinity
which consolidates men’s gender identity (Mandau, 2020). Ringrose, Regehr and Whitehead
(2021) discuss how many teenage boys are sending unsolicited penis images, and trading
nudes, as part of how boys’ homosocial bonds are fostered. Overall, cyberflashing is under-
pinned by problematic constructions of masculinity, with men acting in a social context that

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encourages and validates aggressive sexual engagements and normalises many forms of non-
consensual sexual activity, underscoring the gendered nature of cyberflashing.

The harms of cyberflashing

The gendered and sexualised nature of cyberflashing is also evident in how women report their
experiences and their potentially adverse impacts. At its root, cyberflashing is an infringement
of sexual autonomy, often experienced as a serious violation and intrusion, akin to other
forms of sexual assault (McGlynn and Johnson, 2021). Marcotte et al. (2021) found that
almost a third of women reported feeling “violated” after being sent unsolicited penis images.
Some have compared their experiences of cyberflashing to other forms of sexual violence,
particularly physical flashing, with one victim-survivor commenting that “both are a complete
invasion of your private space, whether physically or digitally” (Gallagher, 2018b, n.p.).
Closely related to experiencing cyberflashing as a sexual violation is the sense of humili-
ation and shame that it can engender, with some describing a “heatwave of embarrassment”
(Boulos, 2019), others being “embarrassed” and “disturbed” (Precel, 2019). There may also be
serious consequential harms, including inducing real fear and threat to physical safety. Many
women have recounted feeling immediately “frightened”, “scared”, “terrified”, “vulnerable”
and “exposed” by the cyberflashing, which negatively impacted their sense of safety and trust
in both online and offline public spaces (Gallagher, 2019; McGlynn and Johnson, 2021).
Cyberflashing is experienced as an aspect of the everyday objectification, inequality and
sexual double standards that women routinely experience and navigate: “another harass-
ment women just have to absorb” (Gallagher, 2018a, n.p.). In this way, it is experienced as
part of a continuum of sexual violence (Kelly, 1988; Hayes and Dragiewicz, 2018; McGlynn
and Johnson, 2021), undermining women’s ability to freely live their lives and exercise their
citizenship in public spaces, both online and offline.
In understanding the nature of cyberflashing and its impacts, examining the specific
nature of the images and videos is vital. Arguably, the harms experienced by cyberflashing
are particular and significant due to the images being of penises. Returning to an under-
standing of cyberflashing as being an intrusion violating a person’s personal, embodied
space; it is a sexual intrusion and breach of sexual autonomy because it is an intrusion
perpetrated with a penis. This is also why being sent such an image or video is experienced
by some as similar to physical exposure or “flashing” of the penis, and other forms of sexual
harassment and assault. It is why it is experienced as part and parcel of broader patterns of
sexual violence and harassment. One victim-survivor stated: “we can’t walk home alone at
night without fear of being raped … and now they’re getting into our phones too”
(Gallagher, 2019, n.p.). Another woman reported that the perpetrator repeatedly sent her
images, “along with a message saying I ‘wanted it’ and that he was ‘going to give it to me’”
(Gizauskas, 2018, n.p.). In another case, a man sent a woman a picture of an erection
alongside the blade of a kitchen knife after she rejected his advances (Thompson, 2016). As
Laura Thompson writes of this example, the subtext is of the “penis as a weapon, with the
ability to hurt or ‘punish’ this woman for her apparent ‘transgression’ by rejecting him”
(Thompson, 2016, n.p.).
These experiences are necessarily connected to the unsolicited images being of penises,
rather than pornography more generally, because of the centrality of the penis to many
understandings of acts of rape and sexual assault (cf McKeever, 2019). This is not to say
that the penis is inherently threatening in image or form. As Susanna Paasonen, Ben Light

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and Kylie Jarrett argue, penis images, like penises, are multivalent objects which “move in
and across different frames of interpretation shaped by the affective registers of, for
instance, shame, desire, disgust, interest, amusement and aggression” (2019, p. 2). However,
as the authors also note, when deployed in a context of non-consent, penis images function
as a figure of phallic power, imbued with gendered heterosexual dynamics of male sexual
aggression, and a fundamental lack of sexual safety commonly experienced by women.
It is this which explains why being sent penis images without consent is different from
unsolicited pornography more generally, an important issue not widely recognised. The
English Law Commission, for example, while recommending an offence of distributing
genital images without consent, nonetheless stated that it was not sure what the real dif-
ference is between unsolicited penis images and being sent pornography without consent
(Law Commission, 2021, para 6.77; McGlynn, 2022). The Law Commission asked: “is it
really the fact that the image contains genitalia specifically that renders that image different
from other sexual content?” (Law Commission, 2021, para 6.77) That it was not understood
that the answer is clearly yes, for the reasons above, raises concerns regarding the broader
understanding of the nature and experience of cyberflashing, particularly by many women.

Terminology matters
This discussion brings us back to the naming and framing of the behaviour being labelled
here as “cyberflashing”. The term “cyberflashing” first came to the fore in 2015 when it was
reported that a woman had been sent penis images on public transport (Bell, 2015). The
discussion of this case predominantly referred to “indecent” images, though specific refer-
ence was made to the fact that it was penis images that the victim had been sent.
Other terminology has been used for longer to describe this practice, principally “dick
pic” and “unsolicited dick pics”. The Urban Dictionary, for example, provided its first
definition of “unsolicited dick pic” in 2007, not long after the phrase “dick pic” appeared
(Urban Dictionary, n.d.). Although the phrase “unsolicited dick pics” is often used to
describe cyberflashing, in my work, like many others, I have generally chosen to use the
term “cyberflashing”, arguing that the term “dick pic” risks minimising and trivialising the
practice (McGlynn and Johnson, 2021; Thompson, 2016; Thompson, 2019). Rachel
Thompson has argued that the default response to any report containing the word “dick
pic” – be it unsolicited or solicited – has been “unbridled mirth” (Thompson, 2019).
Another journalist, Sophie Gallagher, who has written extensively on the topic and been key
to raising this issue in public debate, prefers cyberflashing as a term because dick pics
“belittles it and makes it sound humorous” (quoted in Thompson, 2019). Also, while the
word “unsolicited” affirms the un-invited nature of the penis image, the term “unsolicited
dick pic” tends to focus on the nature of the image rather than the cyberflashing action and
actor, which arguably makes it less visible who is doing what to whom, and the violation
involved in the act. This discussion mirrors those in other fields such as Sophie Hindes and
Bianca Fileborn’s analysis of #MeToo media reporting where they argue that “colloquial
and ambiguous” terminology “consistently downplayed and minimised the nature” of some
of the abusive sexual activity being reported (2020, p. 646).
Nonetheless, the term cyberflashing has its own limitations which mostly parallel cri-
tiques of the term “flashing”. The term “flashing” risks minimising the nature and harms of
sexual exposure. It evokes the idea of a short-lived experience – a flash – yet many women
recount prolonged in-person encounters, such as when confined and isolated on public

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transport with the perpetrator (Vera-Gray, 2018, pp. 101–104). The nature of the exposure
in cyberflashing is even further removed from that of a “fleeting encounter” because it
involves the perpetrator exposing his penis via a digital photograph or video. In enacting the
exposure through such images, the act becomes suspended in time – embodied in a fixed,
tangible object that is inserted into victim-survivors’ personal devices and digital social
worlds. The word “flashing” may also give rise to an assumption that it is always an image
of the perpetrator’s own penis that is shared when the origin of the image will be mostly
unknown. Nevertheless, until now, my choice has been to use the term “cyberflashing” for
want of an equally clear and easily-recognisable alternative phrase.
However, as public discussions have continued, I am increasingly concerned that the
term cyberflashing, while having many benefits as described above, may also risk obscuring
the specific, harmful, sexualised and gendered nature of the abuse. The problem is men
sending penis images without consent. Yes, there may be some women who send images of
their vulva to others without consent. But the reality is that we are discussing this practice,
and its significance, because there are so many men sending penis images, not sexual
material more generally. This would be difficult to discern from current public debates.
For example, in a recent debate in the UK Parliament specifically on cyberflashing, there
was no reference to the penis or even genitals, but many references to “indecent images”,
“sexual images” and “lewd images” (Hansard, 2022). There was also no reference to men
being the primary perpetrators, only to “people” sending such images, though that it is women
and girls who are predominantly experiencing cyberflashing was an important element of the
debate. Media discussions commonly use terms such as “sexual images” (Rider, 2021),
“unwanted sexually explicit pictures” (Braeger and Knowles, 2021), “unsolicited obscene
images” (Petter, 2021), “unwanted graphic nudes” (Kelsey, 2021), “unsolicited sending of
obscene images” (Siddique, 2021), as well as “X-rated snaps” (Ridler, 2022).
There are a range of concerns with these terms, firstly their breadth. Phrases such as
“sexually explicit” could cover a wide variety of images, with the term “sexual” including even
more. “Obscene” further obscures by including a value judgement as well as a descriptor and
such a term is notoriously obscure in the context of defining pornography. These terms would
be more appropriate if the discussion were, more generally, about sending pornographic
images or videos to someone without their consent. This is indeed commonplace and can be
experienced as harassment, abuse and an intrusion. But it is both arguably different to the
specifics of a penis image, which may be an image of the sender’s penis, and in terms of debates
regarding a change in the law, it has very different implications, as further discussed below.
Interestingly, there are discussions which are more specific, particularly when sharing the
testimonies and experiences of women who have been cyberflashed, with references to it
being men who are sending the images, or referring to a penis and masturbation (Gizauskas,
2018; Terry, 2021). There are also media articles by journalists with a long background in
reporting this issue where reference is made to the images being of penises and also reference
to dick pics (Gallagher, 2021). Of further interest is that one of the studies which sparked
much public debate about the practice is clear on the nature of the problem being analysed,
with YouGov headlining its influential survey being about women and girls being sent
“unsolicited penis photos” (YouGov, 2018). There are also some headlines that refer to
both cyberflashing and dick pics (Gizauskas, 2018), perhaps in recognition that not ev-
eryone is aware of the term “cyberflashing”.
This brings me to reconsider the term “dick pic”. Might it be that “dick pic” makes it
clearer exactly what we are talking about, even if the nature of that term risks greater levity

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than deserved? And if the focus is on penis images, it is clearer what and who the problem is.
This is perhaps particularly pertinent as most of the current public debate is in the context
of considering law reform, particularly the introduction of a new criminal offence
(McGlynn, 2022). The law reform discussions centre on the introduction of an offence
specifically targeting the sending of images of genitals without consent (Law Commission,
2021; McGlynn, 2022). In relation to the offence being focussed on genital images, rather
than penis images, this follows the long-standing practice of sexual offence laws being sex
neutral, in that they apply equally to women and men, with the exception of the offence of
rape. The focus itself is on genitals, rather than pornography more widely, due in some
measure to the understanding of the nature of the problem, as well as the offence developing
from existing laws on physical flashing which cover the exposure of genital images.
But it is in these discussions that the use of terms such as “sexually explicit” images may
lead to confusion. Recently adopted laws and proposals in some US states, while prompted by
the problem of cyberflashing, extend to a much wider range of pornographic images
(McGlynn and Johnson, , 2021, pp. 96–101). The law in Texas, for example, criminalises
sending “sexually explicit visual material” which includes images of “sexual conduct” as well
as “intimate parts” being exposed (McGlynn and Johnson 2021, pp. 97–98). The reach of such
provisions is extensive when compared to proposals in England and Wales to cover the
sending of genital images only and would give rise to real concerns about the reach of the
criminal law and the ability to police such provisions. This is particularly significant as current
proposals in England and Wales would introduce a maximum term of imprisonment of two
years, compared to US provisions which mostly provide for a fine only on a first offence.
Arguably, therefore, describing cyberflashing in terms of sending “sexual images” or
similar may be confusing, leading to assumptions that any new law is far wider than the
proposals. That could lead to considerable disappointment from the perspective of those
who are receiving pornographic material without their consent. Alternatively, it may lead to
many objecting to any new law on the basis that it is so wide, when, in fact, it is much more
targeted. Each position is also assuming a different problem – sharing of pornography
without consent – which although overlapping with cyberflashing is still distinct.
Context is of course relevant and in other situations, broader language may be more
appropriate. The organisation Brook, for example, runs impressive sex education cam-
paigns with one focussing on cyberflashing and emphasising the role of consent in all sexual
activity (Brook, 2022). Brook defines cyberflashing as the “act of sending someone nude
pictures online without their consent”. This definition is at least more factual in referring to
“nude” images, rather than a description of them as indecent or obscene. As a definition, it
also has value in an overall context of discussing sexual ethics and practices more generally,
in that sending anyone a nude should only be done with consent, even if a criminal offence
will only cover sending genital images. Nonetheless, their campaign does include recom-
mending changes to the law so that there are no “grey areas” and, as argued above, it is
possible that more obscure terminology impacts negatively on both a law reform project, as
well as understanding of the issues.
Perhaps, however, the term cyberflashing itself is not clear, as every article, report and
discussion of it includes a definition. A one-word term such as cyberflashing has value for
labelling a practice, being succinct, but if it always requires explanation, it is perhaps less
valuable. The words unsolicited dick pics, or perhaps unsolicited penis images, would be
another possibility and perhaps more immediately understandable and name the problem.
However, the term “unsolicited” places emphasis on whether the recipient wanted the image

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or not, rather than the focus being on the sender and what they did or did not do to ensure
the images were wanted.1 This leads to the use of terminology of consent, with the hope that
this emphasises the perpetrator’s responsibility to seek and ensure consent.
Terms such as non-consensual penis images or non-consensual dick pics may, therefore,
be more suitable and effective. It is less clear, however, that such terms would have general
use or appeal. The choice of language such as “sexually explicit” is a deliberate choice not to
use the term penis or dick. In my own experience of speaking about these issues on national
media, I have had many discussions with producers regarding the terminology to be used,
including being told I may use the term “penis” but not too often, and not to use the term
“dick pic”. Genitals is more specific but obscures the gendered nature of the problem,
suggesting it is a gender-neutral phenomenon.

Conclusions
Sending non-consensual penis images is a growing problem that women are experiencing
as a violation and intrusion, often with harmful and lasting impacts. It is part of the
everyday harassment many women experience, with women challenging its normalisation
and minimisation. As a result, there is a growing public debate over necessary measures to
challenge these behaviours, including educational initiatives, as well as law reform pro-
posals. In all contexts, choice of language and terminology is important, but especially
so in relation to current debates over new criminal laws. Just as the term “revenge porn”
has been critiqued not only for victim-blaming, but also for its role in limiting the scope
of current laws (McGlynn and Rackley, 2017), the risk is that the term cyberflashing
may, in fact, be obscuring the nature of the harms being discussed, leading to less effective
legal change.
In particular, a new criminal law targeting the sending of penis images without consent is
justified by the expressive value of the criminal law (McGlynn and Johnson, 2021). Criminal
laws can send a clear message to society generally that those specific behaviours are
wrongful and harmful, potentially aiding prevention and education initiatives (Citron,
2009–10). It can also signal to women that their experiences are understood and recognised.
However, the expressive value is going to be less if the message is not in fact clear; if it is not
obvious what the problem is and what behaviours are being targeted.
It is in this context that this chapter raises the question of whether, despite the term cy-
berflashing being adopted for many good reasons, including being succinct, emphasising links
to the offence of physical flashing, and being less salacious and trivialising, it may in fact risk
obscuring the nature of the problem and therefore the value of a new criminal offence.
Perhaps it is time for us to adopt the term non-consensual penis images. Nonetheless, as
Karen Boyle describes in relation to the challenges of feminist terminology more generally,
“the answer is not to abandon any of these terms or to claim one as inherently better
(or worse) than the other, but to be alert and critical to the ways in which they are used and
to think about the – conceptual, political, practical – work they enable us to do” (Boyle
2019, p. 32).

Note
1 Thanks to Karen Boyle for raising this issue with the term ‘un/solicited’ and its focus on the
recipient, rather than the actions of the sender.

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 36
THE NON-CONSENSUAL
DISSEMINATION OF INTIMATE
IMAGES ON TELEGRAM
The Italian case
Silvia Semenzin and Lucia Bainotti

The evolution of image-based sexual abuse in Italy

The non-consensual dissemination of intimate images (henceforth NCDII) is a worryingly
increasing phenomenon. More commonly known as “revenge porn” by media or as image-
based sexual abuse by feminist critics (McGlynn and Rackley, 2017), it includes sharing
private and sexual material online, without the consent of the person depicted, in the form of
photographs or videos. Talking about NCDII, emphasis is put on the lack of consent in the
sharing of intimate content. Said content is often consensually created, for example in the case
of sexting, and then shared without the represented person’s consent. In some other cases,
material is non-consensually acquired, for example when personal pictures are hacked, taken
with hidden cameras, or created by means of AI technologies (i.e. deepfake porn).
In a study from 2019, the American Psychological Association stated that around 10% of
the US population had been affected by NCDII, with a higher incidence among minors. In
2020, the British Revenge Porn Hotline reported a 70% increase in cases during lockdowns
(Topping, 2020), with an average of seven cases of image-based abuse reported every day.
NCDII is a gendered phenomenon: according to a study by Cyber Civil Rights (Eaton,
Jacobs and Ruvalcaba, 2017), women account for about 90% of victims. Approaching
NCDII in terms of abuse against women is necessary to find concrete solutions to an urgent
issue that indelibly marks victims’ lives. Around 93% of victims claim to have suffered from
anxiety, panic, fear and social rejection and, even more seriously, 51% think of suicide as a
way out (Cyber Civil Rights, 2014). These consequences are mainly rooted in cultural and
social prejudices: female sexual freedom is still broadly criminalised and rejected, and
female bodies remain objects of social control.
In the past decade, NCDII has received attention in different national contexts, including
Italy. Here, concerns started to grow when, in September 2016, Tiziana Cantone, a 29-year-
old woman from Naples, died by suicide after her intimate images were shared on a
WhatsApp group without her consent by her ex-partner Sergio Di Palo. Cantone initially
became a meme after the sexual images went viral: her intimate content was widely shared on
Facebook groups and other social media platforms in a form of derision, as well as on several
Italian and international porn sites, including PornHub (Pasqualetto, 2016). Although

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-43 391

 Silvia Semenzin and Lucia Bainotti

Cantone immediately denounced Di Palo and the platforms hosting the images, asking for the
material to be deleted, on 13 July 2016 an Italian judge denied her the right to be forgotten.
She was ordered to pay 20,000 euros of the platforms’ legal expenses, the judge deciding that
they had no responsibility for the diffusion of her sexual material. The exception was
Facebook, which was condemned to pay 320,000 euros. Two months later, Cantone took her
life. The images remained online for several months after her death.
After Cantone’s death, the phenomenon slowly started to be publicly discussed as part
of the spectrum of an already persisting problem of men’s violence against women. In the
same year as Cantone’s suicide, many Facebook groups aimed at humiliating women via
NCDII flourished in Italy (Di Fazio, 2017). Countless men met in these groups to exchange
stolen pictures of women and girls, secretly taken in public realms (such as on beaches or in
shops) or using hidden cameras, mostly positioned in public toilets, fitting rooms or gyms.
In December 2016, a Facebook group with an explicit and misogynist name “Foto di
amiche da sborrare” (“Pictures of friends to cum on”1) was brought to wider attention
when a girl’s denunciation of it on social media went viral. Despite many users subse-
quently reporting the group, Facebook claimed that “it did not violate its guidelines”
(EWL, 2017). Facebook only closed the group and started de-platforming this kind of
practice after some journalists campaigned against it (Rogers, 2020). Nevertheless, that did
not end NCDII in Italy.
In 2017, a study from Amnesty International reported that at least 1 out of 5 women
in Italy were victims of online gendered violence (Amnesty International, 2017). One of
the authors, Silvia Semenzin, worked with three gender rights associations to launch an online
petition via Change.org called Intimità Violata (“violated intimacy”), accompanied by the
hashtag #intimitàviolata at the end of 2018. The petition called for the criminalisation of
NCDII and the recognition of the phenomenon under the umbrella of gender violence and the
violation of sexual consent. The petition received so much public attention that it quickly
turned into a political campaign. In April 2019, after months of political debate, the Intimità
Violata campaign led to the inclusion of NCDII as a criminal offence in the “Red Code law”,
aiming to protect women from gender violence (art. 612 ter c.p.). The amendment stipulates
that anyone who sends, publishes, or disseminates intimate photos and videos of somebody
without their consent shall be punished by a sentence of one to six years imprisonment and a
fine of 5,000 to 15,000 euro. The same measures may also apply to anyone who helps to
disseminate this material by sending it to other people.
Although the approval of the Red Code was an essential step in providing women with
more protection on the web, the legislative process that led to the introduction of the new
crime in 2019 was extremely hurried and influenced by media debates and public opinion.
Partly for this reason, it is a partial amendment that does not consider the many circum-
stances that make up NCDII and, therefore, often results in ineffective solutions for sur-
vivors. The amendment follows the text of the law against stalking, demonstrating a lack of
understanding of a new and substantially different phenomenon. According to Pavan and
Lavorgna (2021), the current law is, in fact, ineffective due to the lack of recognition by the
legislator of image-based sexual abuse as a form of violence that merges social and tech-
nological factors. The law downplays the role of digital media platforms as key mediators of
the violence (Semenzin and Bainotti, 2020), and seems to endorse the victim-blaming per-
spective that the “revenge porn” label encapsulates (Pavan and Lavorgna, 2021). According to
criminal lawyer Gian Marco Caletti, the problem lies in the idea that victims need to prove
that there was an intentional will to harm and “get revenge” (Saltobz, 2019). Image-based

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sexual abuse has continued to grow in Italy even after the law’s approval, with a 78% increase
in reporting in 2021 (Sole24Ore, 2022).
To understand the societal and cultural nature of NCDII in Italy, this chapter focuses on
the use of Telegram. The spread of NCDII on Telegram has been witnessed in different
countries, including the Philippines and Russia (Kraus, 2020), as well as Italy. Although
Telegram is not the most popular messaging app in Italy, a role that is covered by
WhatsApp, (Mehner, 2022), various journalistic investigations (e.g. Zorloni, 2019) and
academic research (Semenzin and Bainotti, 2020) have addressed the emergence of a large
network of Telegram channels and groups, composed of thousands of users, dedicated to
NCDII. In this chapter, we present the main findings of our research, focusing on the
importance of understanding the impact of sexist practices and inherited gender stereotypes
in the perpetuation of gender-based violence online.

NCDII and Telegram: delving into groups and channels

Over the past years, so-called mainstream social media platforms, such as Facebook and
Twitter, have started to increase the regulation of nudity and sexuality, with stricter content
moderation policies and community guidelines (Paasonen, Jarrett, and Light, 2019).
Consequently, platforms began to shut down groups and pages containing non-consensual,
intimate material too, though this was typically because of the “intimate” nature of the
content, not its more problematic, non-consensual dimension. Nevertheless, those sharing
NCDII quickly found other venues suitable for their purpose, including messaging apps
such as Whatsapp and, especially, Telegram.
Telegram’s architecture is particularly suitable for NCDII in a climate of general
impunity. The platform offers the possibility to register with a phone number only, use a
pseudonym and communicate under a form of pseudo-anonymity. In addition, it is possible
to create groups of up to 200,000 users, which are suitable places for the aggregation of
mostly male users and the creation of male homosocial contexts with the purpose of
humiliating and discrediting women (Flood, 2008). NCDII is further facilitated by certain
freedoms that Telegram offers in the type of material shared on the platform, since content
moderation is not based on a direct intervention of administrators (except in some specific
cases, such as recognised child sexual abuse images). Instead, the platform delegates the
moderation to users’ flagging and reports. Elsewhere (Semenzin and Bainotti, 2020), we
highlighted how Telegram’s specificities can be considered as gendered affordances, as they
orient and favour harassment behaviours and, in concert with an established misogynist
culture, contribute to the re-affirmation of power and hegemonic masculinity (Connell and
Messerschmidt, 2005).
In order to understand how NCDII practices unfold in a predominantly male homo-
social environment, we carried out a covert digital ethnography (O’Reilly, 2008), mon-
itoring 50 Italian Telegram channels and groups, identified via listings on the Italian porn
website Phica.net.2 We then focused on three groups relevant for their popularity and ev-
eryday activity level and analysed the emerging conversations by employing an ethno-
graphic coding approach (Altheide, 1987). Our research first identifies the essential forms
assumed by NCDII on Telegram. In particular, we distinguish between what we call
“Explicit image-based sexual abuse” channels and “General porn” ones. In the former case,
the aim of non-consensually shared material is made clear by the channels’ descriptions and
rules: to upload images depicting “bitches” and share with other users “authentic” pictures

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of “sluts”. Interestingly, those who do not follow these rules and, above all, those who do
not contribute to the non-consensual sharing of material, are often kicked off by the ad-
ministrators. Whilst the channels’ descriptions do not make clear that the chats are for men
specifically, the derogatory – and highly gendered – terms used suggest that the communities
populating these channels tacitly agree on the ideal and most deserving participants being
heterosexual men. The “explicit image-based sexual abuse” category includes both big
groups that exceed 30,000 users and are active on a daily basis, as well as small groups that
target one specific girl and generally do not exceed 20 users, which recall close friends’ chats.
In the second case, in “General porn” channels, which can reach up to 60,000 users,
intimate images shared without the consent of those pictured are disseminated together with
mainstream porn. Without getting into a broader debate about the relationship between
pornography and violence against women, the presence of these groups and channels is
telling, as it shows users’ blurred perception of the boundaries between image-based abuse
and mainstream porn. What is more, on these channels, NCDII is much more appreciated
than mainstream porn. This clearly emerges from users’ interactions, and specifically, in
their requests to other participants to share “authentic” or “amateur” content – which is the
way in which they approach and define the content shared without the depicted person’s
consent – and their messages of appreciation towards this more “realistic” type of material.
In situating NCDII alongside general porn, users reflect and re-iterate the associations
inherent in the umbrella term “revenge porn”. This means that the typically (though not
exclusively) different production contexts are disguised, emphasising sexual content over
questions of meaningful consent. Secondly, the blurred boundary between NCDII and
commercially produced pornography reinforces the sense of impunity that typically ac-
companies the non-consensual dissemination of material. Perpetrators tend to consider their
practices as jokes and locker-room banter and not to recognise NCDII as a form of gender-
based abuse. Therefore, Telegram’s specificities, including its loose platform regulation,
together with the persistence of widespread gender stereotypes about female bodies and
sexuality, contribute to the trivialisation and normalisation of NCDII.
Furthermore, by looking at NCDII on Telegram, and specifically at the “explicit image-
based sexual abuse” channels, our research highlights that the widespread sharing of photos
and videos goes hand in hand with the categorisation of the women portrayed in a large
variety of categories, such as “blondes”, “girls from [name of a city]”, and so forth. This
kind of categorisation is not a new practice and is widespread in male homosocial en-
vironments (Thompson and Wood, 2018) and in commercial pornography (Attwood, 2004).
However, in the context of Telegram groups, categorisation practices do not completely
follow the genres of mainstream porn; rather, they are generated by users’ requests and
emerge from their interactions. The material is categorised according to body parts, age, city
or state of origin, and other relevant characteristics which contribute to the objectification
of the female subject but also, potentially, to the identification of those depicted (e.g. by
revealing either physical locations or online accounts) creating a material risk to these
women. Through the processes of classification, women become raw materials and objects
of consumption available to satisfy men’s heterosexual desires (Flood, 2008). Objectification
presents a rooted phenomenon at the crossroads of online and offline (see, e.g., Rodriguez
and Hernandez, 2018), which becomes even more pervasive on Telegram’s ecosystem of
channels and groups, and the networked nature of digital spaces more widely.
Crucially, these categorisation and objectification practices are further amplified by the
interactions between users and platform affordances, specifically the presence of external

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archives used to classify and store non-consensually shared content. The links to these ar-
chives (which usually do not include general porn) circulate across Telegram channels. One of
the most famous collections, where women are again labelled and grouped into specific cat-
egories, each corresponding to a specific folder, is known as “La Bibbia” (“The Bible”) and
represents a peculiarity of NCDII in Italy. The archive is periodically signalled and taken
down, and yet, it persists on different providers (such as MegaSync and Dropbox) and keeps
circulating across Telegram channels and groups. Therefore, Telegram’s architecture – and
that of surrounding platforms – offers innovative ways of denigrating, humiliating and
objectifying women, which exponentially increases the harm related to NCDII.

Types of violences on Telegram

Our analysis shows how patterns of networked harassment, including NCDII, which have
previously been documented in other research on gender violence and digital platforms (see,
e.g., Marwick and Caplan, 2018), have migrated to Italian Telegram channels and assumed
specific features in relation to the platform’s affordances and the nation-specific context
previously described. We will now explain these types of violence in detail to show the great
complexity of NCDII, building upon existing research made by the EWL (2017), EIGE
(2017), UNWomen (2020) and other women’s rights organisations.
First, we observed a good amount of sexist hate speech. The omnipresence of sexist hate
speech, both in the name of the groups and channels and in the way participants address
women, shows the openly misogynist nature of the chats. Male users insult women with
expressions that spread and incite hatred based on sex, such as using rape threats, and
depicting women as “whores”. The threat inherent in such speech is heightened when the
women depicted are clearly identified and/or located by users. This online sexual harassment
can take the form of comments, videos, photos and graphic images of a sexual nature aimed
at vilifying women and creating conditions of humiliation and sexualisation because they
are women. In the Telegram groups we analysed, the targets of online sexual harassment are
the girls and women depicted in the images shared without consent, and, by extension,
women as a broader category. In most cases, both the dissemination of images and the
ensuing discussion of them seems to happen without the victim/survivors’ knowledge
(victim/survivors are not, themselves, present on these pages as users/commenters) but, as
we have suggested, especially when the women are identifiable there may be material
consequences. For instance, targeted women also report an increase in receiving dick pics
via direct messages on social media platforms, such as Instagram and Snapchat when their
personal information is also shared (also known as doxing). Sometimes doxing takes the
form of identity theft or online personification: this involves, for instance, opening web
pages and social media accounts using the name and identity of someone else with the intent
to harm and discredit them by making public their private contents and personal infor-
mation. Online sexual harassment also includes comments on women’s physical appear-
ances together with the sharing of sexual fantasies regarding the target, which usually
includes practices of collective denigration in line with what we have previously referred to
as objectification, and, more generally, online rape (see, e.g. Bainotti and Semenzin, 2021).
This term is aimed at defining a type of online behaviour which includes the ritual of sharing
rape fantasies and allegations in a chat group, after an intimate picture of somebody is sent
or received (e.g. “I’d like to cum on those boobs” - “Yes, this slut deserves a good rape!”).

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In our research, we observed that doxing is often followed by cyberharassment, including

concrete attempts at getting in contact with the women depicted through social media ac-
counts, or via mobile phone – practices that could be considered as a first step towards
stalking and cyberstalking. Moreover, shitstorms, cybermob attacks and zoombombings
(Elmer et al., 2021) are often organised and coordinated inside chats and groups as forms of
brotherhood (Semenzin and Bainotti, 2020). Hostile mobs include hundreds, sometimes
thousands of people, systematically harassing a target. This behaviour creates fear, anxiety
and willingness to self-censor in victims. Therefore, NCDII on Telegram can be understood
as a form of group sexual violence.
Reasons for NCDII can be multiple, and do not just include revenge. The practices of
homosocial masculinity observed in Telegram chats and groups are often disguised as fun,
amusing and compensatory manhood acts (Schwalbe, 2015), although they end up being
acts of control and harassment. Sometimes, however, threats to expose sexual images can be
used by a person to obtain financial gain or a particular action, or for reasons of revenge or
humiliation: this is the case of sextortion (Wolak and Finkelhor, 2016). That may happen
after a relationship breakup where an ex-partner threatens to share private images to force a
reconciliation or mortify their ex-partner, or where a perpetrator and victim have met
online, and a sexual image from the victim is used to demand more images or money
(Davidson et al., 2019).
Although these shared intimate pictures are frequently consensually taken during a
sexual relationship or encounter, we could observe how intimate content can also be non-
consensually acquired by hacking or fraudulent behaviours. For example, there has been a
growth in creepshots and non-consensual digital voyeurism (EWL, 2017), consisting of
perpetrators secretly taking photos or videos of women’s private areas/moments for the
purpose of sexual gratification. In some cases, the act of taking the image without the
victim’s knowledge, and the subsequent violation of their privacy and agency, is precisely
what provides sexual gratification (EWL, 2017). This is reflected on Telegram by several
“spy-mode” dedicated chats and groups, where non-consensual hidden recordings and
pictures are shared. The spy-mode chats represent a sub-category of the “explicit image-
based sexual abuse” Telegram channels previously described. Creepshots have become so
popular in male-populated online groups that specific terms have been coined to describe
certain types of content, such as upskirting (the act of placing a phone between a woman’s
legs to acquire content) or downblousing (the act of photographing or recording a woman’s
décolleté). These kinds of images are always taken and distributed without the depicted
woman’s consent.
Finally, we have also observed that “nudes” and intimate contents are not always nec-
essarily original pictures or videos: for example, we have seen an increase in sexualised
photoshopped material, which is increasingly relying on new digital technologies to appear
more authentic. In this regard, we now delve into the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to
perpetrate image-based sexual abuse through creating deepfake porn and the automatisa-
tion of violence.

New challenges for online gender-based violence and NCDII

As a form of online gender-based violence, NCDII represents an ever-changing phenom-
enon, which evolves in tandem with changes in digital technologies. This entails the constant
complexification, amplification and modification of already existing practices. To conclude,

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we would like to describe four main challenges that, among others, we already are, and
increasingly will be, compelled to address: a) automation; b) artificial intelligence; c) im-
mersive virtual realities and d) metaverses.
One of the main challenges related to NCDII is the possibilities offered by the auto-
mation of violence and content dissemination through specific bots – applications that
operate on the Internet and automatically perform repetitive tasks that do not depend on
human intervention. In our research, we discovered the presence of various Telegram bots
that allow for systematising and speeding up NCDII by offering users a range of intimate
content at the click of a button along with the personal information of the women repre-
sented. In Italy, the presence of such a form of automated NCDII (Semenzin and Bainotti,
2020) goes hand in hand with the processes of categorisation and objectification previously
described. Moreover, automation is related both to the circulation of images and personal
information, with important implications for the intensification of doxing.
A second challenge is related to the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning
techniques to produce fake content, a phenomenon known as deepfake pornography.
Deepfakes use deep learning, a sophisticated subfield of machine learning technology that is
particularly complex in structure, to manipulate audio and video content (Paris and
Donovan, 2019). In the case of deepfake porn, the faces of celebrities, politicians, influ-
encers and, potentially, any woman or girl are superimposed over a pornographic image or
video without their knowledge (Maddocks, 2020). Deepfake pornography is not a new
phenomenon per se, as the sharing of involuntary pornography targeting celebrities, such as
Emma Watson and Scarlett Johansson, and other relevant public figures such as journalist
Rana Ayyub already testified. However, deepfakes, which usually require high computa-
tional skills, are becoming more and more accessible, thanks to the development of user-
friendly apps for the creation of deceptive content. A famous example, in this case, is
DeepNude, an app that used a photo of a clothed person and created a new, naked image of
that same person. The app gained popularity in 2019, but was immediately shut down due
to its highly controversial nature and the practices of gendered abuse online it prompted.
To date, however, other easily accessible and usable technologies for creating deepfake
porn remain widely available. For instance, a technology similar to DeepNude spread on
Telegram as a bot aimed at undressing women. According to Sensity.ai, the use of the bot
has steadily grown over 2020. The research shows that most Telegram users using the bot
are from Russia or other Russian-speaking countries, whereas the victims come from a
broader range of countries (e.g., Russia, the US, and Italy, among others) (Ajder, Patrini
and Cavalli, 2020). Artificial intelligence and deep learning allow for the creation of non-
consensual images in different ways, where taking or stealing nude pictures is no longer
necessary. Digital technologies are implementing ever-changing techniques to undress
women, which is the first step in harassing and silencing them. It is therefore crucial to
reiterate the gendered nature and use of these technologies.
As these examples point out, we are witnessing the rise and affirmation of technology-
facilitated ways of creating non-consensual material, as well as automated ways of spreading
such content. These practices have also been conceived as gamification of harassment (Hao,
2020), an expression that highlights the consequent trivialisation and normalisation of NCDII
and online gender abuse more broadly.
In light of these issues, it is pivotal to address the challenges related to technological
innovation and the future of gender-based violence online. This is especially true as im-
mersive virtual realities and metaverses are gaining public and corporate attention.

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Metaverses are characterised by persistent virtual worlds created by virtual reality and
augmented reality, which combine aspects of the digital and physical worlds in one space
only. In the metaverse, one can create a persona, or avatar, who will theoretically be able to
do anything they already do in the real world (Ravenscraft, 2021). The discussion about the
metaverse increased after Meta (the name adopted by Facebook’s parent company after its
late 2021 re-branding) launched its version of the metaverse, Horizon Worlds. Not sur-
prisingly, immediately after this version of the metaverse started to be tested, gender-based
and sexual harassment reports also started to appear. In particular, some beta testers report
being groped by a stranger on Horizon Worlds or being virtually gang-raped (Sherman,
2022). In this sense, the metaverse has already become another dangerous and problematic
space, where hostility and harassment against women can thrive. In line with long-lasting
debates about the Internet and cyberspace, it is necessary to restate that because these forms
of violence happen in a virtual space does not mean that they are less real or harmful. On
the contrary, sexual harassment can be both physical and verbal and virtual. The immersive
nature of virtual reality prompted by the metaverse can add a new layer to the experience of
gender-based abuse, with important implications that we are just starting to witness. What
the metaverse is or will be, and what specific features it will assume, is still uncertain. At the
same time, some questions remain: which forms will NCDII have in an immersive and
virtual environment, such as the one enticed by metaverses? And with which consequences?
Our research on the Telegram Italian case shows, among other things, several worrying
concerns in terms of digital platforms’ responsibility in amplifying and normalising gender-
based online violence, to which we must remain vigilant. One of our era’s most complicated
and indispensable challenges will be addressing the urgency of platforms’ regulation and
responsibility, which become intermediaries of gender-based violence and often provide
more tools to perpetrators. It will undoubtedly be necessary to strive for more transnational
debates that discuss what online women’s rights look like and reframe digital technology
from a gender-inclusive perspective.

Notes
1 Translation made by the authors.
2 See Semenzin and Bainotti 2020 for a more detailed account of the methods used and a full
discussion of their ethical implications.

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ONLINE CHILD SEXUAL
EXPLOITATION IN THE NEWS
Competing claims of gendered and sexual harm
Michael Salter

Introduction
Online child sexual exploitation (OCSE) refers to the use of the internet and networked tech-
nologies to facilitate the sexual abuse of a child. OCSE includes the online grooming, solicitation
and exploitation of children by adults (for instance, an adult who contacts a minor online for
sexual purposes) as well as the production, distribution and consumption of child sexual abuse
material (CSAM). Child sexual exploitation (CSE) online and offline has been a particularly
fraught subject for news media (Salter, 2017). Since reports of CSE first emerged in news re-
porting in the 1970s (Berenbaum et al., 1984), news media accounts of CSE have oscillated
between factual crime reporting and editorialising on the significance of the phenomenon, with a
distinct strain of sceptical comment (Salter, 2017). This scepticism provides the backdrop to a
dearth of investigative reporting into OCSE amongst technology journalists until quite recently,
many of whom have complex inter-relationships with the technology industry that disin-
centivises stories that are critical of the sector (Brennen, Howard and Nielsen, 2021).
With annual reports of OCSE to authorities in their tens of millions, and law enforcement
and online safety agencies at “breaking point” (Bursztein et al., 2019: 1), governments are now
considering a raft of reforms that would require the technology sector to take proactive
measures against OCSE. Media coverage of these regulatory efforts has been inflected with a
libertarian politics, with journalists frequently siding with the technology industry to oppose
regulation efforts in the name of individual freedoms (Hanson, 2019). Recognising the central
position of the United States in the global technology sector and internet regulation, this
chapter explores news coverage of two major American law reform efforts – the Stop Enabling
Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking
Act (FOSTA) (hereafter, SESTA-FOSTA) and the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant
Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act (EARN IT act) – in North American outlets. The
chapter highlights the gendered convergences between media scepticism of CSE and the cyber-
libertarianism of the technology sector, particularly the invocation of certain gendered
and sexual subjects (particularly sex workers and LGBTIQ+ people) to defend unregulated
private sector control of online environments and infrastructure. The chapter foregrounds the
gendered and sexual harms of OCSE amid a media spectacle of intersecting cyberlibertarian

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-44 401

 Michael Salter

fantasies and corporate interests, in which the language of gender and sexual identity and
rights features prominently in anti-regulation rhetoric.

The emergence of OCSE

The commercial internet industry emerged in the laissez faire milieu of the 1990s with US
legislators eager to promote the growth of the industry untrammelled by rules and regu-
lations (Kosseff, 2019). An excess of optimism regarding the economic potential of the
internet led to the “dot com bubble” of the late 1990s, characterised by speculative
investment in internet companies, followed by the “dot-com bust” of 2000, as stock market
valuations fell rapidly when industry hype failed to materialise in the form of profit.
Nonetheless, the invention of Web 2.0 and so-called “social media” in 2005 revived popular
and investor interest in the technology sector, promoting a business model in which free
online services enabled users to interact and generate content, while the underlying plat-
forms commodified and sold the data generated by its user base. The business model and
prerogatives of Web 2.0 has been occluded by the suggestion that social media is politically
and socially liberatory, and designed in such a way as to promote democratic freedoms
(Salter, 2017). The anti-authoritarian and emancipatory posture of social media companies
represents, in many ways, a re-articulation of the so-called Californian Ideology: the syn-
thesis of counter-cultural utopianism with libertarian politics that is the cultural bedrock of
Silicon Valley (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996).
Technology sector hype and marketing have long been dogged by the spectre of OCSE.
Since the late 1990s, it has been apparent that the internet offers unprecedented opportunities
to exchange and access CSAM (Jenkins, 2001) and to sexually solicit children (Lamb, 1998).
The pervasiveness of OCSE has persistently undermined cyberlibertarian predictions of a
brighter future predicated on unconstrained technological consumerism. However, the posi-
tion of governments has been remarkably relaxed regarding the potential for online harms and
the presence of illegal content such as CSAM (Keen, Kramer and France, 2020). The US
technology sector has few child protection obligations by law and enjoys broad legislative
immunity for content uploaded or shared by third parties under Section 230 of the 1996
Communications Decency Act (Kosseff, 2019). As a result, internet service providers do not
face the legal consequences for distributing content, such as CSAM, that would be illegal if
shared by a television channel, newspaper or some other media (Keen, Kramer and France,
2020). The extent of the immunity offered by Section 230, and its implications for OCSE, was
evident in Doe v. America Online, Inc (1998), when a woman sued America Online, claiming
that the man who had been imprisoned for sexually abusing her son was using America Online
to distribute CSAM of her child. The complaint was dismissed on the grounds of Section 230
immunity, and this decision was upheld by the Florida Supreme Court in 2001 (Kosseff, 2019).
Early attempts by the United States government to rally a collaborative response to
OCSE by the major technology companies were met with symbolic gestures but little
substantive progress (Farid, 2017). OCSE has since emerged as a significant form of gender-
based violence that is committed overwhelmingly by men, and disproportionately targets
girls. A recent international survey found that almost two-thirds of girls and almost half of
boys experience some form of online sexual harm prior to the age of 18 (WeProtect, 2021).
The largest content analysis of CSAM undertaken to date found that 80% of victims are
female, with 78% under the age of 12 (C3P, 2016). The most highly traded CSAM depicts
the abuse of young girls by their fathers (Seto et al., 2018). Since the commercialisation of

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the internet, the presence of CSAM has been increasing rapidly year-on-year far beyond the
capacity of police and online safety agencies to contain (Bursztein et al., 2019). Child and
adult victims of OCSE have frequently been unable to access a helpful, constructive or
protective response from online platforms where they have been abused, or where their
CSAM continues to circulate (Salter and Hanson, 2021).

Early trends in news coverage of OCSE

From the early 2000s, increasing investigations and prosecutions for OCSE were attended
by regular news reports about investigations and prosecutions (Gillespie, 2012), however,
the issue of ineffective government and industry responses was largely overlooked by news
journalists (until recently, as the next section demonstrates). Indeed, in the early 2000s, as
increases in online offending against children drew enhanced police attention, some media
commentators and editorialists questioned whether OCSE warranted any specific action.
This was a prominent mode of argumentation from journalists who characterised allega-
tions of CSE and CSAM as bizarre and unsubstantiated, and who described the public as
beset with anxiety and obsession about non-existent threats to children (Cheit, 2014). They
proposed instead that public and police concern about OCSE was indicative of underlying
sexual neurosis and scapegoating.
A review of media comment about OCSE from the United Kingdom in the early 2000s is
illustrative, with a range of journalists across the political spectrum united in their scepti-
cism of the seriousness of OCSE. In the Guardian, Aaronivitch (2003) recounted his concern
about “prosecuting people who click on dodgy photographs” and suggested that men who
pay for CSAM are probably not “hard-core” offenders, but motivated by a “strange
curiosity”. The Guardian editorial agreed that the investigation and policing of OCSE had
produced a “moral panic” and “witch hunt” (Guardian, 2003). In the Daily Telegraph,
Thomson (2003) describes concern about online abuse as a “horrible witch-hunt” and
Hitchens (2003) in The Mail calls it a “frenzy”. A year later, Hume (2004) in The Times felt
“sickened by those seeking to prey on our emotions by turning child pornography into an
all purpose moral panic for our times”, criticising a children’s charity for merely reporting
the significant increase in child pornography charges since the advent of the internet. Other
examples during the same period include the American documentary Capturing the
Friedmans (Jarecki, 2003), which was deceptively edited to suggest that two men who pled
guilty to CSAM and child sex offences may have been the victims of mob sentiment and
injustice (Cheit, 2022). The film was rapturously received by media critics and reviewers,
although a judicial review of the case in 2010 would find that the men were guilty and the
documentary had misrepresented and omitted key facts (Cheit, 2022).
In short, during a critical period in the expansion of the technology sector, when the
platforms that today dominate and monopolise online activity were being established,
media coverage of OCSE reflected journalistic scepticism regarding the seriousness of the
problem. This scepticism ran in parallel with the disinterest of the technology sector in
responding to rapidly escalating OCSE reports. There are a number of potential explana-
tions for this synergy between journalism and the technology sector in their shared treat-
ment of OCSE. As previously mentioned, the culture of news production in the late 1990s
and early 2000s evinced considerable scepticism about claims of child sexual abuse, and
CSE in particular (Kitzinger, 2004; Cheit, 2014). Such a stance was certainly congruent with
the libertarian masculinism of the technology sector and its disinterest in addressing the

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threat of online sexual violence, with voices from within the technology sector ascribing
responsibility for OCSE to police and rejecting any substantive role for the private sector in
online child safety (Keen, Kramer and France, 2020). More generally, media coverage of the
technology sector has been widely criticised for its naïveté and absence of critical coverage
in the face of industry and marketing hype (Brennen, Howard and Nielsen, 2021).

OCSE in the era of the “techlash”

Social media and the technology sector as a whole has entered into a sustained crisis of
legitimacy, due to successive scandals that are a direct product of its own business model
and evasion of effective regulation. Improper collection and commercialisation of user data,
privacy breaches, monopolistic practices, the amplification of political and medical mis-
information, and the distribution of hate speech and videos of atrocities have focused
journalistic attention on industry shortcomings and policy failures. Sometimes called the
“techlash”, news and media coverage of the technology sector is in a distinctly critical phase.
The link between industry practice, regulation and OCSE was largely ignored by main-
stream media until an explosive New York Times exposé in 2019 (Keller and Dance, 2019;
Dance, 2019). Keller and Dance (2019) documented the lack of industry response to ex-
ponential increases in CSAM and OCSE for over 20 years, alongside a permissive government
posture that did not expect companies to abide by existing legislative obligations.
Importantly, their articles gave prominence to the views and experiences of CSAM victims,
who were directly interviewed about the impact of the ongoing circulation of images and
videos of their abuse. Their coverage was followed by highly impactful reporting on the
presence of CSAM on major adult pornography sites, which documented the failure of those
sites to respond to entreaties from minor victims to remove videos of their abuse (Kristoff,
2020). Reporters began to identify children selling sexual content on social media and adult
content sites (de Gallier, 2020) which not only implicated those platforms but also payment
and banking services, who do not enjoy the legal impunity granted to online platforms for
enabling OCSE. Consequently, online platforms have faced the threat of the withdrawal of
payment services if they cannot guarantee that their content does not include CSAM.
This reporting has galvanised governments in a range of jurisdictions to advance legal
reforms that specifically target industry inaction. These reforms have brought to a head
competing trends in news media coverage of the technology sector, in which an entrenched
cyber-libertarianism that is defensive of the private sector and instinctively anti-regulation
persists alongside a relatively recent focus on the political economy of the sector and its
resultant harms. An older vision of the internet as an emancipatory infrastructure for the
marginalised and the oppressed, which has long been part of the technology sector’s self-
conception and marketing (Turner, 2010), has collided with the increased visibility of online
harms to children, including annual increases in OCSE and CSAM that some journalists
had become comfortable with overlooking if not dismissing as exaggerated. The following
sections examine two major US reform initiatives and the gendered and sexualised logics
that attended their media coverage.

SESTA-FOSTA
SESTA-FOSTA refers to two pieces of legislation passed in the United States in 2017 which
were designed to criminalise the online advertising of sex trafficking victims. FOSTA was

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introduced first, followed by a similar bill, SESTA. Ultimately both bills were combined in
their passage through the House and Senate in 2018 (Goldman, 2018). An unusual feature
of SESTA-FOSTA was that it was crafted specifically to target a single website: Backpage, a
US-based online classifieds service. A 2015 Senate investigation uncovered clear evidence
that Backpage knowingly facilitated child trafficking, including failing to report adver-
tisements that depicted trafficked children, stripping metadata from uploaded photos that
could identify the location of the victim to law enforcement, and working directly with
traffickers to remove child-related wording from adverts that might attract law enforcement
attention (Kosseff, 2019, p. 254). Kosseff (2019) summarises some of the egregious child
exploitation cases linked to Backpage as well as civil lawsuits dating back to 2014 which
attempted to hold Backpage responsible for its complicity in child sexual exploitation; suits
which failed because of the legal immunity that Backpage enjoyed under US media law,
specifically Section 230.
SESTA-FOSTA evolved via complex negotiations between legislators and industry or-
ganisations, making it a federal crime for internet service providers to intend to promote
or facilitate “the prostitution of another person” and/or “sex trafficking”, amongst other
measures (Goldman, 2018). Shortly following the passage of SESTA-FOSTA, a number of
websites chose to shutter options for sexual advertisements, which has been perceived
negatively by some sex workers in the US and elsewhere (Blunt and Wolf, 2020). SESTA-
FOSTA does not criminalise sites that enable sex workers to advertise online, but rather it
targets sites that facilitate one person exploiting another person through “prostitution” or
“trafficking” (Born, 2019). The fact that some sites closed down their sexual advertisements
suggests that they lacked the confidence or resources to ensure that, in fact, such criminal
activity was not taking place on their platform. As such, the issue here is not so much the
drafting of the legislation but an online business model that maximises profit by minimising
content regulation and oversight.
However, this distinction is occluded within the media construction of SESTA-FOSTA –
and, often enough, internet regulation as a whole – as a conflict between prurient or
ignorant legislators, and the needs and rights of sex workers. The legislation has been the
subject of significant social movement mobilisation by sex worker groups and their allies,
who argue that the closure of classified websites after SESTA-FOSTA has forced sex
workers to return to unsafe street-based sex work (Blunt and Wolf, 2020). Media coverage
of these issues routinely repatriates Backpage’s reputation and is largely silent on the be-
haviour of the site’s owners that led to the drafting of SESTA-FOSTA. For example,
Holland declares on ABC News that:

Advocates say FOSTA-SESTA has restricted these protections by shutting down

personal service websites like Backpage, including arresting some Backpage employees
for promoting prostitution. As a result, they claim, sex workers have seen greater
instances of violence.
(Holland, 2019)

In this account, the complicity of Backpage in the sexual exploitation of children receives no
meaningful attention. To the contrary, Backpage emerges for the reader as a champion of
sex worker safety. SESTA-FOSTA increasingly features in reporting as an example of a
punitive attack on sex worker rights, to the point where journalists are reframing Backpage
as a public good and its prosecution as an example of state over-reach. For instance, in the

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influential technology blog Tech Crunch, Coldeway (2018) suggests that Backpage was in
fact beneficial for child trafficking victims since it made their exploitation more visible to law
enforcement. He characterises Backpage as a “valuable tool” for police that provided a
“nice digital trail to follow or cite in court”. In this analysis, efforts to prevent or disrupt
OCSE are pointless since such abuse will occur “offline” if it’s not allowed to occur
“online”; therefore efforts to eradicate OCSE do little more than push the problem around
while infringing internet freedoms.
The proposition that facilitating child sexual abuse is in fact beneficial to victims and
police is extraordinary. However, there is an established strain of journalism which ignores
and erases the harms of CSE in discussions about civil liberties going back to the 1980s
(Cheit, 2014). In many regards, news coverage of SESTA-FOSTA has conformed to this
libertarian style. There are now numerous news articles that uncritically position the
prosecution of Backpage as an example of internet censorship in the name of child pro-
tection. One article by the Guardian described the move as “a long line of instances of
internet censorship pushing sex workers to the margins”, citing the closure of Backpage,
which one advocate described as a “lifeline” for sex workers (Paul, 2021). In the Daily Beast,
Shugerman (2021) argues that Backpage has become a “symbol for the larger fight for sex
workers’ rights online”. In an article in the Globe and Mail, Ralston (2021) claims that
Backpage was targeted by a “campaign” that “vilified safe and lucrative spaces for sex
workers”, based on “moralism about sex and pornography” and a “moral panic about sex
trafficking”. This is a clear misrepresentation of Backpage’s serious criminality and the
legislative debates which led to SESTA-FOSTA, however flawed the legislation may be.

EARN IT Act
Prompted by the New York Times exposé of rapidly escalating CSAM reports (Keller and
Dance, 2019), the EARN IT Act aims to reduce the proliferation of CSAM online by
carving out Section 230 immunity from internet service providers who do not take sufficient
steps to detect and remove illegal content. Arguably, Section 230 was always intended to
incentivise such proactive efforts by service providers although that is not how it has been
interpreted by the courts (Kosseff, 2019). Two versions of the EARN IT Act have been
proposed. The first would withhold Section 230 immunity for those service providers who
do not implement “best practices” or adopt “reasonable measures” to detect and remove
CSAM, thus exposing service providers to both civil liability and state prosecution. The
second version of the legislation proposes eliminating Section 230 immunity for CSAM. The
bill would also establish the National Commission on Online Child Sexual Exploitation
Prevention, including representatives from law enforcement, child protection experts and
adult survivors of OCSE. At the time of writing, the second version of the bill had been
passed unanimously by the Senate Judiciary Committee (McKinnon, 2022).
While they are very different pieces of legislation, it is common for digital rights and civil
liberties groups to compare the EARN IT Act to SESTA-FOSTA and claim in the media
that it will have dire impacts on sex workers (Cole, 2020). Arguments from sex industry
representatives that the proactive censorship of CSAM would “inevitably resulting in
censorship of communications that don’t relate to child exploitation” (Cole, 2020) closely
parallel earlier arguments from libertarian groups who opposed the criminalisation of
CSAM in the 1970s on the basis of a “slippery slope” argument (MacPherson, 1977).
However, opposition to the EARN IT Act from industry and civil society has focused

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primarily on its potential impact on end-to-end encryption (that is, a method of secure
electronic communication that prevents third parties from intercepting or altering data as it
is transmitted from one system, device or user to another). The passage of the EARN IT Act
would likely impose some restrictions on the use of end-to-end encryption, such that
internet service providers would need to include safeguards to ensure that their encrypted
services were not being used to distribute CSAM or otherwise exploit children.
LGBTIQ+ people feature prominently in media coverage of opposition to the EARN IT
Act, in which the legislation is characterised as a form of surveillance and censorship that
will inexorably impact sexual and gender minorities (Mills, 2022). The underlying logic of
this argument is that encryption ensures the safety of sexual and gender minorities. The
suggestion that LGBTIQ+ rights hinges on encryption is certainly a novel one and it is
unclear what specific scenarios encryption advocates have in mind when they make this
assertion. What is undoubtedly true is that encryption is also widely used by OCSE
offenders to evade law enforcement, and moves to encrypt major social media services such
as Facebook have been widely criticised for their child protection implications (Valentino-
DeVries and Dance, 2019). Not only would encryption significantly reduce the detection of
CSAM and OCSE and reports to law enforcement (Salter and Hanson, 2021), but en-
cryption would also offer further legal protection to internet service providers who, under
current US legislative arrangements, are legally obliged to report (but not proactively search
for) CSAM on their services. Encryption would thus shield service providers from knowl-
edge of legally reportable content and thus resolve the headache of content moderation.
However, this clash between child safety, encryption and the commercial interests of ser-
vice providers has been largely overlooked in news coverage. Instead, the implications
of EARN IT Act for encryption have been repeatedly presented as a dire threat to the safety of
LGBTIQ+ people. For instance, writing in The Advocate, Trujillo (2020) characterised the act
as life-threatening legislation, harkening:

the end of needed online mediums the most marginalized LGBTQ+ communities rely
on to survive … [P]reventing the passage of the EARN IT Act is a matter of life or
death for our community.

In this characterisation, LGBTIQ+ existence is contingent upon an unregulated internet

and the ongoing prerogative of the private sector to encrypt communication services. The
suggestion that regulation is equivalent to murder has been driven home by civil society
groups. In a statement widely covered in the media, a spokeswoman for a digital rights
organisation described the act as “one of the most poorly conceived and dangerous pieces of
internet legislation I have seen in my entire career”. She went on to claim that “The
sponsors of this bill are ignoring the LGBTQ+ community, and they’re going to get us
killed” (Lovelace, 2022).
These claims rely implicitly on the libertarian characterisation of government as an
oppressive force that tends, inevitably, towards censorship and authoritarianism, specifi-
cally in relation to sexual freedom and expression (Hanson, 2019). LGBTIQ+ people are
positioned in such claims as marginalised targets of government discrimination, overlooking
sustained but uneven expansions in LGBTIQ+ rights in liberal democracies. Encryption
undoubtedly offers benefits to oppressed groups and activists; a point well recognised by
child protection experts who also point to the rampant misuse of encryption in the sexual
abuse of children. In contrast to media debates over SESTA-FOSTA, where child welfare

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concerns were often ignored or characterised as exaggerated, opponents of EARN IT have

been at pains to signal some concern with child protection. For instance, writing in Slate,
Nuthi (2022) suggests that encryption secures child privacy as well as adult privacy and that
EARN IT improperly tasks business with conducting searches on behalf of the police. A
similar line of argument is that business should not be tasked with preventing OCSE on
their services but instead, law enforcement should be resourced to police OCSE at scale (Ng,
2020). It is entirely unclear how or why children would benefit from the encryption of their
online communications. Such claims are not being advanced by child welfare organisations,
who have been at pains in the media to emphasise the child protection responsibilities of
online providers who market services to young people (Das, 2022).

Discussion and conclusion

SESTA-FOSTA and the EARN IT Act reflect an indisputable public consensus that the
technology sector has a duty of care to ensure that its systems are safe for children and free
of CSAM. A recent global survey of over 21,000 people found that approximately 90% of
respondents agreed that governments should pass laws that require technology companies
to meet child safety standards, with penalties for non-compliance, and that approximately
85% of respondents indicated that technology companies who do not remove CSAM from
their platform should be charged with a criminal offence (C3P, 2021). This survey captures
public sentiment at a time when there is broad awareness of the availability of CSAM and
annual and exponential increases in OCSE, which has emboldened governments to promote
preventative action by the technology sector.
Recent examples of investigative journalism have been pivotal in resetting the context for
government action on online harms, reflecting a critical strain of technology journalism that is
actively interrogating the political economy of the internet. However, media coverage of
legislative reforms continues to be inflected by a libertarian inheritance which includes sig-
nificant scepticism about claims of CSE and a suspicion of government intervention in sexual
life. In media discourse, online regulation to prevent OCSE is frequently positioned as a threat
to the safety of marginalised people, specifically sex workers and sexual and gender minorities.
Via the claims of advocacy groups but also through editorial commentary, the language of
civil liberties is mobilised within a coalition of opposition to state efforts to regulate the
technology sector and impose a proactive corporate responsibility for online child safety.
In media discussion of online regulation, the commercial interests of the technology sector
are typically subsumed to a rhetoric of concern about gender and sexual rights. However, the
language of civil liberties advances a position of implied support for a “free market” of
unregulated technology companies, unburdened by government legislation. In this regard,
trends in media coverage of SESTA-FOSTA and the EARN IT Act continue the libertarian
tradition of opposing efforts to prevent CSE and prohibit CSAM on the grounds that it
represents an intolerable form of sexual censorship as well as an undue burden on business.
The extent of libertarian disengagement and disinterest in the harms of OCSE is graphically
illustrated by efforts in the media to repatriate the website Backpage as a social good and
utility rather than a criminal enterprise, and other examples of hyperbole, including the
suggestion that legal measures to promote the proactive scanning and removal of CSAM will
“literally” kill LGBTIQ+ people. Meanwhile, the commercial prerogatives that disincentivise
online child protection measures, and in some cases are directly impacting the safety of sex
workers and others (for instance, the shuttering of online classifieds by companies who are

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concerned that their own services are facilitating sex trafficking), go uninterrogated and
obscured by such media coverage.
Amidst these exaggerated claims, a persistent point of absence and silence in media
coverage has been the voices and experiences of OCSE victims and survivors themselves,
who have only occasionally been interviewed by journalists in order to represent their
interests (Keller and Dance, 2019; Kristoff, 2020). The hyper-visibility of certain sexual and
gendered subjects in this debate is thus in contrast to the media invisibility of those subjects
who have been directly impacted by OCSE. Sex workers and LGBTIQ+ communities have
vocal advocacy groups and representatives who can prosecute their arguments in the mass
media; in contrast, victims and survivors of CSAM have only recently been supported to
develop a public voice and participate in advocacy.1 The development of CSAM survivor
advocacy groups, as well as the ongoing development and expansion of a critical strain of
technology journalism that is sensitised to political economy and its link to online harms,
suggests the opening up of possibilities for more nuanced media analyses of the sexual and
gendered implications of OCSE. However, an entrenched libertarian journalistic reflex
persists in the mobilisation of the language of gendered and sexual harms in defence of
the status quo.

Note
1 For instance, the Phoenix 11 are a group of eleven women who have survived CSAM and OCSE.
In the last few years, the Phoenix 11 have met with White House representatives and senior
politicians from a range of jurisdictions to represent the views of CSAM survivors in debates on
online regulation ( Phoenix 11, 2021).

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 38
RESPONDING TO TRANSPHOBIC
VIOLENCE ONLINE
Ben Colliver

Introduction
Increasing political, social and academic attention is being paid to the prevalence of violence
perpetrated against transgender (trans) people, and the ways in which trans people ex-
perience this violence (Chakraborti, Garland and Hardy, 2014). Whilst research has shown
that trans people experience high levels of physical and sexual violence, harassment and hate
crime in the offline world (Colliver, 2021; Reback et al., 2001; Xavier, Honnold and
Bradford, 2007), less attention has been paid to violence experienced in online spheres.
Whilst there is a growing body of research that investigates online violence and hate speech
more broadly, the interest in the online victimisation of trans people specifically has been
lacking, overshadowed by research into more socially recognised victim groups relating to
race, sexuality and religion (Awan, 2014; Cmeciu, 2016; Weaver, 2013).
This chapter utilises data from semi-structured interviews conducted in 2018 with 31 trans
people, aged 16 and over, in the United Kingdom, who had experienced transphobic violence
(See Colliver, 2018 for further details). The interviews were one element of a wider research
project which sought to investigate trans people’s experiences of transphobic violence and hate
crime, with a specific focus on “everyday” experiences, including online victimisation (Colliver,
2021). Social media was utilised to recruit participants from across the UK alongside referrals
made by several support organisations that offer services and support for trans people.
Purposive sampling was used to engage trans people who had experienced some form of
transphobic victimisation. Particular effort was made to recruit those who may be the most
marginalised within trans communities in relation to participants’ ethnicity, disability status,
age, religion and gender identity. In relation to participant demographic information, 23% of
participants were non-binary, whilst 31% and 44% were male or female, respectively. The
majority of participants identified as White British (54.8%), however, a range of ethnic back-
grounds were represented within the sample including Black British (10%), British Asian
(3.2%), Black African and white British (3.2%), Black Caribbean and white British (3.2), South
American (3.2%), Bangladeshi (3.2%), Irish Traveller (6.4%), Thai (3.2%) and Pakistani (3.2%).
Several participants also identified as Christian, Sikh and Muslim and a smaller number of
participants identified as Buddhist and Pagan. The average age of participants was 32 years old

412 DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-45

 Responding to transphobic violence online

with ages ranging from 17 to 67 years old. In relation to disability status, 30.3% of participants
indicated that they lived with a disability, including sensory, mobility and long-term health
conditions.
All participants received a “Participant Information” document prior to participating
which explicitly outlined the nature and scope of the project, allowing participants to ask
any questions before consenting to participate. All participants were informed of their right
to withdraw and that their participation was voluntary. Participants were also provided
with contact details for free, local support services that they could access through a fast-
track service by quoting the researcher’s name. In this chapter, all participants have been
assigned a pseudonym to protect their identity.
This research adopted Hines’ (2010, p.1) definition of trans as:

a range of gender experiences, subjectivities and presentations that fall across, between
or beyond stable categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’. ‘Transgender’ includes gender
identities that have, more traditionally, been described as ‘transsexual’, and a diversity
of genders that call into question an assumed relationship between gender identity and
presentation and the ‘sexed’ body.

This definition has been utilised as it acknowledges gender identities and expressions that do
not fit within the western gender binary. The term “cisgender” is also used throughout this
chapter, and describes people whose gender identity aligns with the sex they were assigned
at birth (Stryker, 2008).
In what follows, qualitative data collected from the semi-structured interviews are drawn
upon to provide an overview of participants’ experiences of online violence and the ways in
which they respond to these incidents. Made up of three parts, I begin this chapter by
discussing the ways that participants use social media, outlining key motivations such as
networking and researching transition options. I then address violence experienced both
directly and indirectly illustrating the ways that trans people respond to these different
experiences of violence. These discussions are situated within the context of the “everyday”,
in which online violence is a prominent feature.

The role and importance of social media

It became clear from participants’ narratives that the internet, and social media in partic-
ular, was an integral part of their everyday lives, with different social media platforms used
for different purposes, including research, entertainment, and social networking.

I would be lost without social media. I use Facebook quite a lot, mainly to stay in
touch with family and friends. Twitter on the other hand, is much more political, and I
use it to keep up to date with political events that affect trans people. YouTube is also
really cool just for watching videos, but also lots of trans people document their
transition on there, so you can also learn quite a lot from other people’s experiences.
(Ryan, 17, Male)

In the data above, there is a relationship between participants’ descriptions of their internet
use and the “everyday”, in which engaging with social media is an inherent feature. The
frequency of engaging with social media, and utilising it to maintain connections illustrates

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that social media becomes an extension of the self. Other participants also reflected upon
which sites they were “openly” and “visibly” trans.

I use YouTube to create videos which talk about some of the issues that I face as a
trans person, so I document things like accessing medication, therapy, troubles I have
had in relation to changing ID documents and so on. I think it is useful for other
people. So, like, on YouTube everyone knows I am trans. Whereas, on Twitter,
because there is much worse abuse on there I think, I have a more anonymous
account, where I don’t really say that I am trans.
(Ashley, 34, Male)

Well, I am out on Facebook, because only people who I am friends with can see my
profile. On YouTube, I don’t post any videos myself, but I do comment on people’s
videos, who are trans, so people probably know that the person who has the account is
trans, but there are none of my personal details on my YouTube account, so nobody
would know it was me personally.
(Corrina, 21, Female)

Participants’ narratives thus demonstrate varying levels of trans “visibility” on different

social media platforms. Whilst participants’ experiences are not uniform (note, for instance,
the different attitudes to being “out” on YouTube described above), what is consistent is the
negotiation of risk and opportunity. Although this chapter focuses primarily on risk, it is
important to contextualise this with reference to opportunity as this helps to highlight what
trans people stand to lose if they simply disengage.
Many participants reflected on the importance of social media, in providing opportu-
nities and information which may be unavailable in the offline world, including in relation
to transition options. This information may not be available through mainstream outlets
such as educational establishments (METRO Charity, 2014). Participants also reflected on
the networking opportunities that social media provided, which were often seen as
inaccessible in the offline world.

I have however made lots of online friends, there are some groups that are specifically
for LGBT people of colour and LGBT people who are Sikh. The internet has been a
great place for me to find support and actually not feel so isolated.
(Dilip, 45, Male)

I use the internet a lot, I never used to use the internet as much, but then because I
start to go out less [because of experiences of victimisation], I use the internet a lot now
to try and make some friends online.
(Bushra, 29, Female)

The role that social media plays in social networking and building peer support networks was
emphasised as a key motivation for using social media. This was particularly the case where
offline networking opportunities were difficult to access, for instance, due to anxieties about
offline victimisation (as in Bushra’s account). At the same time, as Dilip notes, the internet
enables organised communication between individuals who are perceived to be similar or have
shared values and interests. Research has shown that LGBTQ+ inclusive spaces are often

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dominated by white, atheist individuals and may result in the exclusion of those who do not
conform to these dominant norms (Colliver, 2022). In accessing social opportunities through
social media, participants were able to find a sense of “belonging” within online communities.
However, despite all of the benefits associated with social media, and the important role
it played in participants’ lives, many noted the dual nature of social media as both sites of
support, but also of pervasive abuse. In what follows, I examine two forms of violence
experienced on social media: direct violence and indirect violence.

Experiencing and responding to direct violence

Research has shown that hate crime is often opportunistic, perpetrated in the context of an
individual’s “everyday” life (Iganski, 2008). Despite media representations of hate crime
primarily depicting incidents of extreme physical violence, other research has shown the
mundane nature of hate crime which is often overlooked (Colliver, 2021). The everyday
nature of online violence was apparent in participants’ narratives. Online violence was
understood to be a direct consequence of participants engaging in everyday life, but it was
also understood to be an intrinsic feature of everyday life. Whilst there were a number of
benefits associated with the internet as explored in the previous section, this was often
starkly juxtaposed with the abuse and violence that participants experienced when engaging
and accessing online spaces.
Participants perceived online violence to be significantly more prevalent than violence
perpetrated in the offline world. This was primarily understood as a result of the inherently
connected nature of the internet, and social media in particular. Whilst the connected nature
of the internet was often understood to be beneficial in terms of building a sense of com-
munity, it also allows those who perpetrate online violence to connect, organise and
repetitively target victims. As such, online violence was often perceived by participants to be
more sophisticatedly coordinated, and less random than violence perpetrated offline. As
Ashley, a 34-year-old male explains:

There is much more abuse online than in real life. There are just more opportunities,
because the internet is so big and so vast and people from all over the world can see the
same thing at the same time and everyone can all respond at once. Like in real life, it
would take me months and months to meet every individual that has posted something
negative on one of my videos, but online, I meet them all at once in a second.

It is clear from Ashley’s narratives that there are significant differences in relation to direct
violence experienced online and offline, primarily relating to the prevalence of victimisation,
but also the immediacy of such incidents. The synchronous, real-time nature of the internet
facilitates large-scale, instantaneous victimisation to occur, and the scale of violence, and
potential for organised, multiple perpetrations is what is perceived as distinguishing online
violence from offline violence. However, what also stood out to participants about online
violence was other online users encouraging the victim to self-harm or engage in suicidal
behaviours. This type of violence was so common that one participant noted that they could
not remember how often they had been told to “hang [themselves] or take an overdose”, and
others suggested that this kind of abuse had become generic, appearing in vast amounts of
online hate speech (Colliver and Coyle, 2020). Ty, a 21-year-old non-binary individual,
describes how “most of the time people use exactly the same wording. It is almost as if they

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have just cut and paste the comment from the person who started it”. Whilst the incitement
to self-harm is not commonly reported in studies exploring online violence, the trans people
in this study reported that popular prejudice about trans people “already butchering their
bodies” (Colliver, Coyle and Silvestri, 2019) legitimated this kind of abuse. In this sense,
there appears to be a connection between comments about gender reassignment being
considered a form of self-harm by perpetrators, and therefore incitement to further self-
harm becomes a common rhetoric.
One other key difference between violence experienced online and offline was the per-
petrator. Chakraborti and Garland (2012, p.502) argue that “victims [of hate crime] are
interchangeable and almost invariably strangers with whom the perpetrator has had little or
no contact”. However, others have suggested that victims are likely to know the perpetrator
(Colliver, 2021; Mason, 2005; Meyer, 2014). This was the case for participants as many
reported family members, friends and colleagues perpetrating violence in the offline world.
On the other hand, Jae, a 21-year-old non-binary individual describes how:

I don’t know most of the people who abuse me online, well, I don’t think I know them
anyway. It can be so difficult to tell because people use fake pictures and names. So,
who knows? Maybe it is my best friend. I don’t think it is, I think it is probably
strangers.

The idea that perpetrators of online violence are primarily strangers was echoed through
participants’ narratives and words such as “randomers” and “unknown” were commonly
used. The “unknown” nature of the perpetrator was also considered to make online violence
scarier than offline violence, as did the likelihood of online threats of violence manifesting in
the offline world.
Participants often described the violence that they experienced as being a direct result of
engaging in “everyday” activities, such as connecting and communicating with others on
social media. This was often a result of social media being perceived as one of the only
spaces in which to connect with other trans people and access peer support. Joby, a 17-year-
old, gender-fluid individual describes their experiences of sharing pictures on social media:

Doing something as simple as posting a picture of yourself online can result in hun-
dreds of violent messages … like most people don’t even have to think twice about
doing that.

Joby compares their own experiences to those of “most people”, who may be able to
participate in everyday activities such as posting selfies without fear of violence. Here, we
see that victimisation is understood to be a direct consequence of participating in everyday
activities, and resultantly, these incidents of violence become anticipated and normalised
(Colliver, 2021). Whilst many participants were open about their trans identity online, Joby
was only openly gender-fluid in particular spaces such as Instagram, on which they felt they
had more autonomy over other people’s access to their content. On Twitter, Joby was not
openly gender-fluid, however, still experienced online violence when posting pictures. Here,
we see violence as a result of “genderism”, which Browne (2004, p.332) describes as “the
hostile readings of gender ambiguous bodies”.
Due to the volume of online abuse experienced, violence often became understood as an
intrinsic feature of the everyday. Ashley, a 34-year-old male, explains that “you see it every

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time you log on, it really is just a part of life you have to deal with”. Similarly, Sam, a 31-
year-old male noted:

I don’t remember when I got used to it, at first it really bothered me, and now, it
happens so much that it almost doesn’t phase me. When I log in to social media, I just
expect to see transphobia, so I just keep scrolling.

Participants often normalised their experiences, rationalising violence as part of the “ev-
eryday” in their response to targeted online violence, which in turn had a protective
function (Colliver, 2021). This conceptualisation of online violence as a part of everyday life
allowed participants to prepare emotionally and psychologically as an impact reduction
strategy. This was seen as fundamental in order to maintain daily functioning which was
understood as central for sustaining positive mental health. Brian, a 20-year-old male ex-
plains that:

When I know it is coming, it isn’t a shock, so it doesn’t really upset me as much, it

doesn’t get me down, whereas, if I receive abuse and I’m not prepared for it, it’s like a
real shock to the system you know? So, if I log on to social media every day and I
know there is going to be abuse, I can just kind of delete it, and get on with my day
and not think about it too much.

Cody, a 29-year-old male, similarly describes the inescapable nature of online violence and
how the normalisation of such victimisation is to avoid “fall[ing] to pieces”. In this sense,
there appears to be both a normalisation of victimisation which is described as unavoidable,
and, at the same time, evidence that participants had significantly more power and control
over the ways in which they chose to respond to these incidents of online violence when
compared to what they saw as the more random and unpredictable nature of offline abuse.
Some participants in this research study understood the process of normalisation to be an
active, conscious decision that was made to protect themselves.
However, although the process of normalisation may have individual utility, there are
consequences for the accurate recording of how much online violence occurs with vast
amounts of online violence remaining unreported. The normalisation of online violence
renders the accountability of perpetrators inconsequential. This is often because incidents of
online victimisation are also understood in comparison to offline victimisation, primarily
physical violence. Online violence was often considered to be “less serious”, and lower in the
hierarchy of victimisation (Colliver, 2021), with one participant claiming that “the police
have real work to do, they don’t need to be bothered by me because someone has threatened
me online”. Participants also described hesitancy in reporting online violence for fear of not
being taken seriously, or out of fear that reports of online violence would minimise the
seriousness of reports of offline violence.
One of the key barriers to addressing online violence and hate speech was the lack of a
singular social understanding of what is “hateful” and illegal, and participants not being
sure as to what incidents they could report. This is exacerbated by the global nature of the
internet, and the potential for the victim and perpetrator to live in different geographical
areas policed by different legislation (Yar, 2013). It was more common for participants to
report incidents of online violence to the platform host, rather than the police. However,
“no action taken” by the social media platform was the most commonly described response

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from participants when discussing their reports of online violence. It has been claimed that
social media responses, including those from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, to online
violence, are reactionary and the onus is on the victim to report incidents (De Latour et al.,
2017). This creates a barrier for victims who experience high volumes of online violence, and
in order to address this, platform hosts should adopt a proactive approach to addressing
online violence. The volume of abusive content posted on social media also resulted in
participants experiencing indirect violence.

Experiencing and responding to indirect violence

The general toxicity of online culture, particularly the large volumes of anti-trans discourse
on social media, was noted by many participants. Whilst these kinds of comments were not
necessarily directed at the participants, they were an unavoidable aspect of their online
experience with evident negative impacts. Piper, a 42-year-old woman, describes how:

It’s everywhere you look online at the minute. I am not openly trans online, so I don’t
really get any abuse directed at me personally, but everything I look at there is always
some type of transphobia. Even on stuff that isn’t related to trans people, like I can be
reading stuff on social media about animals, and no doubt someone would have made
a transphobic comment. I used to follow a lot of trans people online, but I don’t
anymore, it is so tiresome seeing abuse that is directed at them.

Piper describes this general anti-trans narrative as being inescapable. Even when avoiding
gender-related content, she still witnesses transphobic discourse. Rose, a 67-year-old
woman, goes on to claim that:

It isn’t just the direct abuse you experience every day, you also experience it through
other people, or just at trans people more generally. I can’t go a day online without
reading some newspaper article that is transphobic, and then you look at the com-
ments, and they aren’t directed towards you directly, but they are targeted at trans
people generally. It’s so common, you just have to kind of deal with it and know that it
isn’t going to change any time soon.

Despite the Independent Press Standards Organisation (2016) placing a duty on UK

newspapers not to publish pejorative, discriminatory or prejudicial references to an in-
dividual’s sexuality and/or gender identity, it is clear that some participants felt the press
were still transphobic. News websites also provide further opportunities for individuals to
publish hate speech online, not least as the comments section on online news reports also
tends to be under-policed and under-moderated. The relative anonymity afforded to people
by online websites, through the use of pseudonyms, and the ability to create multiple,
unidentifiable profiles can make policing online violence difficult.
Social media also allows for coordinated violence to occur, and participants noted the
“copy-cat” nature of online violence. I have already noted how participants experienced
coordinated direct attacks (such as Ty’s comments on the incitements to self-harm), but it is
relevant to note that witnessing coordinated attacks on other trans people was also discussed
by participants. For example, Joe, a 28-year-old gender-queer person, claimed that “the
comments on other people’s posts are always nearly identical, it’s like people read what

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other people have posted and then just say the same thing”. Therefore, the presence of an
engaged and invested audience in the online world may exacerbate the violence that trans
people face.
Witnessing transphobic violence aimed at others was most commonly responded to in
two ways: withdrawal, and invisibility. Whilst some participants did describe withdrawing
from social media and other online spaces completely, often, the perceived benefits of
connectedness outweighed the potential isolation that often occurred as a result of complete
withdrawal. Joe, for instance, describes how they:

Take a break from social media every now and then. Like, sometimes I just deactivate
all of my accounts for a week or two, just to get some space from all the transphobia
and the negativity. I still get to talk to people by text and stuff, but obviously my
network is a lot smaller because I don’t have all of my online friends to talk to.

Joe engages in intermittent withdrawal from social media, which they later described as a
coping mechanism for their mental health and well-being. Whilst Joe withdraws intermit-
tently, Star, a 44-year-old non-binary person explained that they had “permanently deleted
all social media accounts” as a way to avoid victimisation. Star explained that although they
were not experiencing direct violence, the thought of experiencing what others were exposed
to was too concerning for them to remain engaged on social media.
Fear of experiencing direct violence as a result of witnessing others being targeted also led
to participants attempting to render their trans identity invisible in online spaces. (In)visibility
is a complex concept and is navigated in different ways within an online context. Many
participants felt that it was important to make their trans identity visible in order to connect
with others and build support networks that many found unattainable in the offline world.
However, increased visibility also resulted in an increase in online violence. It is not simply an
online disclosure of an individual’s trans identity that resulted in increased visibility, rather,
people made assumptions about participants’ gender identities based on their online network,
the content they engaged with and which discussions they were involved in. This also meant
that some trans people felt the need to monitor the content they engaged with as a risk
reduction strategy. This meant that quite often participants were unable to benefit from
building support networks. Bushra, a 29-year-old woman described that she had:

not really [experienced abuse online], I am very careful that I do not put any pictures of
myself online and I only talk about being transgender in very private and safe places …
Because of this people do not really abuse me online because of being transgender … I
don’t talk to many trans people online, because I want to avoid being targeted.

For Bushra, fear of victimisation prevents her from being able to establish a strong network
of trans people. She also shares that she has witnessed violence perpetrated on other trans
people online. Here, we see the consequences of online violence reaching far beyond the
initial, targeted victim. Participants also rendered their trans identity invisible by meticu-
lously removing old photos from social media as a way to reduce the risk of their trans
identity becoming visible. Elaine, a 48-year-old woman notes that she has:

created all brand new profiles, I don’t have pictures of me before I transitioned on
there, so I live very much as a woman online and I pass, so I don’t really get any abuse

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online anymore … I also have really strict controls over my social media and who gets to
see it. Since I made new profiles, I don’t follow any pages that are about trans issues, as I
don’t want to be clocked … Sometimes I wish I could join some online networks and
stuff, but I just feel like the potential abuse outweighs the potential support.

It was hoped that creating a disconnect would prevent people from identifying them as
trans, and therefore reduce the risk of experiencing online violence (see also Rood et al.,
2016); but this has a recognisable cost in terms of access to networks of support for gender
and sexual minorities (Cipolletta et al., 2017).
Elaine also referred to ensuring her privacy and security settings were stringent in rela-
tion to social media platforms. This was both a reactive and a preventative measure that
resulted from her having experienced transphobic violence online, coupled with racism.
Despite security and privacy settings being a dominant concern within participant narra-
tives, others shared concerns that this could create a false sense of invisibility, and result-
antly, individuals may be unprepared for any violence they experienced. Lia, a 17-year-old
woman describes that on:

Facebook, my privacy settings are quite strict so only friends can see stuff, and it gives
you a false sense of security, because even if only your friends can see it, if they share it
then all of their friends can see it … If two of their friends share it, all of theirs can and
before you know it thousands of people can see a photo or a post that you have put on.

Lia discusses the unstable nature of privacy and security associated with social media, in
which so many options may be difficult to continually update. Therefore, violence may be
experienced unexpectedly, which may have more severe consequences for an individual than
online violence which is anticipated. Whilst an individual may be conscious of their own
privacy settings, the connected nature of social media can result in a snowballing effect, in
which content is shared by another user with less stringent privacy settings.

Conclusion
This chapter has addressed some of the ways in which trans people experience violence in an
online context, situating this violence within the “everyday”. The everyday was first ex-
plored in relation to trans people experiencing direct violence as a result of engaging in
everyday activities, particularly connecting with others on social media. On the other hand,
experiencing violence online was understood as being an inherent feature of the everyday
and this was, for some, contrasted with offline violence which was less predictable.
However, a distinctive and alarming element specific to online abuse was the prevalence of
incitements to self-harm. It was also demonstrated how the seriousness of online violence
was evaluated in the context of whether this abuse would manifest into violence in the
offline world. As such, it appears that it is possible for participants to separate and dis-
connect the online and offline space, at least some of the time.
In addressing responses to online violence, it has been made clear that victims of direct
violence often normalise these experiences as a way to rationalise said violence, and mini-
mise the impact. On the other hand, witnessing violence was often responded to through
withdrawal, and invisibility. Resultantly, many participants engaged in a complex rela-
tionship with (in)visibility which had further consequences for social isolation. Whilst many

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participants tried to render their trans identity invisible in an online context, this often
meant that they were unable to authentically connect with, and receive support from, other
trans people. This presents its own set of barriers and consequences for trans people’s access
to social life. However, it is not simply an individual’s own identity that can render someone
as visibly trans, it is also the content that they engage with online, which can result in
meticulous self-censorship in an online context. In order to address transphobic violence
online, social media platforms must be more proactive in identifying, removing and policing
online hate speech.

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 39
HOMOPHOBIC HUMOUR IN
RAPE MEMES
Maja Brandt Andreasen

Introduction
When millions of (primarily) women shared their experiences under the #MeToo hashtag in
the Autumn of 2017, it felt like a watershed moment in which sexual violence and
harassment were finally deemed unequivocally unacceptable. A movement started by
Tarana Burke in 2006 found its global media moment when Alyssa Milano encouraged
women to share their experiences under #MeToo. The power of social media to unite across
borders to highlight a feminist issue became evident. However, social media also provided
the platform for a backlash against #MeToo as a counter-discourse of various voices that
characterised the movement as having gone too far, as political correctness gone mad, and
as a witch hunt against all men.
Much of the backlash discourse is similar to discourse emerging from the complex
network of social media platforms that researchers refer to as the “manosphere”. A sig-
nificant aspect of the discourse on the manosphere is that of subcultural humour which
dictates the insiders and outsiders of these discursive networks. On the manosphere, the
discursive “us vs them” is often characterised through divides of gender, sexuality and race.
This became evident in my research into how sexual violence is discursively constructed in
internet humour about #MeToo (Andreasen, 2020). In the autumn of 2017, I collected data
on three social media sites (9gag, Reddit and Imgur) using four search terms (Harvey
Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Louis C.K. and #MeToo) to investigate how sexual violence was
characterised in internet memes on platforms that encourage humorous content. In addition
to the search term #MeToo (which represents more general experiences of sexual assault
and harassment), the three search terms were chosen as they represent three famous
Hollywood men who were accused of sexual assault and harassment under the hashtag
during the first months of #MeToo.1
In this chapter, I discuss the way in which the Kevin Spacey memes discursively construct
sexual violence in relation to homosexual masculinity. On 29 October 2017 actor Anthony
Rapp told Buzzfeed that Spacey had attempted to sexually assault him when Rapp was 14
years old (Vary, 2017). Rapp’s statement prompted a number of other men to come forward
with similar reports of sexual harassment and assault by Spacey. Spacey’s now infamous

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-46 423

 Maja Brandt Andreasen

response to Rapp was to tweet a public apology accompanied by the announcement that he
was coming out as gay. Spacey claimed to not remember the incident and stated that if it did
happen, it was due to drunkenness and “deeply inappropriate behaviour” for which he
apologised (Convery, 2017). Spacey’s response has been widely criticised for using his
coming out as a distraction from the accusations against him (Victor, 2017).
While the memes in my research broadly consisted of rape jokes and discourses of
misogyny, victim-blaming and sympathy for the alleged perpetrators (Andreasen, 2021,
2022), the Kevin Spacey memes on 9gag placed particular emphasis on homosexuality and
child sexual abuse, presenting them as inextricably linked. By taking humour seriously, the
chapter discusses a type of discourse that often gets a free pass and is largely dismissed from
analytical scrutiny. 9gag has many discursive similarities with the manosphere (as will be
discussed below), which assumes maleness and heterosexuality and in turn characterises gay
maleness as something that exists outside of this space – as “other”. Before analysing the
9gag data, I visit the feminist literature on rape culture, masculinity and humour in order to
contextualise how gender, sexuality, and sexual violence are portrayed on 9gag.

Rape culture, masculinity, and humour

Nicola Gavey (2019) notes that rape culture must be understood through the logic of
heterosexual sex. Within the logic of hetero-sex is the idea that sex is something men do to
women as “men are always-already ready for sex, and it is women ( … ) who activate this
interest” (Gavey, 2019, p.99). This reproduces an idea of the (hetero)normative man as
naturally sexually aggressive and the (hetero)normative woman as naturally sexually pas-
sive. Within this logic, rape then becomes a natural bi-product of normative heterosexual
male desire and at the same time plausibly deniable because it is often conceptualised as
“just sex” rather than rape. While rape culture naturalises heterosexual sex as violent,
homosexual rape disrupts such a heteronormative logic.
While the focus of this chapter is on male aggressors rather than victim/survivors of rape,
I want to pause for a moment on the role of heteronormativity in cultural portrayals of male
victim/survivors. Connell’s (1987) work on hegemonic masculinity is useful for considering
dominant discourses in relation to portrayals of masculinity. Hegemonic masculinity, for
Connell, is the practice which allows for men’s dominance and women’s subordination – as
well as the subordination of other genders and masculinities. Hegemonic masculinity must
then be understood in relation to femininity as well as nonhegemonic masculinities – in
particular ethnic minority masculinities and gay masculinities. This gendered hierarchy is
particularly evident in research into attitudes to male rape. Javaid (2015, 2018) discusses
how male rape is conceptualised as an anomaly precisely because “it challenges, confronts
and contradicts the status quo and hegemonic masculinity practices” (Javaid, 2018, p.753).
Victims of male rape are relegated to the bottom of the gender hierarchy as they are con-
sidered “unmanly” and not “real” men (ibid.). In turn, this chapter considers the way the
figure of the gay male rapist is also considered an anomaly, but not because of his sexual
assaults – rather because of his sexuality.
Discourse is central to the perpetuation of rape culture – humour being a particularly
powerful way of trivialising sexual violence. Judith Butler (1997) argues that language has
the ability to injure. Violent language is more than a representation of violence: “it enacts its
own kind of violence” (Butler, 1997, p.9). When such “injurious language” refers to trau-
matic events such as experiences of sexual violence, the trauma is not just remembered – it is

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relived (ibid). Rape discourse thus has the potential for real injury, especially if victim/
survivors are blamed and sexual violence is dismissed. Such a discursive dismissal of sexual
violence also extends to humour.
Humour can be an instrument of social control by which to maintain the social order
within a given group or society (Billig, 2005). In turn, analysing humorous discourse can
reveal the social norms and the social hierarchies of a given group. Humour thus constructs
social norms and designates subject positions as either insiders or outsiders: including those
who “get the joke” and excluding those who do not or who might be the butt of the joke
(Billig, 2005; Kramer, 2011; Kuipers, 2009). While humour can function as a means to
speak truth to power, it can also be a means of othering and excluding marginalised people.
This depends on whether a certain humorous utterance “punches” up or down – whether
the butt of the joke represents those in power or those on the margins. Feminist humour
scholars note how the humorous practice of inclusion and exclusion is gendered and can be
a mechanism for challenging as well as upholding stereotypes about gender and sexuality.
This practice often creates an “us vs them” duality existing within patriarchal power hier-
archies that centralise the experience of some groups of people (often white, heterosexual,
cis-gendered men) while oppressing and subordinating other groups of people (often non-
white, non-heterosexual and non-male people) (Bemiller and Schneider, 2010; Shifman and
Lemish, 2010). Humorous discourse about sexual violence might have a re-traumatising
effect or it might create an othering of those people who are more likely to experience, or
have a reasonable fear of experiencing, sexual violence. Over the past decade, this has been
the focus of much feminist criticism in relation to the rape “joke” – which tends to result in
debates about offence and free speech (Cox, 2015; Gentile, 2018; Kramer, 2011; Lockyer
and Savigny, 2019; Pérez and Greene, 2016).

Humour, gender, and sexuality on 9gag

This chapter focuses on memes relating to Kevin Spacey gathered from 9gag (n=381). The
memes were uploaded to the data management software, NVivo 12. The data was read
repeatedly and coded into a number of themes, the largest themes for the Spacey memes being
“Paedophilia” (184 memes), “Spacey’s coming out” (101 memes) and “Homosexuality” (55
memes). Once themes had been established, discourse analysis was used to draw out the
discursive construction of sexual violence, gender, and sexuality in the memes.
9gag provides a platform for users to upload images, videos, GIFs and memes. It has an
“upvoting/downvoting” system that enables users to upvote posts that they like and
downvote posts that they do not. The upvoting system influences the algorithm, allowing
for the most popular posts to feature at the top of the feed (Massanari, 2015). Research on
Reddit (Massanari, 2015) and 4chan (Nagle, 2015) has shown how the algorithms, upvoting
systems, anonymity, and lack of moderation (all of which are also features of 9gag) facilitate
a culture in which users outdo each other in an effort to create the most shocking and
controversial posts.
9gag is a humorous discursive space – meaning that it provides a space in which
humorous content is encouraged and can reasonably be expected. This is evident from the
About Us page that describes 9gag as “your best source for fun” and “the fun part of the
internet” (9gag, About, 2018). A 2012 interview cites the co-founder, Ray Chan, as saying:
“We want to become a place where people will go whenever they want to kill some time and
have a laugh … We want to make the world a happier place” (Gannes, 2012).

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It is important to note that while 9gag is positioned as a light-hearted “source for fun”,
the content is a mix of political commentary and satire, feel-good videos of puppies and
kittens, next to extremist expressions of misogyny, racism, and homophobia. However, this
study highlights that once we consider a wider discourse and ask specific questions about
how gender and sexuality are constructed, it becomes clear that homophobia seeps through
other parts of the content on this platform. The fact that Spacey was accused of sexually
assaulting a 14-year-old boy and that he came out as gay in his response to the accusation,
has shaped the themes of the data set and in what follows I discuss how the memes construct
Spacey (humorously) as a hypersexual gay man and paedophile.

The gay man as a hypersexual deviant

The content analysed here indicates how 9gag functions as a male discursive space in which
maleness is assumed (Jane, 2017; Milner, 2013, 2016; Phillips, 2015). Throughout my dataset,
the male centrality is evident when considering the images in combination with the discursive
construction of the narrator of the meme. Many memes, for example, use the format, “MRW”
(“My Reaction When”) which all feature either an image of a man and/or a text that char-
acterise the narrator as male – using words such as “father”, “us guys” or referring to male
masturbation.
However, it is a specific type of maleness that is centralised on 9gag: heterosexual
maleness. One trope that is repeated a few times is the contrast between who Kevin Spacey
is sexually attracted to (often personified by Anthony Rapp) and who other alleged per-
petrators are attracted to (personified by conventionally attractive Hollywood women). The
joke is the seeming absurdity that anyone (read: a man) would prefer a man over a woman
(read: an attractive woman who per definition is always sexualised and an object of desire).
The joke depends on the assumption of heterosexuality.
In my data set, homosexuality is presented as a hypersexual and deviant practice, pri-
marily characterised as a sexual act (specifically, through explicit and implicit allusions to
anal sex), rather than an expression of romance or love. One meme, for example, muses that
teenage actors describe working with Spacey as “a pain in the ass”. Another example is a
meme that refers to the reveal at the end of Se7en (9gag, 2017c), where David Mills (Brad
Pitt) desperately asks serial killer John Doe (Spacey) “What’s in the box?”. A sequence of
images illustrates how Mills’ partner, Somerset (Morgan Freeman), opens the box to find
two large, dark dildos. That these dildos occupy the position of Mills’ wife’s severed head in
Se7en, underlines the association of anal sex with death and destruction, the perverted other
to normative, “non-threatening” heterosexual sex.
As Butler (1990) points out, homosexuality is discursively constructed in opposition to
heterosexuality. Similarly, men and women are constructed as occupying distinct and binary
gender categories. Significantly, this construction exists within a power hierarchy in which
man and heterosexuality are the norm, and woman and homosexuality are the other. Butler
notes how these concepts exist within what she refers to as the heterosexual matrix. This is
the system within which biological sex, in relation to culturally constructed gender, de-
termines desire (Butler, 1990). The heterosexual matrix, and the understanding of gender
and sexuality as binary opposites, is exemplified in a meme that compares Kevin Spacey to
Harvey Weinstein (9gag, 2017e). Two separate toilet doors are pictured, with girls invited to
choose the door with Weinstein’s image and boys invited to choose the door with Spacey’s.
The use of the terms, “girls” and “boys”, muddles the accusations against the two

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(Weinstein was not accused of sexually assaulting children but adult women) and has the
twin effect of both infantilising women and sexualising children. The use of toilet signage
here is particularly noteworthy as this is something we usually use to self-select where to go.
The meme thus ignores any notion of coercion or force in relation to the alleged assaults.
Instead, the meme conceptualises sexual violence as sex – not sexual violence.
Another meme features a photograph of Bill Clinton and Kevin Spacey posed with their
arms around each other’s shoulders (9gag, 2017b). The text is framed as a quote by Spacey:
“So then Bill says ‘At least my cigar didn’t taste like shit’”, contrasting Bill Clinton’s liaison
with Monica Lewinsky with Spacey’s presumed preference for anal sex. The cigar refers to
details given by Lewinsky during the 1998 Grand Jury hearing, where she explained how
Clinton had inserted a cigar into her vagina (Starr, 1998). However, rather than using the
cigar as a sexual prop in a “clean” heterosexual way, Spacey’s sexual practice is aligned with
excrement and positioned as de-facto disgusting.

Framing the gay man as a potential paedophile

Spacey is to a large extent characterised as a paedophile in the memes. While Spacey had been
accused of sexually assaulting and harassing adults as well as children (BBC News, 2017; Jung,
2017; Rannard and Hutton, 2017; Romano, 2018; Vary, Cheng and Levy, 2017), half of the
memes in the Spacey data set imply that he is sexually attracted to children, either by using
the word “paedophile” specifically, or through the use of similar words or imagery. While
many of them feature images of teenagers and use terms such as “teenage boys” and “14-year-
old boys”, a large proportion of the memes include pictures of much younger children, such as
toddlers and babies. Notably, there have been no accusations that Spacey abused much
younger children and at one level this seems like a straightforward attempt to increase shock
effect and gain popularity. However, this also works to silence Spacey’s actual accusers who,
at the time the story became public were already adult men (and, in Rapp’s case, an out gay
man), and who had been adolescents or teenagers at the time of the alleged abuse. Instead, by
using babies, toddlers and (as we will see) mixed-sex groups, the users are not offered any
possibility of identification with the children.
For instance, a common tactic is to appropriate images of Spacey with children already
in the public domain, such as a photograph of Spacey next to four children at a visit to a
children’s health clinic in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2016 (Rosen, 2016). The logo of the pre-
dominantly heterosexual porn website Brazzers is photoshopped onto the image: there is no
additional text beyond the title of the post: “Smooth” (9gag, 2017a). The address is clearly
to other heterosexual men who are assumed to recognise the porn logo and thus determine
that this is a sexual encounter and one for which the users should have some, ironic,
admiration. This is perfectly in keeping with the “smooth”, morally duplicitious characters
for which Spacey is most celebrated (Boyle, 2019, pp. 88–90) and does not necessarily
suggest a condemnation of child sexual abuse. While Spacey is placed next to a boy, three of
the four children in the photograph appear to be girls. The meme could be suggesting that
Spacey specifically chose to stand next to the boy (his face in close proximity to the boy),
but the existence of girls as well as a boy is representative of the data more widely. In this
specific image, the vulnerability of the girl in the centre is underlined as she appears to be
wearing a hospital gown and is attached to medical equipment. Exploiting girls’ vulnera-
bility seems to be a potential source of identificatory humour: masturbation (when the
object of desire is a young woman or a girl) functions as a “manhood act” (Moloney and

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 Maja Brandt Andreasen

Love, 2018) on 9gag, while homosexual sexual acts are positioned as othered (such as al-
lusions to anal sex as discussed above).
This meme is interesting in light of feminist arguments that the figure of the paedophile is
often constructed as the monstrous-other par excellence (Boyle, 2018; Kelly, 1996), which
problematically serves to distract from the structures in place that enable men to sexually
assault people in the first place (Kitzinger, 1999, p.207). Clearly, that is not what is going on
here, as girl children are positioned as potentially fair game. However, in other memes,
Spacey is more clearly constructed as the shadowy dangerous stranger. This includes a
meme which features an image of a van with the words “Free Candy” and the text: “What is
one good thing about child molesters? They drive slowly in school zones” (9gag, 2017d).
Notably, Spacey is not visible here, rather users are told this is about Spacey through the use
of a tag with his name. The van as a symbol of sexual assault has become part of popular and
online humour, where it is known as a “rape van” (Urban Dictionary, n.d.). The “rape van” is
characterised by no windows or blacked-out windows and it is implied that the rapist drives
around seeking out victims, who he lures into the van to sexually assault them. The van in this
meme, which is in poor condition, driving around after dark with a hand-written promise of
free candy, is positioned as suspicious and the notion of the paedophile as a stranger lurking
around after dark is reproduced. Notably, there is no reference to the fact that Spacey was
accused of assaulting boy children specifically: for Spacey to fit within the existing “rape” joke
structure, this has to be elided. Admittedly, child molesters do seem to be the butt of the joke
here (there is only one good thing about them) in a way they are not in the Brazzers meme, but
the joke is still constructed at the expense of victims of child sexual abuse.
However, paedophilia is seen as most problematic when discursively liked with homo-
sexuality. As discussed in the previous section, male homosexuality in these memes is con-
sistently portrayed as perverted, deviant and often as always already potentially threatening.
The connection between homosexuality and child sexual abuse instigated by Spacey’s
response to Rapp is reproduced in many of the memes, reinforcing highly problematic his-
torical and cultural constructions of gay men as potential paedophiles (Weeks, 1985).
An example of this is the meme which uses a promotional image for Season 1 of House of
Cards (Netflix, 2013–2018), in which Spacey, as Frank Underwood, sits in Abraham Lincoln’s
seat at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. An image of a small boy has been photo-
shopped into the promotional image in a way to suggest that the boy is performing oral sex on
Spacey, with the text “I’m not a pedophile, I’m gay”, referencing Spacey’s coming out as gay
as a response to the sexual assault allegations against him. When the words gay and paedo-
phile (or variations thereof) are used repeatedly throughout hundreds of memes, they stick
together and “constitute their coincidence as more than just temporal” (Ahmed, 2004, p.76).
What Ahmed refers to as the “slide of metonymy” sticks the words homosexual and pae-
dophile together as an “implicit argument about the causal relations between the two” (ibid).
Writing specifically on the notion of disgust, she notes that words and bodies are not inher-
ently disgusting. Rather, the historicity of a word as disgusting invokes the “stickiness” of
disgust to certain words and bodies. Thus, the history of the homosexual, as outlined by
Foucault (1978), as a perverted other, means that disgust historically has stuck to that word
and those bodies that come into contact with the word. As Ahmed claims: “Anything which
has had contact with disgusting things itself becomes disgusting” (2004, p.76). Interestingly, in
this dataset, it is when paedophilia is aligned with homosexuality that it is most likely to
be rendered disgusting: heterosexual paedophilia (as suggested above) may be legitimated, in
keeping with 9gag’s typical banter around rape (Andreasen, 2020).

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 Homophobic humour in rape memes

Conclusion
In memes about Kevin Spacey, the figure of the homosexual male rapist is not just a
predator and a monster (as was the case for the portrayal of another famous #MeToo
perpetrator, Harvey Weinstein – see Andreasen 2022). Spacey is first and foremost defined
by his sexuality – as hypersexualised. And he is considered always potentially a paedophile.
The conflation of paedophilia with homosexuality, as instigated by Spacey’s “apology” to
Rapp, is reproduced by memes drawing on historical constructions of the homosexual man
as a deviant and perverted other and therefore always potentially sexually threatening. The
metonymic slide between the two words is thus exemplified in the hundreds of memes that
comment on homosexuality and paedophilia in connection with each other: the gay man is
constructed as always potentially a paedophile.
Though Spacey is ridiculed for drawing the connection between the allegations against
him and his sexuality, child sexual abuse is not always condemned in the memes. Rather, it
is used as a means to create the darkest and most potentially offensive memes generating
notoriety for the user who uploads them. Though Spacey and paedophiles sometimes – far
from always – might be the butt of the joke, the joke is usually at the expense of the victim/
survivors who are deprived of having a voice. Instead, victim/survivors of sexual violence
are not assumed to be part of the discursive space on 9gag – they are talked about rather
than being the ones who talk. While the memes might ridicule Spacey and thus employ
humour that punches up, it’s important to note the ways in which they simultaneously
punch down and make fun of marginalised sexualities and of sexually abused children.
Ultimately, the humorous discourse perpetuates homophobia by centralising a hetero-
normative hegemonic masculinity while simultaneously othering a gay masculinity. Finally,
the real losers within the humorous rape discourse are gay men as well as the voiceless
victim/survivors of sexual violence, whose experiences are either largely ignored or trivia-
lised in order to make a punchline.

Note
1 During the early stages of the research project, I conducted searches using search terms of both
alleged perpetrators and the famous women who accused these men of sexual violence (including
Rose McGowan, Ashley Judd, Asia Argento, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Beckinsale, Mira Sorvino,
Salma Hayek, Angelina Jolie, Heather Graham and Rebel Wilson). However, any searches I made
for these women on the three websites generated no or so few results that I decided not to include
these in my data set. The fact that these famous women are hardly represented by name on the
social media sites is not irrelevant as it supports the notion of the platforms as male discursive
spaces.

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 40
ONLINE DISCOURSES OF
VIOLENCE AGAINST MEN
Portrayals of neglect, discrimination and
equality gone too far
Satu Venäläinen

Introduction
Men’s victimisation both in intimate relations and on a societal level has been raised as a
concern by men’s rights movements and anti-feminist actors over the last two decades, though
similar views have been expressed from the 1970s onwards as part of a backlash against the
rise of women’s movements. The rhetorical functions and contexts of such concerns have
remained largely the same; men’s victimisation is commonly highlighted as a response to
feminist efforts to tackle and raise awareness of men’s violence against women (MVAW).
Raising the issue of men’s victimisation thus often serves the discursive function of dis-
crediting, or at least attempting to, such feminist efforts, often through evoking images of men
being discriminated against by campaigns and other means of advocacy that focus on women
as victims of gendered violence (Dragiewicz, 2011). As such, the issue has become deeply
politicised with polarising effects in contexts such as online forums and social media, in ways
that not only undermine feminist work against violence but also may crucially depart from the
views and needs of men who have encountered violence in their intimate relations (Bjørnholt
and Grønli Rosten, 2021; see also Burrell and Dhir; and Ndhlovu, this volume).
In this chapter, I take a closer look at the ways in which anti-feminist rhetoric on men’s
victimisation is constructed and how it functions in online discussions that focus on intimate
partner violence (IPV) committed by women toward men. I illustrate how such portrayals
employ widely available discourses concerning both intimate partner violence and con-
temporary gender relations in western societies, and how they gain affective and discursive
force to influence public understandings of these issues. I conclude with a discussion of the
kinds of masculinities evoked through these portrayals, where seemingly contradictory
characterisations of men’s victimhood are mobilised with efforts to retain men’s powerful
position in relation to women, and thus to reinforce gendered hierarchies.
The online discussions drawn upon in the chapter come from discussion forums hosted in
Finland. This is a national context with a high prevalence of MVAW; for instance, in 2014
Finland ranked second for violence against women per capita in an EU-wide survey (European
Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2014). This is despite the fact that Finland has a
national image as a progressive welfare state with high levels of gender equality – a contrast

432 DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-47

 Online discourses of violence against men

partially shared by other Nordic countries, and which has therefore been referred to as the
Nordic paradox (Holma et al., 2021). Moreover, in the past decade, Finnish online spaces have
become populated by anti-feminist men’s rights rhetoric in a largely similar fashion to inter-
national forums with audiences across the globe (e.g. Ging, 2017). In the next section, I will
briefly outline this broader online context and the discourses circulating within it. This is fol-
lowed by a description of the theoretical perspectives adopted in my inquiry.

Discourses on discrimination against men and intimate partner violence

Recent years have seen a vast rise in men’s rights rhetoric, largely due to its spreading in
online contexts specifically supportive of its proliferation (Ging, 2017, and this volume). The
online manifestations of anti-feminist forms of men’s rights advocacy are known as part
of the manosphere – a loosely knit collection of anti-feminist communities dispersed across
various internet sites. One of the common tropes circulating in the manosphere is the figure
of a victimised man who is the target of misandry – a term coined as the counterpart of
misogyny for the purpose of evoking an image of societal hatred toward men due to the rise
of feminism (Marwick and Caplan, 2018). Hence the term misandry is an apt example of the
tendency of men’s rights rhetoric to construct images of men’s oppression through various
equivalency tactics and reversals of gendered positions (Dragiewicz, 2011; Dragiewicz and
Burgess, 2016) that twist feminist understandings of gendered power imbalances and
thereby attempt to dismantle the legitimacy of feminist efforts at societal change. Claims of
misandry frequently co-appear with the kind of meaning-making around gendered violence
that works to minimise, justify and excuse MVAW, by employing rhetorical tools that have
been commonly found in the talk of men who have committed IPV (see e.g., Hearn, 1998;
Anderson and Umberson, 2001; Dragiewicz, 2011). Such rhetorical tools and the associated
reversed portrayals of gender, power and violence are, however, not limited to men’s rights
activism or men who have a specific stake in the constructions they allow for, but have also
been identified in online discussions on gender and violence among the general public
(Dragiewicz and Burgess, 2016) as well as in young people’s sense-making on everyday
sexism (Calder-Dawe and Gavey, 2016).
To illustrate the discursive construction of men’s victimhood in online contexts, in this
chapter, I draw upon materials collected in April 2017 for a project focusing on contemporary
discourses on violence and societal inequalities in Finland. I approach the spreading and the
impacts of portrayals and views on men’s victimhood from a poststructural perspective, with
an emphasis on intimate interconnections between discourses and power. Based on a
Foucauldian understanding, discourses refer to broad systems of meaning available for sense-
making within any particular socio-historical context (Hall, 2001). Discourses have the
potential to both sustain existing power imbalances as well as to assist in subverting them.
Patterns of dominance among various discourses coalesce with socio-historically shifting
societal relations of power, thereby imposing limits to what can be said, thought and done at
any particular socio-historical period or more narrowly defined context. In terms of making
sense of intimate partner violence and the related gendered power relations and inequalities,
powerful discourses can, for instance, silence any understandings of gendered power inscribed
in dynamics of violence in ways that work to sustain prevailing gendered inequalities (Towns,
Adams and Gavey, 2003; Berns, 2004). Such understandings may easily be utilised in efforts to
construct images of men as a disadvantaged and multiply victimised group, geared towards
countering feminist views on historically continuous patterns of gendered inequalities.

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 Satu Venäläinen

From the related perspective of discursive positioning (Davies and Harré, 1990), the
prevailing discursive regimes enable the construction of socially recognisable identities
based on subject positions made available by those regimes. Subject positions are discur-
sively constructed locations from where to speak and view the world and other people. They
emerge relationally, both in terms of being dependent on social interaction and becoming
evoked in relation to the ways other actors are simultaneously being positioned. Identity
construction enacted through discursive acts of positioning in relation to available and
socially recognisable subject positions is thus a dialectical process reliant on dynamics of
hierarchical differentiation (Hall, 1996), evident for instance in the ways that masculine
identities are commonly constructed in relation to feminine ones or in relation to sub-
ordinated forms of masculinity (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005; Messerschmidt, 2018).
Below, I illustrate how such dynamics are at play in online discussions, and how they
involve contradictory constructions of masculine identities.

Online discussions as materials for analysis of aggrieved manhood

The internet and social media are central contemporary sites for producing normative forms of
white heterosexual masculinities that reinforce gendered power imbalances and normalise
hierarchical gendered distinctions (White, 2019). They also play a key role in shaping the
general public’s understandings of issues such as intimate partner violence (Dragiewicz and
Burgess, 2016). The materials I analyse in this chapter come from some of Finland’s most
popular online discussion forums and the comment areas of popular blog sites. The writers
participate in these discussions in the Finnish language. The discussion threads were located by
conducting internet searches on Google and site-specific text-search tools with the search terms
“violence + women”, “women’s violence” and “intimate partner violence experienced by men”.
Discussion threads for a span of 10 years (2007–2016) from six different types of discussion
forums and nine blog sites have been included in the materials. The discussion forums include
one general online discussion forum and the forums of a national newspaper, a regional
newspaper (from northern Finland), a youth magazine, a baby-focused magazine and a science
magazine. All of the comment areas on the blog sites were accessed through a popular blog
section of a web-based newspaper. Several writers of the blogs were politically active, and one
of them is a well-known advocate of the men’s rights movement in Finland. Overall, however,
the writers in these discussion forums constitute a heterogeneous group including both men and
women, despite the fact that some of them are hosted by magazines with a specific area of focus.
All told, the materials consist of 98 discussion threads and 3,190 comments.
In my previously published work, I have drawn upon various tools from discursive
approaches to analyse these materials and the processes through which the portrayals of
men as victims are achieved and mobilised in them (see e.g. Venäläinen and Virkki, 2019;
Venäläinen, 2020a, 2020b, 2021). In line with the perspective outlined above, in this chapter,
I specifically focus on discursive processes of positioning actors referred to in the discussions
in alignment with subject positions made available by the discourses that prevail during a
particular moment in history.1

Men’s victimisation as a political tool at the service of anti-feminism

In this section, I demonstrate how men’s victimisation, and specifically its neglect, are dis-
cursively constructed as a pressing social problem and used as a political tool for anti-feminist

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purposes in online discussions. In addition to highlighting the political functions served by

these portrayals, my aim is to show the dialectical nature of gendered positionings on which
the portrayals rely, as well as the underlying discourses that enable their construction and
circulation. These specifically include a gender-neutral discourse of intimate partner violence
and a discourse of gender equality having gone too far.

Forgotten victims of violence and gender-neutrality as the solution

Across the various online forums I have analysed, men’s victimisation in intimate relations
is raised as a pressing and yet neglected phenomenon, with a high level of consistency in the
forms of rhetoric adopted and the underlying discursive configurations drawn upon. Such
positionings of men as forgotten victims of violence are enacted by simultaneously posi-
tioning a broad group of actors – sometimes the whole of society – as responsible for
neglecting their victimisation. These actors’ purported neglectfulness is attributed to their
lack of insight and/or regard for men as a social group and as members of society. The
actors held specifically responsible include feminists and feminist researchers, ministries and
(women) politicians, representatives of the press, as well as individual women perpetrators
of violence, who are portrayed as exploiting the biases and the neglectfulness of other actors
and society at large. NGOs such as Amnesty are also frequently positioned as responsible,
due to many of the discussion threads being triggered by commentaries on Amnesty’s
Finnish section’s campaigns aimed at raising awareness of violence against women.2
This extract shows how such campaigns are constructed as discriminating against men
due to laying emphasis on women victims:

Only violence against women is a problem in this feminist society, and that’s what
feminists and the Amnesty are so worried about. Violence against men, especially
when committed by women, is instead quite alright, even funny. I don’t understand
why violence cannot be seen as equally reprehensible regardless of whether the per-
petrator or the victim was a man or a woman. Feminists always minimise violence
committed by women. (14/5/2014)3

Contrasting the treatment of violence committed and experienced by women versus men is a
key mechanism here through which the image of men’s neglect is constructed. Such a
contrast evokes a sense of injustice, in the light of which any attempts to dispute the
legitimacy of asking for equal treatment appear as opposing common sense. Hence the
justification for gender-specific awareness-raising on MVAW is effectively mitigated.
Similar dialectical dynamics in highlighting men’s victimisation as a response to attention
being given to violence against women are frequently triggered in online discussions by news
reports about research findings reminding about the high frequency of victimisation among
Finnish women. For instance, news reports about the results of the EU-wide survey in 2014
mentioned in the introduction were met with fierce opposition, with claims that aimed to
discredit the findings’ validity by pointing out various shortcomings, most significantly the
fact that the survey had only examined women’s experiences without including those of
men. In these responses, the results were seen to tarnish Finland’s national reputation, or
more precisely, the reputation of Finnish men.4 The comments frequently reiterated the idea
that if the survey had also asked about men’s experiences of victimisation, the findings
would have shown that Finnish men are also victimised at a high rate. Furthermore, as the

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comment below, from a discussion thread of a newspaper, illustrates, this claim is frequently
accompanied by the idea that Finnish women would have then been found to be equally
violent as men:

What about men and boys. The time for these statistics to be accepted without
question has passed. We demand to know the whole truth. How many men and boys
have experienced violence and sexual abuse. For me everyone’s suffering is equally
valuable. Gender is not relevant in experiencing suffering. Likely Finland is violent
regarding all parties! In Finland men, women and children all experience violence.
Violence is also committed by all genders. Women are at least as violent as men in
intimate relations. (12/3/2014)

These calls for addressing men’s victimisation both in campaigns and in research on inti-
mate partner violence echo not only men’s rights rhetoric (Dragiewicz, 2011; Marwick and
Caplan, 2018) but also the rhetoric commonly used in attempts to legitimise a gender-
neutral approach in IPV research (e.g. Straus, 2011; Dutton, 2012). The key function
accomplished by highlighting men’s victimisation and neglect in all of these contexts is the
same: it essentially allows for disputing the value of gender-specific approaches, thereby
encouraging the dismissal of research on which gender-specific, feminist approaches are
built. This is done specifically by mobilising a symmetry discourse of IPV, based on
equalising women’s and men’s experiences of victimisation and perpetration, as the extract
above illustrated. The interplay between research and understandings circulating online
thus plays a key role in these constructions, mediated by discourses that have the power to
become part of commonsense understandings of gender and violence. Importantly, these
discourses also rely on positioning feminists and feminist researchers as illegitimate actors in
terms of knowledge production on violence.

Feminism gone too far and the obstruction of violent displays of masculinity
Linking feminism and its efforts toward social change to men’s victimisation in contem-
porary Western societies, as was evident in the previous section, is frequently enacted in
online discussions with the help of narratives of change that depict the current state of
gender relations as characterised by equality having gone too far. Men are positioned in
these narratives as not only victimised in intimate relations and neglected as victims, but
also as societal outcasts in other respects as well. Thus, again echoing men’s rights rhetoric
and its notions of misandry, positionings of men as IPV victims function as proof of men’s
broader discrimination and societal disadvantage, attributed to feminism:

A woman is not the weaker party nowadays but on average stronger than a man in a
juridical and social sense, often also physically […] All this because feminism did
everything to make this happen. A sick movement, the instigator of witch hunts
against men, families and children. Feminism is female chauvinism, narcissism and
violence, in plain language. (11/7/2015)

The following extract similarly hinges on comparative constructions of women’s and men’s
victimhood but also illustrates the workings of a related, recurring trope, namely the notion

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of double standards. This is another example of appropriating elements from feminism for
the purpose of creating a reversed image of men’s oppression (Dragiewicz, 2011).

I have always thought that it’s downright stupid that a man cannot even touch a
woman without everyone hating you and being labeled as a wife beater, but a woman
can do exactly what she pleases and she’s only praised like oh great that you gave him
what was coming, good, yes, female energy!!!!! […] It’s ridiculous how there’s always a
search for equality and women’s rights, because in the end in quite many things
women are incredibly favored. This exactly is a good example – still there’s a call for
women’s equality and complaints about how women are beaten and bla bla bla, but no
one considers that men in fact are here unequal and their side is not taken at all even
though there really is reason for that. (11/11/2012)

With the claim that whereas men’s violence against women is not tolerated, women’s violence
against men is in turn celebrated as a sign of empowerment, the comment constructs a skewed
image of the legitimation of violence in favour of women. Significantly, this is then mobilised
for the purpose of inviting the readers to side with men in terms of defending their equal right
to do violence without being chastised as wife beaters. Thus the equal rights called for here, as
well as in many other similar comments, do not only extend to men being recognised as victims
but also to condoning men’s violence. The positioning of men being implicitly defended here is
therefore one of a legitimised perpetrator of violence against women, the entitlement to which
is obstructed due to advocacy of women’s rights and complaints of MVAW. The seeming
defence of men victims in online discussions thus occasionally gives way to a more traditional
reiteration of men’s entitlement to IPV (Towns, Adams and Gavey, 2003). What is note-
worthy is that this happens in various discussion forums that are not specifically targeting men
or men’s rights advocates – the extract above for instance is not from the one blog site of a
known men’s rights advocate that was included in the data.
The distinctions constructed in the positionings of women and men in meaning-making,
such as described above, simultaneously align with hegemonic notions of masculinity and an
entitlement to defend its privileged position (e.g. Kimmel, 2013), with force if necessary, as
well as with the appropriated victim status that reverses the positionings in IPV and associated
imbalance of power that feminist discourses have pursued to make visible. This adds com-
plexity to the construction of gendered positions at play: the victim status is not treated here
simply as contradictory to a masculine identity and the associated dominance in hierarchies
of worth, as it tends to be viewed (Åkerström, Burcar and Wästerfors, 2011), but rather
works as a vehicle for retaining dominance through discrediting understandings of gendered
power dynamics in IPV.
Similar complexity is also present in the discussions where being victimised by a woman
is portrayed as shameful for a man, specifically because it obstructs their performance of
masculinity (see also Ndhlovu, this volume). The following extract illustrates how the social
norm that a man should not hit a woman is transformed into evidence of men’s shameful
inability to defend themselves with violence.

Especially for a man, intimate partner violence is TRULY humiliating. It is subor-

dination at its worst, when you “cannot” give back, because women are supposedly so
weak and boo hoo (11/11/2013).

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 Satu Venäläinen

The misogynist tone of the comment owes to a withdrawal of any sympathy or belief to-
wards women’s victimisation, again contrasted with the suffering experienced by men due to
humiliation. Such a tone quite frequently accompanies the claims of men’s victimhood
online, borrowing from and merging with the explicit misogyny of the manosphere (Ging,
2017), exemplified in the following extract with the use of derogatory labels and with
straightforward legitimation of violence as a response to being victimised by a woman:

I am disgusted above all by these bitches who smack their boyfriends on the face and
even more disgusted by people who defend these bitches and say that it’s not violence.
In that situation I would hit the bitch with equal force. Usually these same bitches are
even the first to shout out if women are oppressed somehow. It is so nice to always be a
victim (11/11/2013).

The references to being disgusted seen above – implying a deep, affective sense of violation
against social norms one holds dear (Tileag
, 2019; see also Tyler, 2007) – reinforce the
image of transgression against the principle of equal treatment, which thereby lends legit-
imacy to a violent response. Such legitimation of MVAW that rests on attributing blame to
women to whom violence is directed reiterates the patterns repeatedly identified in the talk
of men who have committed IPV (Anderson and Umberson, 2001), which find new audi-
ences and collective support – though also contestation – in online forums, specifically
equipped for allowing the vast spreading of such patterns of portrayal.

Conclusion
The discursive functions of highlighting men’s victimhood in online discussions such as the
ones I have analysed are quite obvious: this allows for the construction of an image of
reality where men instead of women are discriminated against, which works to undermine
the legitimacy of raising feminist issues such as MVAW. In effect, men are frequently po-
sitioned in the discussions as victims of both violence and feminism, and the interplay of
these positionings allows them to reinforce and feed into each other. With these patterns,
the discussions focused on IPV can be traced to the broader contemporary dynamics in the
dialectical manifestations of popular misogyny and feminism (Banet-Weiser, 2018), echoing
also the backlashes against for instance online activism such as #MeToo, with similar
rhetoric of men’s false demonisation and double standards (see e.g. Boyle and Rathnayake,
2020).5 The techniques used for casting suspicion on gendered understandings of violence
are also similar to those used for silencing women across various contexts and time periods
(Towns, Adams and Gavey, 2003).
However, in a manner that is specifically characteristic of recent online displays of vic-
timised masculinities (Ging, 2017), the positionings made available for men in the discus-
sions are mixed: on the one hand, they are based on efforts to protect men – and oftentimes
particularly Finnish men – from allegations of violence, and to thereby re-centre their
concerns and viewpoints (Kimmel, 2013). On the other hand, these positionings involve not
only emphasising men’s victimhood but also their entitlement to align with hegemonic,
violent masculinities in their gendered performances and interaction with women.
The discursive means whereby these positionings are constructed and made believable
are similarly multifaceted. The epistemic privilege and the legitimacy of the expressed anti-
feminist views specifically rely on various factualisation techniques (see Venäläinen, 2020b),

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 Online discourses of violence against men

including, for example, references to academic research and authorities, building consensus,
mobilising anecdotes, evoking contrasts, and so on. Equally prominent in the discussions
are, however, various means of mobilising affect (Venäläinen, 2021), specifically for the
purpose of creating a deep sense of injustice and transgression of norms related to equality,
and to mobilise sympathy towards men and antipathy towards women as a result. In the
Finnish context in particular, such notions feed on common ideas of Finland having already
largely reached gender equality, which make available positionings of Finnish women as
powerful and Finnish men as relatively powerless.
Positioning men as victims of injustice powerfully employs commonly accepted dis-
courses of equal treatment regardless of gender (Messner, 2016), appropriated and reversed
to serve anti-feminist purposes. These affectively-loaded appeals merge in the discussions
with those based on an image of rationality and logic, which are denied from feminist actors
or any supporters of women while attributed to those opposing them. The hierarchical
distinctions thereby achieved follow the common splitting of feminised irrationality and
masculinised rationality in Western thought (Wetherell, 2012), to the service of which the
affective potential of the circulated images is harnessed. Not least due to this merging of
affective and discursive dimensions, the power of these portrayals to influence the general
public’s understandings should not be underestimated. This is likely to apply as long as
these images retain their capacity to speak to broader patterns in undermining feminism and
forming digital communities around men’s aggrieved entitlement, which so far have shown
no signs of ceasing.

Notes
1 For more details on the analytical process involving the use of these concepts, see e.g. Venäläinen
(2020a).
2 Amnesty’s Finnish section has included campaigns that aim to raise awareness of sexual and
intimate partner violence against women in Finland since 2004, with a 10-year celebration of the
first campaign in 2014. The latter was commented on in several threads with similar criticism
against the campaigns’ exclusive focus on women victims.
3 Following the established ethical guidelines for internet research (e.g. Markham and Buchanan,
2012), in order to ensure the anonymity of the writers on these sites, I have removed any infor-
mation about the forums, as well as the names or pseudonyms of the writers themselves. The
extracts, therefore, come with the number of each discussion forum and the month and year of
publication. All the extracts have been translated from Finnish to English by the author.
4 For a more detailed discussion on the intersections of ethnicity, national identity and gender in
these discussions, see Venäläinen and Virkki, 2019.
5 It is important to note that the kinds of positionings and the anti-feminist rhetoric focused on in
this chapter frequently also evoke counter-arguments more or less aligned with feminist under-
standings in online discussions (see Venäläinen 2020b). Thus as it is common, the discussions are
much more multivoiced than what has been possible to convey here. However, the power dynamic
between the different stances commonly follows a logic of silencing, dominance and occasionally
even hate speech, through which feminist views are systematically deflected in the bulk of dis-
cussions (see Venäläinen and Virkki, 2019).

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441
 41
THE CURIOUS CASE OF
KAREN CARNEY
The argument for equity over equality in curbing
the online abuse of women in sports media
Guy Harrison and Melody Huslage

Introduction
For the better part of the 2010s and continuing into the 2020s, the gendered online harassment
of women working in sports media has garnered much attention within an industry that has
been increasingly (if unevenly) willing to discuss sociopolitical issues – particularly systemic
racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. Women working in the sports media industry –
particularly those commenting on men’s sports – have called attention to multiple examples of
the abuse they receive online (e.g. Just Not Sports, 2016) and their experiences in different
sporting and national contexts have been the focus of academic research (e.g. Harrison, 2021;
DiCaro, 2021; Chen et al., 2020; Everbach, 2018). This chapter uses the example of English
football pundit, and former professional footballer, Karen Carney as a lens through which to
discuss these issues and think about how we might best frame gendered online harassment and
respond to effect change.
In December 2020, Carney appeared on Amazon Prime’s coverage of the English Premier
League match between Leeds United and West Bromwich Albion, two clubs in England’s top
men’s football league. While Leeds decisively won the match 5–0, Carney expressed scepticism,
due to Leeds’ relatively frenetic style of play, that the club could physically maintain its form
over the remainder of a season that would not end until May 2021. The club was in the first
season of its second stint in the Premier League having earned a promotion from England’s
second tier after the coronavirus-induced pause in 2020. After crediting Leeds’ performance in
the match, Carney added, “My only concern would be: would they blow up at the end of the
season? We saw that in the last couple of seasons and I actually think they got promoted
because of Covid in terms of it gave them a bit of respite. I don’t know whether they would
have [earned the promotion] if they didn’t have that break” (quoted in Ingle, 2020, para. 4).
Carney’s comments were typical fare for a sports pundit whose job is to offer both positive
and negative assessments of a club’s past performance and speculate on their chances for
success in the future. Nevertheless, on its official Twitter account – which has over 900,000
followers as of this writing – Leeds United tweeted a recording of Carney making her com-
ments while adding “‘Promoted because of Covid,’ won the [second-tier] by 10 points, Hi @
primevideosport,” with a waving hand emoji (Ramsbottom, 2020). Though Leeds’ response

442 DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-48

 The curious case of Karen Carney

was seemingly playful, it was shared on Twitter over 11,000 times (BBC, 2021) and sparked a
wave of gendered online abuse hurled toward Carney that led to further discussions of the
treatment of women in sports media. When first given the opportunity to denounce his club’s
tweet the day it was published, Leeds United owner Andrea Radrizzani (2020) doubled down
on the criticisms lobbed at Carney. “I consider [her] comment completely unnecessary and
disrespectful to our Club,” he tweeted, “and particularly to the fantastic hard work of our
players and coaches whom were outstanding on the pitch for the last two championship
seasons by all stats” (@andrearadri, 29 December 2020). Leeds’ tweet was not immediately
removed, even when the club publicly condemned the abuse being hurled at Carney in a
statement one day later (Ingle, 2020). Ultimately, the comments stemming from Leeds’ viral
tweet moved Carney to delete her Twitter account entirely (MacInnes, 2021).
In this chapter, we call upon Harrison’s (2021, 2019, 2018) and others’ previous work on
the treatment of women in sports media to critically analyse this case. Given the well-
documented persistence of gendered online harassment against women in sports media and
the need to consider the disproportionate affective or emotional labour foisted upon such
women (Harrison, 2021; Harrison, 2018), we argue clubs, athletes and sports media orga-
nisations would do well to take an approach to this issue that seeks gender equity rather
than equality. That is, athletes and organisations would better serve women in the industry
by accounting for the current sociopolitical environment and interacting with those women
(and their comments) differently than they might interact with men in the online environ-
ment. We further argue that the historical mistreatment of women working in sports media,
along with the sophistication of contemporary anti-feminist discourse, calls for a more
nuanced and contextualised approach to tackling the issue of online abuse. Indeed, as many
of the English football fan responses to this controversy demonstrate – and as others have
argued in this volume – discourses of gender equality are often used to legitimise or condone
online violence against women. Co-opting seemingly feminist discourses in this manner
(“treat her the same way you’d treat a man”) is part and parcel of the contradictory,
neoliberal feminist logics that govern women in the sports and other media industries
(Harrison, 2021; Banet-Weiser, 2018; Gill, 2007).
In the pages that follow, we offer more details about the controversy in question before
reviewing what has been reported on both the issue of gendered online harassment in sports
media and the gendered nature of sports punditry. We conclude this chapter by synthesising
these threads to make the case for an alternate approach to responding to Carney’s com-
ments that might have at least mitigated the online abuse she was subjected to.

Carney vs. Leeds United FC

Karen Carney was not the first football pundit to predict that Leeds would wear down by
season’s end and, on their official Twitter account, the club had responded similarly to male
pundits who had made comparable predictions. This included former men’s footballer
Gabby Agbonlahor (@LUFC, 23 October 2020). However, given the pervasive and well-
documented nature of gendered online abuse, one could have reasonably predicted that the
replies to Leeds’ tweet about Carney were going to be gendered. According to The Guardian:

In public messages Carney was called a “silly bitch,” a “stupid slag” and “twat of the
week” and told to “get back in the kitchen,” or to “put your [microphone] down and get
yourself home there’s dishes to wash and clothes to iron.” Other users wrote they were

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 Guy Harrison and Melody Huslage

“sick of this shit women pundits,” while another said: “Women’s lives matter but come
on, women and football? Get kettle on love!” These were far from the worst examples.
(MacInnes, 2021, para. 11)

As the abuse continued, many footballers and football fans called for Leeds to remove its
tweet. Jake Mallen, director of a footballer agency wrote, “Poor from the @LUFC social
team … . trying to embarrass a hard working pundit who will now be subject to vile abuse
from #LUFC fans!” (@_JMallen, 29 December 2020). Rio Ferdinand, a Leeds United
alum, replied to Mallen with “Agree … delete tweet!” (@rioferdy5, 29 December 2020).
Women in Football, an advocacy group seeking gender equity within the sport, tweeted:

Whether you agree with [Carney’s] comment or not, singling out & ridiculing an individual
on an official club account is not what we’re here for. Karen Carney is a well-informed
pundit. This tweet is inciteful & inappropriate. Not a good look now, or at any time
(@WomeninFootball, 30 December 2020)

Despite denouncing online abuse and stating that it “respects Karen greatly for all she has
achieved in the game, as well as her work in the media and the charity work she undertakes”,
Leeds did not, at that point, remove its tweet or apologise for it (Ingle, 2020, para. 7).
The abusive messages therefore continued. Carney deleted her Twitter account three
days after Leeds’ initial tweet, with the abuse described by one journalist as getting “worse
and worse” (MacInnes, 2021, para. 3). It was then reported that Leeds would not be
deleting its tweet to avoid inciting a second wave of abuse (MacInnes, 2021). As of this
writing, however, the tweet has been deleted.
Although many came to Carney’s defence during the controversy, there were of course
many Twitter users who condoned Leeds’ response. These users believed it fair for the club to
treat Carney as it had male pundits who, like Agbonlahor, also questioned the sustainability
of the club’s tactics. While some of the tweets questioning Leeds’ culpability in Carney’s abuse
were seemingly genuine inquiries, when read closely, many more were ironic. Replying to
Women in Football’s tweet, one man wrote, “Are only men allowed to be poked fun at? Just
trying to work out the ground rules here” (30 December 2020).1 In response to a tweet in
which US footballer Megan Rapinoe defended Carney (@mPinoe, 30 December 2020), a
Leeds United fan club account replied, “I missed your tweet about Leeds United when they
also called out Gabriel Agbonlahor, Tim Sherwood, and Paul Merson to name just a few. Any
reason why it’s different this time?” (30 December 2020). Another man responded, “Seems
more sexist to interact with punditry from men only. [Carney] chose the profession & I don’t
condone sexist comments but I don’t see how Leed’s [sic] tweet is sexist” (30 December 2020).
Lastly, one man reasoned, “I kind of agree with [Carney], but if she’s big enough to go on tv
and have a pop at fellow professionals then she’ll have to be big enough to deal with people
disagreeing with her, frankly” (29 December 2020). These responses notably deflect the issue,
suggesting that it is criticism and not abuse that is being aimed at Carney, and missing the
gendered nature of the kinds of comments identified in The Guardian report above.

The online harassment of women working in sports media

Suffice to say, Karen Carney is not the first woman in sports media to have been attacked
online for expressing an opinion. Casual observers often wonder why women in sports

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media pay attention to their online harassers or even stay on social media altogether.
Developing and maintaining a social media presence has become a required activity for
those seeking a successful career in sports media (Chen et al., 2020). The compulsory nature
of social media, paired with the rise of popular misogyny (Banet-Weiser, 2018), has made
sports media an even more toxic space for women. While it has long been accepted that
women are not typically given the freedom to speak or act freely in the sports media
workplace (Olson, 2017), in the digital age, many women sports journalists have also
learned that “You may not share your sports opinion while, at the same time, being a
woman” (DiCaro, 2015, para. 2).
Due to these very narrow boundaries for acceptable online behaviour, and as a result of
popular misogyny and postfeminist discourses (Gill, 2007), women in the industry have had to
be autonomous and entrepreneurial in how they navigate online harassment. Compulsory
entrepreneurialism as the solution to misogyny is a hallmark of the neoliberal, (anti)feminist
discourses that govern women in sports media. In that vein, Everbach (2018) found that many
women sports journalists engage in what she calls “strategic troll management” (p. 141). This
method of dealing with Internet trolls is an integral part of the affective labour women in
sports media have to perform, almost on a daily basis, in order to manage their emotions and
exist within the industry (Harrison, 2019; Harrison, 2018). The labour of developing a “thick
skin” has thus been normalised. Nevertheless, it remains oppressive work with a concrete
impact on women’s careers. Many women either leave the industry or, in the case of once-
aspiring women sports journalists, never enter the industry at all because such labour is ex-
pected (Harrison, 2021). In the absence of systemic structural change, this double bind ends up
legitimising both online abuse and the neoliberal labour required to overcome it.
In Carney’s case, she only left social media as a result of the abuse she endured but has
remained in the industry as of this writing. Still, her case is one worth examining as it clues
us into the limitations of “equality” when addressing, in this pervasively neoliberal en-
vironment, the gendered online abuse of women working in sports media. Her case also
grants us the opportunity to explore and strategise nuanced approaches to understanding
and curbing gendered online harassment for public figures who, like Carney, traffic in
subjective arguments and opinions. To understand the importance of applying nuance to
sports punditry, it is important to examine the purpose and (gendered) construction of the
sports television pundit.

Sports television punditry

Karen Carney’s role on Amazon Prime Video’s coverage of the English Premier League
(EPL) was that of an expert sports pundit. Carney’s authority as a football expert comes
from her playing career, which included 144 appearances for the English Women’s National
Team. Sports broadcasters and television sports pundits are performers, filling “gaps” for
spectators who are watching at home as opposed to viewing games from sporting venues
(Gunn, 2010). The contents of this performance will vary, depending on the timing of the
broadcaster’s appearance on television, relative to the events they may be covering (Gunn,
2010). Although Carney expressed her opinion on Prime Video after an EPL match between
Leeds United and West Bromwich Albion, she was making a prediction about Leeds’
prognosis for the rest of the EPL season, based on what she observed in previous seasons.
Simply put, Carney’s comments were standard pundit fare.

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Gunn (2010) – reflecting on the role of predominately male pundits in US sports

broadcasting – writes that predictions about individual games and entire seasons, which
pundits make using statistics, “gut feeling,” scientific data, or some combination thereof, are
typically wrong. Furthermore, despite the longstanding inaccuracy of these predictions,
(male) sports pundits are typically afforded unfettered latitude – by television networks and
spectators – to make what ultimately amounts to informed guesses. As a result of this lack
of accountability, these prognosticators seem to “pump viewers full of idle talk … hold[ing]
onto an audience merely for the sake of profit” (Gunn, 2010, p. 76).
In Carney’s case, despite her worry that Leeds would physically “blow up at the end of
the season” due to the club’s frenetic style of play, the club earned points – through either a
win or draw – in 10 of its final 11 EPL matches in 2021 and finished ninth in the 20-team
competition. Leeds also finished the season with more points than any newly-promoted EPL
club in 20 years. Leeds supporters took issue with Carney’s prognosis, and the reasoning
behind it, at the time she made it and would have been justified in doing so at the end of the
season. Yet, while Carney’s prediction of Leeds United’s future was no less accurate or
informed than the analysis usually offered by sports pundits, the online harassment she
suffered after making the prediction would appear to debunk any suggestion that spectators
passively listen to such analysis to fill time.
The gendered and racialised nature of sports punditry, alongside the rise of digital
communication and popular misogyny, helps explain the vitriolic reaction to Carney’s
analysis. Although sports broadcast networks like ESPN, BBC Sport and Amazon Prime
Video have demonstrated a greater commitment to racial and gender diversity among their
punditry, sports debate is still a style of sports coverage that centers white masculinity
(Henry, 2021). Critics of early political television commentary often positioned women
pundits as “screechy and strident” in what was a predominantly white, male platform
(Hirsch, 1991, p. 55–56). That view has carried over to sports television and continues to
this day, with many broadcasting and commentary positions within men’s sports coverage
closed off to women because of, to some extent, gendered perceptions of their voices
(Harrison, 2021; DiCaro, 2017) and credibility (Harrison, 2021; Mudrick et al., 2018).
The extant literature on sports television punditry would suggest that, although a woman
like Karen Carney performs the same role as her male colleagues, audience perceptions of
her commentary were always going to be vastly different from those of her male peers. If
audiences, therefore, perceived her opinions differently because she was a woman, it stands
to reason that their reactions would also be gendered. Additionally, while it is not
uncommon in the digital age for sports media consumers to take to social media to call out
sports pundits who speak negatively of their favourite teams, it was unconventional for a
professional club to do the same.

A turn toward equity

Leeds United should have considered the above factors before tweeting its response to
Carney. While the conventional inclination may be to treat women like Carney as equal to
male pundits, an approach centering equity would have taken these factors into account.
The users who wrote many of the tweets quoted above believed that if Carney wanted to
work in men’s sports media, she should have expected the same treatment as her male peers.
It understandably stands to reason, then, that many would view Carney as needing to be

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prepared for Leeds’ mockery, which the club had already bestowed upon some of her male
peers. Echoing this point, another Twitter user wrote this reply to Megan Rapinoe:

Leeds are right to tweet this. [Carney] should face the criticisms for her professional
opinion like every other pundits (sic). If she does not get criticized for her professional
opinions just because she is a woman, we will be doing disservice to all the women
(30 December 2020).

Although this argument is logical within an equality-forward approach, the contemporary,

neoliberal use of equality as an anti-feminist cudgel delegitimises this argument. Additionally,
the unsurprisingly gendered nature of the abuse to which Carney was subjected further ren-
ders “gender equality” insufficient. In truth, women encounter gender-based online violence
more often than men (Women’s Media Center, n.d.). Until that changes, an approach that
takes gender equity into account would be more effective.
Although equality and equity are often used interchangeably in popular vernacular, it is
important to note the distinctions between the two terms. Equality has been defined in
international laws and treaties and focuses on providing everyone with the same opportu-
nities and benefits, without discrimination (United Nations, 2000, 2006). Gender equality,
for example, ensures that all genders are equally able to access opportunities for career
advancement or receive equal pay. Equity, however, is customarily concerned with fairness
and considers the historical disadvantages encountered by marginalised groups that impede
the ability for everyone to start on a level playing field (World Health Organization, n.d.;
United Nations, 2005). Equitable policies recognise individuals may have different cir-
cumstances and different needs based on their positionality, requiring different treatment
(United Nations, 2005). The goal of equity measures can be to achieve equality, where
everyone has equal opportunities, unconstrained by structural discrimination, and enjoy-
ment of the same opportunities and rights in all areas of life (United Nations, 2005).
Inequality tends to disadvantage women, nonbinary and trans people in relation to men,
especially in the male-dominated sphere of sports media. Women in Journalism Scotland
(2022) found that only three out of 95 sports reporters at Scottish print organisations (a
meagre 3.1%) are women. In the US and Canada, 14.4% of sports reporters are women and
only 3.3% are women of colour (Lapchick, 2021). Women sports journalists across Europe
and North America also face derision and discrimination in the workplace based on their
gender (Bennett, 2022; Organista and Mazur, 2020; Antunovic, 2019; Mudrick, Burton and
Lin, 2017). Such inequalities also exist online, with women accounting for 57% of the people
who have reported online harassment in the US (Women’s Media Center, n.d.). Considering
these gendered inequalities in sports media and beyond, the distinction between equality and
equity is a critical one. Measures promoted as gender-equal can hide behind gender equality
discourse while still maintaining the interests of the privileged (Friere and Delavan, 2021), as a
gender-equal policy may result in unequal outcomes among different genders. Stated another
way, if all genders are treated equally, in a manner that necessarily does not account for
longstanding differences and inequalities, issues such as those above remain unsolved.
A sports club or organisation that is at least open to the idea of changing the industry’s
gendered status quo would have therefore sought an approach that took these factors into
account. Thus, for a club or sports organisation to attempt to treat Carney and men
like Agbonlahor equally online is to ignore both the current sociopolitical climate as well
as the historical disadvantages women have endured both online and in sports media broadly.

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 Guy Harrison and Melody Huslage

As Suzanne Wrack (2020) wrote for The Guardian, “did [Leeds] not realise the abuse directed
at [Carney] would be different because she is a woman? If they didn’t, where have they been?”
(para. 8).
As popular feminism – and its economy of visibility – pervades the current media
landscape (Banet-Weiser, 2018), it is unlikely that the person managing Leeds’ social media
account was unaware of sexism in sports and in the online treatment of women in sports
media. It is more likely that this person found large numbers of Leeds supporters engaging
with their tweets mocking male pundits – indeed, the Leeds tweet (2020) about Agbonlahor
garnered nearly 14,000 retweets and 68,000 likes – and thought poking fun at Carney would
only result in the same levels of engagement. They also likely thought this tweet would be
fair game, unlikely to be viewed as sexist. After all, the club lampooned male pundits, too,
and conventional wisdom suggests that if a man and a woman can both be pundits, they
must be on equal footing and can be treated equally.
Nevertheless, just as popular feminism and postfeminism stop short of addressing – and,
in many ways, serve – the structures that allow misogyny to persist, so does the concept of
equality within the context of gendered online abuse. The most equitable way for Leeds
United to respond to Carney’s criticisms online would have been not to address her com-
ments at all. This does not mean that women sports journalists should not have their
comments retweeted, forwarded or engaged with, but that each institution should weigh
whether it is sensible for them to do so. Some Twitter users thought it would have been
sexist for Leeds not to treat Carney like her male peers. Indeed, we certainly would never
advocate for silencing a woman sports pundit’s opinions. Nevertheless, given what we know
about gendered hate speech online, the historical marginalisation of women in sports media,
and the contemporary misuse of the concept of equality, when viewed through an equity-
based lens, it was thoughtless and irresponsible of the club to call her out on Twitter.
Although we argue it would be fair and appropriate for some institutions or individuals to
repost or question Carney’s criticisms, it was especially careless for Leeds United to do so,
given its large number of followers (nearly one million), its followers’ strong affinity for the
club, and the fact that the club operates within the male-dominated context of English
men’s football (Bryan, Pope and Rankin-Wright, 2021). Given all of these sociopolitical and
institutional contexts, the reaction to Leeds’ dissemination of Carney’s comments was not
only predictable but also preventable.
If Leeds United insisted, however, on disseminating a response to Carney’s comments –
which, even in a vacuum, was a practice many journalists called into question after the club’s
inflammatory tweet – another equity-forward tactic would have been to make a play on
Carney’s words without directly referencing the pundit or showing the footage of her com-
ments. A tweet that makes no direct visual or written reference to Carney but says something
along the lines of “I don’t know who needs to hear this but we did win the EFL by 10 points
last season”, would have sufficed. Such a tweet may have come across as clever to supporters
who watched Carney’s commentary but, to most, would have come across as a cryptic attempt
to stoke supporters’ passions. This is especially true when one considers Carney’s comments
were made on Amazon Prime, a subscription-based streaming platform that is just now
coming into its own as a sports broadcaster. Such a response may also have come across as
a general response to a common criticism levelled by multiple pundits. Instead, by sharing a
video recording of Carney’s comments in a tweet, Leeds United framed its rebuttal as an ad
hominem attack against the pundit, not only ensuring that more of their supporters would see
her criticisms than they otherwise would have but also encouraging (abusive) rebuttals.

448
 The curious case of Karen Carney

While the above approaches to equitably responding to Carney may not have garnered
the engagement numbers Leeds earned when it mocked Agbonlahor, not inciting gendered
online abuse should have been prioritised. With no justification for Leeds directly re-
sponding to Carney, the onus was always on the club to devise an alternate, more equitable
approach to responding to one of its critics.

Conclusion
We have spent this chapter writing about gender equity as more effective than gender
equality as a paradigm through which social media users and sports organisations can curb
gendered online abuse. However, we want to be clear that gender equality is still the ulti-
mate goal for those seeking better working conditions for women in sports media.
Nevertheless, the current absence of gender equality in these contexts necessitates gender
equity now. At the moment, women, trans and nonbinary people do not enjoy the same
freedoms and opportunities that accrue to men in sports media or online. As a result, these
marginalised people often feel unsafe and, as was the case for Karen Carney, are often
forced to leave these spaces to preserve their well-being.
Along these lines, it bears mentioning again that this controversy took place within the
context of professional English men’s football, a context in which men dominate in leadership
positions off the pitch (Bryan, Pope and Rankin-Wright, 2021) and in which women football
fans feel compelled to put on specific gendered performances to demonstrate their authenticity
as fans (Pope, 2013). The gendered hierarchy of the sport dictates these phenomena and the
broad marginalisation of women within its auxiliary institutions, such as men’s football
media. Thus, a woman pundit covering women’s football, for example, likely would not face
the same vitriolic backlash that Carney did for questioning Leeds United’s men’s team. Still,
as the other chapters in this book demonstrate, gender-based online violence is not exclusive
to male-dominated professional contexts, and sports have long offered a lens through which
we can observe broader societal issues, such as the pervasive misuse of the notion of equality
and of other feminist ideals in western cultures writ large. We, therefore, argue Karen
Carney’s case is much more about the utility of gender equity as a paradigm for addressing
gender-based online violence in any context than it is about the culpability of a professional
sports club in perpetuating such violence – though it is about that, too.
An equity-forward approach to engaging women online offers an avenue through which
we may be able to acknowledge or even disagree with their work, while also taking care not
to generate or facilitate the kind of gendered and sexualised abuse aimed at Carney. If the
online environment becomes safer for women working in sports media, these spaces may
attract, nurture and retain women in greater numbers. Through equity-forward efforts,
gender equality may therefore be more easily achieved.

Note
1 Tweets written by non-public figures have been de-identified to protect users’ identities.

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 42
“ONLINE OTHERING”
The case of women in politics
Emily Harmer

Introduction
In recent years there has been a burgeoning scholarship which is concerned with incivility,
intolerance and hate speech in digital spaces (Papacharissi, 2004; Jane, 2014; Sobieraj, 2020;
Rossini, 2020). While these studies contribute an enormous amount to our understanding of
how various social inequalities and direct discrimination are reflected in online spaces, the
primary focus on overtly abusive or hateful content misses other, less overt, ways in which
marginalised people are subjected to discrimination. Harmer and Lumsden (2019) argue that a
broader view is needed to better understand how digital technologies reinforce or perpetuate
inequalities. They propose that the concept of “online othering” better encapsulates the myriad
power contestations and abusive behaviours which are manifested on/through online spaces
(Harmer and Lumsden, 2019). This chapter first outlines what is meant by “online othering”. It
then illustrates how the concept can be used in the analysis of online content, by presenting a
brief analysis of Mail Online reader comments about the then British Home Secretary Priti
Patel. Readers should be warned that the analysis section will contain overtly racist and sexist
comments (although no racial slurs will be replicated). These are reproduced because, following
Jane (2014), it is important to quote these sentiments directly rather than couch them in eu-
phemism to capture the full impact of online abuse and discrimination.

Online participation and “othering”

In the early days of the internet, there was much enthusiasm for its potentially trans-
formative role in offering a space for individuals to construct their identities, communicate
with others and share ideas and concerns (Turkle, 1995; Papacharissi, 2002). Early pro-
ponents were hopeful that the internet could operate as a virtual extension of the public
sphere and it was even celebrated as a potential space where one’s identity or background
could be circumvented and made irrelevant (Van Zoonen, 2002). In hindsight, it should
have been obvious that the virtual sphere is not a neutral space and that instead disparities
and inequalities experienced in the offline world would be transposed into the digital en-
vironment. The fact that much of the internet is built on the commodification of its users in

452 DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-49

 “Online othering”

what has become known as the “attention economy” (Fuchs, 2009) means that participation
has always been limited and moreover that it benefits those with more wealth and power.
This is underlined by the domination of online spaces by multinational corporations whose
interests lie in the accumulation of capital rather than enabling civic society.
It should come as no surprise then, that existing social inequalities are built directly into
the infrastructure of digital media, whereby the very affordances designed to enable com-
munication serve to replicate and perpetuate the social inequalities that people already
experience. For example, Noble (2018) demonstrates how pre-existing prejudices are built
into the code of digital platforms. Her study of the Google search engine reveals that the
algorithms used to conduct searches are based upon and perpetuate harmful racist and
misogynistic stereotypes. Moreover, Massanari (2017) argues that the design, culture and
policies of platforms such as Reddit encourage certain toxic behaviours which suppress
equal participation. Platforms can also enact forms of regulation and censorship which are
deemed discriminatory, such as when Tumblr decided to ban porn and other “not safe for
work” content on its platform which disproportionately impacted LGBT+ and queer
Tumblr communities (Engelberg and Needham, 2019; Tiidenberg, Henry and Abidin,
2021). Digital technologies have also been implicated in the perpetration of violence in
people’s everyday lives (see Powell, this volume). For example, various smartphone apps
can also be used by perpetrators in cases of intimate partner violence. Chatterjee et al.
(2018) identified over 200 apps and services that offer “would-be stalkers” a variety of
capabilities, including basic location tracking to harvesting texts and secretly recording
video. Significantly, it is not all bad news. As well as perpetuating inequalities, digital
technologies also offer significant opportunities for resistance and political organisation, as
the articles in Part 4 of this collection demonstrate. Feminist groups have demonstrated a
sustained commitment to organising online despite its many challenges (Keller, Mendes and
Ringrose, 2016; Williams, 2015). Activists also use social media hashtags to challenge social
and political inequalities, for example, #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter both deployed
hashtags to expose the transnational pervasiveness of gendered and/or racialised violence
(Berridge and Portwood-Stacer, 2015; Tynes, Schusckle and Noble, 2016).
One of the most discussed unintended consequences of the expansion of digital tech-
nology has been the decision by some individuals and groups to engage in hateful or dis-
criminatory communicative practices in these often anonymous, loosely regulated spaces
(Papacharissi, 2004). This is often framed as “trolling”: the sending of provocative emails or
social media posts, with the intention of inciting an angry or upsetting response from its
intended target (Hardaker, 2010). Advice to victims on how to respond to trolling includes
such statements as: “do not feed the trolls” (Binns, 2012). The implication of this advice for
dealing with trolls is that victims should be silenced (Lumsden and Morgan, 2017). The term
trolling has become problematic because it is now widely used to describe the posting of
offensive messages per se, in addition to the more proactive, deliberate and organised hate
campaigns engaged in by groups of individuals, in a pre-meditated manner. It has therefore
become a “catch-all term for any number of negatively marked online behaviours”
(Hardaker, 2010, p.224) which is why there is a need to reconceptualise how we understand
abusive and hateful conduct online.
Feminist scholarship has expanded the vocabulary we use to refer to these kinds of be-
haviours online using concepts such as “e-bile”, “gender trolling,” and “networked harass-
ment” to connect online behaviour to structural sexism and violence against women (Banet-
Weiser and Miltner 2016; Jane 2014; Mantilla, 2015; Marwick and Caplan, 2018).

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 Emily Harmer

While such terms are very useful in conceptualising the experiences of women, it is also
important to capture how online abuse and harassment also target other aspects of identity
such as ethnicity, sexuality and so on. Harmer and Lumsden (2019) therefore argue these
terms alone do not help us to understand and conceptualise how exclusion from digital
spaces operates across various groups, individuals and contexts. Crucially, many of these
interactions are not recognised as “harmful” or they fall short of being considered hateful
speech. Instead, the concept of “online othering” is intended to capture the intersectional
nature of online abuse and harassment, as well as consider more subtle ways in which
under-represented people and groups are excluded from online spaces.
In online spaces, as in all social arenas, there are those who are perceived as belonging and
those who are deemed “outsiders”. The process of how this takes place is encapsulated via
the notion of “othering”. “Othering” is a “process of differentiation and demarcation, by
which the line is drawn between ‘us’ and ‘them’ – between the more and the less powerful – and
through which social distance is established and maintained” (Lister, 2004, p.101).
Accordingly, an “in-group” and the “other” (or “out-group”) are identified through what
characteristics the former possesses and what the latter group lacks (Brons, 2015, p.70). By
defining itself against an “other”, the dominant group silences or delegitimises the “other”
(Kitzinger and Wilkinson, 1996). Feminist work on digital exclusion demonstrates that often
women are positioned as the “other” in virtual spaces, however as Black feminist scholarship
demonstrates, the intersectional aspects of “othering” also need to be considered (see
Crenshaw, 1989; Collins, 1998). Patricia Hill Collins (1998) discusses what she calls “marginal
outsiders” and the notion of “othering” is incorporated as part of her “matrix of domination”,
a paradigm which explains how power is organised in society. Since a diversity of experiences
will be reflected in and shaped by other aspects of identity, including class, religion, age and
sexuality, adopting an intersectional approach to understand how people are “othered” online
permits us to account for how multiple social categories are positioned in such a way as to
distinguish “insiders” from “outsiders” (Collins, 1998). The intersectional nature of “online
othering” means that it is crucial for researchers to think across these multiple sites of
oppression to highlight the complexity of digital discrimination when trying to make sense
of it.
The concept of “online othering” then attempts to offer a broader means for understanding
these hugely complex experiences people have online (Harmer and Lumsden, 2019). While it
includes abusive or hateful speech, it also accounts for inadvertent forms of othering and
microaggressions (Harmer and Southern, 2021). It also allows us to consider benevolent forms
of othering where participants might be well-meaning but still discriminatory (Southern and
Harmer, 2019). “Online othering” then, is an attempt to move beyond the inflexible ways
of categorising examples of harmful behaviours online referred to in varying contexts as
“abuse”, “hate”, “hate speech” or “trolling”. Furthermore, unlike other contributions in
this volume which focus on regulatory or legal frameworks, the concept is intended to help us
conceptualise what is going on and identify ways of understanding and addressing these ex-
periences. Despite the inclusion of the term “online”, it is important to recognise that digital
discrimination does not “occur in a ‘virtual vacuum’ – they are part and parcel of everyday
life, and have real consequences in what some have chosen to call the ‘real’ versus the ‘virtual
world’” (Harmer and Lumsden, 2019, p.14). Therefore, it is crucial to consider the impact and
potential consequences for those who experience “online othering”. The remainder of the
chapter attempts to demonstrate how this concept can be used to inform analysis by pre-
senting a case study of the “online othering” of women in politics.

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 “Online othering”

“Online othering” in digital-political spaces

In the context of the political sphere, trolling and abuse online are extremely problematic.
Women and minoritised people can often find themselves being pushed out of online political
spaces due to direct harassment or more indirect discriminatory communications circulating
amidst more general political discussion. Those who put themselves forward as political re-
presentatives become particularly vulnerable to online abuse as they enter the public eye
(Ward and McLoughlin, 2020; Southern and Harmer, 2021). In the case of direct forms of
communication such as email and social media, there has been much debate about whether
being exposed to abuse potentially deters women and minoritised individuals from seeking
office in the first place (Wagner, 2020). Online abuse can therefore be considered a form of
“semiotic violence” which is designed to discourage women from participating in politics
(Krook, 2020). It therefore should be considered a grave threat to democratic participation.
While online abuse and harassment are serious problems, recent research has also
shone a light on other forms of sexism and intolerance which may not meet the threshold
to be considered abusive, yet nevertheless make women and minoritised people feel
unwelcome or out of place in political life. Social media messages or online comments
which are not abusive or harassing but which nevertheless reinforce stereotypes or
question the legitimacy of women and minoritised representatives may be just as likely to
put off those who would otherwise seek political office. These “digital microaggressions”
(Harmer and Southern, 2021) can become exhausting for politicians to navigate as they
continue their work. Moreover, it may not be strictly necessary for women and minori-
tised politicians to experience these forms of discrimination directly for them to be dis-
couraged from participating in political life. Social media and other digital platforms can
become spaces characterised by what Fox, Cruz and Lee (2015, p.436) refer to as
“ambient sexism”, whereby discriminatory discourses about under-represented groups
produce a hostile environment for them in online spaces. This is particularly difficult for
women and minoritised politicians because social media have become increasingly
important to their political campaigning work (Southern and Harmer, 2021).
It is within this broader context of “everyday” forms of discrimination that online
“othering” as a concept is particularly useful because as well as accounting for outright
abuse and harassment, it also captures less overt forms of discrimination online. The
concept, furthermore, allows us to account for the broad range of discrimination that can
take place online such as sexism, racism, ableism, Islamophobia and transphobia, as well as
accounting for the ways that discrimination is often intersectional. The concept of “online
othering” then offers a means of describing and making sense of the myriad behaviours,
interactions and discourses which seek to (re)draw boundaries in, around and between
virtual spaces, and shape the rules and norms concerning which individuals and groups are
endowed with status and legitimated to participate in these spaces, and those who are not.

The “online othering” of Priti Patel in Mail Online reader comments

Over the past two decades, print newspapers have expanded their operations to include ex-
tensive websites which also incorporate spaces for readers to comment on news and com-
mentary articles. “Below the line” comments were initially applauded as providing a space for
readers to debate and deliberate current affairs (Graham and Wright, 2015). However, em-
pirical studies tend to find that, in reality, the quality of online discussion is questionable and

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that “below the line” comment sections often operate as places where unrestrained bigotry is
commonplace (Slavtcheva-Petkova, 2016). The democratic potential for comment sections is
further undermined by the lack of investment in moderation.
For the purposes of this chapter, online reader comments offer an interesting space for
the analysis of “online othering” because the posters’ contributions are stimulated by a
recent news story. It is therefore possible to see how ordinary people respond to women
politicians, as well as seeing how news organisations portray them. This means there are
essentially two layers of potential interest, the first being the original article and the second
being readers’ responses to it. It may therefore be possible to pick up on whether those
commenting on the article are replicating problematic forms of media representation of
women politicians they notice in the reporting. In this case, the news story is fairly brief and
factual in orientation, therefore the readers’ comments represent their own views and
prejudices without too much encouragement from the content.
All the comments analysed here are derived from one article from the Mail Online (the
online platform of the UK right-wing tabloid the Daily Mail) about the Conservative MP
and, at the time the data was gathered in January 2022, UK Home Secretary Priti Patel.
Patel is a woman of Ugandan-Indian heritage and her parents emigrated to the UK after
being expelled from Uganda in the 1970s. The news story that prompted the online com-
ments discusses the measures Patel was trying to put in place to reduce the number of visas
issued to non-UK residents who had been convicted of a crime (Terry, 2022). While ana-
lysing online reader comments from the Mail Online can be considered low-hanging fruit
when it comes to finding discriminatory comments about minoritized women politicians,
this case is made more interesting by the fact that Patel is a Conservative who has taken a very
hard line on immigration issues in her role as Home Secretary, a political position which is
enthusiastically supported by the Mail Online’s editorial line, and presumably speaks very
clearly to their desired audience. The Mail Online is also a pertinent example because it is one
of the most visited English-language news sites in the world, receiving 373.3 m monthly visits
in May 2022 (Majid, 2022). The examples presented here are not necessarily representative of
the Mail Online or other news comments in general but nevertheless demonstrate the extent to
which “online othering” is a problem and offers insights into how we might analyse these
kinds of communication.
In total, there were 701 individual comments on the article, which is relatively high
compared to other articles published on the day. The Mail Online does not routinely
moderate its comment section so it is unlikely that any posts have been removed although it
is difficult to determine for certain. All quotations are replicated verbatim with their original
grammar and spelling. There are some examples of overtly racist and sexist comments,
although the use of overtly racist terminology was very rare. There were just two racist
terms counted within the 701 comments at the time of data collection. Three sets of ex-
amples are discussed, overt racism, microaggressions and sexism. Within each, the inter-
sectional dimension of “online othering” will also be elaborated.

Overt racism
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the Mail Online’s ideological orientation and established
reputation, as well as the content of the article, there were examples of comments which
expressed overtly racist or xenophobic sentiments in general, and some of which were
directed at Patel specifically:

456
 “Online othering”

“She is ensuring her native blood infiltrates us all.”

“she wants to swamp britain with india’s poor erm who have science degree’s in
dung.”
“And as predicted Brxiteers voted to be 30th state of India soon, with Rishi as a PM
soon. Just wait when they sign a free movement of people with India, population of 1.5
BILLION. Prtiti voted for Brexit to get rid of all Europeans and replace them with
Indians, it’s so obvious.”
“Can we not revoke her visa.”
“Even better just send the wet lemon wipe muppet woman back to India jobs a good
un!! I see why Theresa May sacked her!!”

These comments all target Patel’s ethnicity by explicitly accusing Patel of wanting to replace
the white British population with people from India, seemingly drawing on “great replace-
ment” discourses circulated by the far-right (see Marcks and Pawelz, 2020). The final example
also erroneously questions her British citizenship. By emphasising Patel’s heritage over her
British identity, these posts serve to position her as an outsider who is unable or unwilling to
represent her constituents (who the posters implicitly assume are white British citizens). This
undermines her status as an elected representative. These kinds of “othering” are also
common in social media messages aimed at minoritised women politicians (Harmer and
Southern, 2021; Calasanti and Gerrits, 2021). The fact that this level of hostility and racism is
given a platform by the Mail Online, the sixth most visited English-language news site in the
world in May 2022 (Majid, 2022), is extremely disturbing and demonstrates the potential
audience for these sentiments. These comments were not the majority but nevertheless were
numerous enough to demonstrate what minoritised women politicians are up against.

Microaggressions
In addition to these overtly racist posts, there were others which were less explicit but which
echoed similar sentiments:

“3rd generation immigrant incharge of immigration. What could possibly go wrong?”

“You should stop them altogether you useless woman nor should we be accepting
anymore of your fellow countrymen either”

These comments once again highlight the perception that Patel is an outsider who is therefore
incapable or unwilling to approach the issue of immigration in the way they would like to see it
tackled. Labelling her an “immigrant” and implying her “countrymen” are not welcome once
again positions Patel as an outsider who does not belong and is, therefore, unable to do her job
as a political representative. Crucially, some of the explicitly racist comments (in the above
paragraph as well as the second comment here) also explicitly invoke her gender demonstrating
that “online othering” often targets multiple aspects of the target’s identity (Harmer and
Lumsden, 2019). Sexist comments were also pervasive within the comments on this article.

Sexism
Sexist comments were at times overt, as we have already seen. There were also a number of
comments which questioned Patel’s competence, trustworthiness and intelligence which
were also inflected with sexism:

457
 Emily Harmer

“This woman is useless, any agreement to let people in should have a return if criminal
caveat otherwise no-one gets in from there. Hardly complicated”
“She is an embarrassment to women. Useless and pathetic.”
“Oh shut up silly woman. No one believes you …”
“Try slowing the arrival of the dinghy’s. Useless bloody woman,”

The examples above repeatedly affirm her gender identity while simultaneously calling her
“useless”. The conflation of her gender and her abilities reinforces sexist stereotypes about
women politicians not being as capable as their male counterparts (Harmer, 2021). This
tactic of questioning the intelligence and competence of women in positions of power has
also been observed in social media messages directed at women politicians (Southern and
Harmer, 2019).
Other overtly sexist posts sought to trivialise Patel by sexualising her, attacking her
appearance or objectifying her:

“Boris bit on the side, that must be why she has not lost her job, she like Boris is
nothing but a liar.”
“Absolutely nothing Priti about this woman. No clue.”

The first comment makes a misogynistic claim that Patel has only been given a position of
authority in return for a sexual relationship with the then Prime Minister. The other
objectifies her by attacking her physical appearance through a pun on her first name. Both
comments reveal the position of women politicians is precarious because, on the one hand,
Patel was (according to these posters) only elected to office because of her sexuality, and on
the other, she is ineffective because she is unattractive. These comments clearly demonstrate
that women politicians often fall foul of sexist stereotyping in digital spaces which fre-
quently throw doubt on their abilities as politicians (see also Esposito, this volume).
In addition to questioning their abilities, other comments also draw on feminine ste-
reotypes to discredit Patel and her contribution to politics:

“Aha, a Priti Patel ‘vow’! It’s worth zilch, NADA, nothing, zero! Priti (making no
apologies) Useless is noted for flapping her gums with empty promises of action, which
ALWAYS remain unfulfilled. Why hasn’t she been sacked?”
“There she goes, waffling off again, vowing this, vowing that but not actually doing
anything. She’s been Home Sec for 2 years. What has she done?”

Both comments overtly reference the stereotypical idea that women are loquacious. The
comments accuse her of merely “flapping her gums” and “waffling”. The other implication
of these sentiments is that Patel is more interested in rhetoric than political action, which
once again calls into question her willingness or ability to do her job.
Crucially, these examples all constitute explicit expressions of discontent with the
political performance of Priti Patel as UK Home Secretary. While reader comment sections
may be a useful and legitimate forum for expressing political dissatisfaction under certain
conditions, this case highlights that it is often the tone of that criticism which is problematic.
Some of the examples highlighted in this chapter show that comments often went beyond
mere criticism to express intolerant and discriminatory attitudes towards Patel based on her
gender and racial identity. Commenters could have chosen to convey their concerns about

458
 “Online othering”

the UK government’s immigration policy or its implementation in very different terms, but
instead, the ones highlighted here go far beyond criticism to make racist and sexist perso-
nalised comments about this one politician.
This very brief overview of some of the hostile comments discussing Priti Patel dem-
onstrates the different ways that women politicians can be subjected to “online othering”
in digital-political spaces. These examples illustrate the way that online communications
can directly position women (and minoritised women in particular) as ineffective and
incompetent political representatives. While the comments discussed above target Priti
Patel specifically, it is important to consider the wider impact of allowing often anony-
mous commenters to level racial abuse and sexism towards elected representatives.
Experiencing “online othering” may lead to women deciding to leave politics or not seek
an election in the first place. Moreover, comments do not need to be overtly abusive or
misogynistic to reinforce women’s outsider status in subtler and potentially enduring
ways. This “ambient sexism” (Fox, Cruz and Lee, 2015, p.436) or racism, might deter
women, and minoritised people from participating in politics or posting online, regardless
of whether they have experienced “online othering” personally (Harmer and Lewis, 2022).
These findings, and the concerns they provoke about women participating in politics, also
mirror those from previous research into social media messages directed at women pol-
iticians (see Sobieraj, 2020; Southern and Harmer, 2021; Harmer and Southern, 2021;
Calasanti and Gerrits, 2021).
Importantly, “online othering” also has implications for ordinary citizens. Many of those
who commented on the article also demonstrated racist attitudes towards would-be
immigrants. While none of these comments will be surprising to those who are familiar
with the Mail Online, this is just a tiny snapshot of the kinds of “online othering” taking
place on its site each week. This abundance of intolerant or hostile discourse excludes
people from participating in online spaces.

Conclusion
The chapter has demonstrated that the concept of “online othering” allows us to move
beyond merely focusing on outright abuse and harassment in online spaces to recognise that
less overt “digital microaggressions” can also work to exclude under-represented people
online. “Online othering” also enables an intersectional analysis of these issues, demon-
strating that messages or posts can target multiple aspects of a person’s identity simulta-
neously. While this chapter highlights racist and sexist “online othering” it can be used to
analyse a range of ways in which inequalities are replicated in online spaces.

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 43
CYBERVIOLENCE AGAINST
WOMEN IN POLITICS
Eleonora Esposito

The boys’ club?: conceptualising violence against women in politics

The political sphere is one that women have been striving to inhabit for centuries, battling
well-engrained social, cultural and practical barriers standing in the way of their political
careers. In the past few decades, the active political participation of women has become an
important focus in global development policy. As the untapped leadership skills of women
are finally being recognised, women’s representation in national parliaments across the
world has gradually increased from 13% in 1999, to 18.5% in 2009 and to 24.5% in 2019
(Inter-Parliamentary Union, 2019).
Despite this evidence of progress, politics remains a profoundly gendered institution whose
structures, roles and procedures have been established by men for men, at a time when women
were still largely excluded from the public sphere and fighting for the most basic civil rights,
including voting. One of the consequences is that the realm of politics is characterised by a
predominance of “masculine” attitudes and values (Wood, 2016) and rhetorical (if not
physical) violence is largely normalised. The political arena is often discursively constructed as
not for the “squeamish”, “thin-skinned” or “fainthearted” and violence is typically regarded
as the “cost of doing politics” (Krook and Restrepo Sanín, 2019), to the point that abuse and
intimidation directed at candidates and elected officials are often considered a “common-
place” (Sabbagh, 2019).
Yet, while violence can be regarded as a structural component of the political arena, there is
growing awareness and evidence that, as women advance into a traditionally male-oriented
sphere, they are targeted with instances of violence that are distinctive for both their sheer
quantity and vitriolic quality (Bardall, 2018). Starting from the early 2000s, under the
impulse of female politicians across Latin America, Africa and South Asia denouncing
their experiences of violence, we have witnessed a transnational turn to the investigation
of gender-based violence against women in politics. Among scholars and practitioners
alike, gender-based violence against women in politics is increasingly recognised as a
global phenomenon of interest, to be problematised and theorised vis-à-vis traditional
definitions of “violence in politics” or “violence against politicians” (Krook, 2017; Krook
and Restrepo Sanín, 2019).

462 DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-50

 Cyberviolence against women in politics

One of the main challenges of investigating how violence affects women in politics
specifically is that gender-based violence per se is an extremely multifaceted phenomenon,
with diverse and overlapping forms of physical, sexual, psychological or economic harm.
The Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women
and domestic violence (2011) – better known as the Istanbul Convention – detailed a broad
spectrum of empirical manifestations of gender-based violence, ranging from unconscious
bias, discrimination and everyday sexism, sexual and psychological harassment or bullying,
to rape threats and ultimately to sexual or physical violence (Council of Europe, 2011). As
shown in a recent survey conducted by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (2018), the lived
experiences of women politicians seem to be affected by forms of violence encompassing this
spectrum in its entirety.
By the time a woman manages to carve out a space in politics, she has inevitably come
to realise the exceptional and precarious nature of her very presence. Precarity, here
understood in the Butlerian sense, not only designates those politically induced conditions
by which women are failed by social and economic support networks in their political
careers, but also to a differential exposure to “injury, violence and death” (Butler, 2009, ii)
that puts women at a clear disadvantage. Adopting a precarity framework, the transversal
phenomenon of gender-based violence against women in politics can be ascribed to a
wider, globally normalised conformity to gendered social norms and a gendered vision of
social roles and institutions. Compared to men, women are less “recognizable” (Butler,
2009, ii) – not only less powerful but less entitled to power – and violence can be inter-
preted as an effective measure to “prosecute the trespassers” (Manne, 2017) and restore
the status quo.
All forms of gender-based violence have been working as fairly effective gate-keeping
practices, fostering the silencing and exclusion from the public and political arena of less-
represented political actors and the (re-)establishment of power as a white, male, cis-
gender property. In fact, the phenomenon “can harm [women] physically and emotionally
and affect their health and sometimes their ability to do their work” (Inter-Parliamentary
Union, 2018, p.10). For example, gender-based violence has been aggressively discour-
aging women from being politically active, dissuading them from running for election or
pushing them to leave office prematurely over safety fears, as many British female MPs
reported at the eve of the 2019 UK General Election (see Esposito and Zollo, 2021;
Esposito and Breeze, 2022). Research from Australia found that 60% of women aged
18–21 and 80% of women over 31 said they were less likely to run for political office
after seeing the semiotic violence endured by PM Julia Gillard (NDI, 2018). Other
shortcomings include candidates withdrawing from digital dialogue and reducing their
media presence, with detrimental effects on women’s political careers (Lumsden and
Morgan, 2017).
In particular, cyberviolence has a significant impact on gender equality and diversity in
the political realm. This is especially unfortunate since social media platforms were initially
regarded as a low-cost resource with great political impact that could have allowed less-
represented candidates to both bypass the stereotypical framing in traditional media and
achieve a greater degree of visibility (Patterson, 2016). However, existing and emerging
generations of voters are currently exposed to high volumes of social media content aimed
at delegitimising and sexualising female candidates and elected politicians. This comes with
a high potential to jeopardise hard-fought progress towards closing the gender gap in
political institutions on a global level.

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Digital media: a new frontier for gender-based violence

Media play a pivotal role in the unequal representation of women in politics and as a result,
they represent a crucial research site when triangulating gender, politics and violence. The
role played by media visibility in women’s political careers has been deeply scrutinised, both
in relation to the degree of attention the media give women politicians (“quantity”) and the
nature of representation and framing in their media coverage (“quality”) (Campus, 2013).
In both aspects, women politicians are at a clear disadvantage in traditional mass media:
they are often underrepresented in sheer numbers (especially during elections) and their
coverage is marred by stereotypes, trivialisation and a well-established focus on their family
relationships and physical appearance rather than on their ideas on political issues (van der
Pas and Aaldering, 2020). In this respect, the negative role of media is two-fold: reflecting
sexism in society and reinforcing a gendered and sexist picture of reality, enacting a vicious
cycle difficult to break (Haraldsson and Wängnerud, 2019).
Largely perceived as questioning or even disrupting gendered power relations, female
politicians have always been portrayed, evaluated and perceived in gendered ways: among the
most recent examples are the misogynistic construction of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 US
Presidential Campaign (Partington and Taylor, 2018) and the intersections between misogyny,
classism and racism in the mediatised discourse against US Congresswoman Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez (Rasulo, 2021; also Kay, this volume). In particular, the current generation of
female political leaders face the unique challenges of ascending to power in “profoundly
mediated contexts” (Van Zoonen, 2006, p. 288), where politics is being “mediatized”, “spec-
tacularized” and “personalized” (Mazzoleni and Schulz, 1999) at unprecedented levels. Digital
affordances play such a pivotal role in sharing political information, engaging and building
relationships with the electorate (especially in reaching younger voters or during fast-paced
election campaigns) that having an established presence in the main social media platforms is
now indispensable for any politician.
Unfortunately, this digital visibility comes at a cost, as the cybersphere has come to rep-
resent a breeding ground for the expression and dissemination of violence and hate, only
maximised by “constant connectivity” (Keipi et al., 2017, p.2) and by the embeddedness of
social media platforms in our daily life. On the one hand, the increasing incidence of violence
has been directly connected to the democratisation of access to digital recourses in the absence
of gate-keeping practices, as well as to key features of Computer-Mediated Communication,
such as perceived anonymity and the lack of face-to-face context, to name a few (for an
overview see KhosraviNik and Esposito, 2018). On the other hand, online forms of violence
replicate and extend the power relations that pre-exist digital communications technologies:
the cybersphere is far from being a “neutral” space, and lived experiences of Internet users can
vary considerably according to their gender as well as sexual orientation, race, ethnicity,
mother-tongue, age/generation, dis/ability, among others (Noble and Tynes, 2016).
Coming to represent yet another “digital divide”, cyberviolence is also a profoundly
gendered phenomenon. Statistics show that women politicians are targeted dis-
proportionately in comparison to their male counterparts and are 3.4 times more likely to
experience gender-related derogatory comments (Atalanta, 2018). Nowadays, cyberviolence
is one the most prevalent forms of violence against women politicians: six in ten women
MPs and parliament staff across Europe have faced some form of technology-facilitated
violence in their workplace (Inter-Parliamentary Union, 2019). At the same time, gender is
not the only factor at play: cyberviolence is profoundly intersectional and exacerbated by

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factors encompassing racial, ethnic and religious identity, sexual orientation, young age
(<40) as well as being more or less outspoken on topics such as equality and human rights
(Kuperberg, 2018). Under the cloak of innocent gossip or harmless humour, terabytes of
content which delegitimise, objectify and sexualise female candidates are being produced
and consumed on a daily basis across the cybersphere.
As the phenomenon proliferates, women politicians are increasingly aware of the specific
threats and troubles their digital presence can bring about. The quantity and quality of
digital violence they endure has in fact prompted women to question whether social media
are actually advancing or impeding their political careers (Patterson, 2016). Although the
impact in terms of emotional and psychological distress may be less easy to measure, women
in politics are becoming increasingly vocal about the digital abuse they are faced with, as
they start mobilising against the phenomenon and taking action against social media en-
trepreneurs themselves. A famous example is Laura Boldrini, then President of the
Chamber of Deputies of Italy, who in 2017 published an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg
denouncing the uncontrolled spread of hate speech and fake news targeting herself and
other women politicians (Wong, 2017).
One of the most recent events that sparked the debate on cyberviolence against political
actors is the murder of British Labour MP Jo Cox during the 2016 Brexit Campaign: when
the online death threats of one of the many white supremacists inhabiting the cybersphere
turned into a real-life murder, the issue suddenly became much more newsworthy and
urgent (Saner, 2016). Unfortunately, it has often proven difficult to keep up with the fast-
paced evolution of digital affordances and to assess the material implications and conse-
quences of actions that are initiated in digital environments. Too often, the perceived dis-
embodiment which characterises the digital sphere has allowed technology-facilitated forms
of gender-based violence to be dismissed as an insignificant, “virtual” phenomenon. Only if
explored along a continuum of gender-based violence between enmeshed digital and
physical spaces, can cyberviolence be problematised as yet another form of abuse and
silencing embedded within existing gendered power structures, whose tangible consequences
are too often ignored.

Cyberviolence against women in politics: the many faces of a techno-social phenomenon

Violence and discrimination are complex social, cultural and psychological phenomena and
the multifaceted and multidirectional nature of the participatory cybersphere only adds
to further complicate an already thorny matter. Broadly speaking, cyberviolence should be
approached as a “techno-social” phenomenon (KhosraviNik and Esposito, 2018), as infra-
structures composed of different technological layers host communicative acts and exchanges
with massive social and cultural implications. More specifically, new technologies play a
crucial role in shaping the scale, characteristics and mechanism of new digital discursive
practices that are firmly rooted in old and established misogynistic violence, discrimination
and hate.
Being highly widespread and equally trivialised, cyberviolence fosters a normalisation of
a culture of violence against women and a broader and transversal reinforcement of gender
stereotypes and gendered social roles which affect not only women in politics, but women as
a whole (Krook, 2020). Far from being “just words”, cyberviolence consists of “harmful
speech acts” (Langton, 2012, p.80) which have the potential to annihilate certain social
groups, legitimate their discrimination and shift attitudes and behaviours towards them.

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One of the main challenges of conceptualising and mapping cyberviolence against

women in politics is that it stands at a very complex crossroads between existing patterns of
violence, well-established gendered social structures, politics “as we know it” and new
digital technologies as facilitators. Producing a complete taxonomy proves very challenging:
not only do victims experience violence both in the political arena and in the cybersphere,
but cyberviolence takes many different and evolving forms. Moreover, threats and abuse are
both posted publicly on social media profiles as well as sent privately (e.g. via e-mail, instant
messaging), which poses issues to a comprehensive assessment of both the quantity and
quality of cyberviolence experienced by women in politics.
Below is an overview of some of the most widespread forms of violence that women
politicians are faced with in the cybersphere. The taxonomy was developed by Esposito and
Zollo (2021) in their effort to identify specific topics of digital misogyny against women in
politics in the UK, their related discursive strategies and their means of realisation, by
means of an inductive approach grounded in Social Media-Critical Discourse Studies (SM-
CDS) (KhosraviNik and Esposito, 2018; Esposito and KhosraviNik, 2023). While by no
means a complete categorisation of the numerous ways in which cyberviolence is perpe-
trated, the taxonomy includes some of the most widespread and recurring forms.
Please note that examples may contain graphic content. Euphemising data, or reporting
only the milder examples as a form of self-censorship, would be detrimental and may
contribute to wrongfully framing cyberviolence as a non-threatening and/or recreational
phenomenon. Far from being an endorsement, this programmatic choice is framed by a
critical, socio-prognostic approach aimed at denouncing an issue with a profound impact on
gender equality in digital spaces, in the political arena and in society at large.

Body shaming
Unsurprisingly, a core strategy of cyberviolence entails scrutinising women politicians’
facial features and body shape or size and engaging in aggressive body shaming practices.
For example, women politicians are insulted on the basis that their appearance does not
necessarily conform to beauty ideals of an appropriately “gendered self” (Bailey et al., 2013)
and is not considered feminine enough. References to women politicians secretly being
transgender women are frequently used to attack women in politics for their perceived
“lack” of femininity and transphobic slurs are often employed. Often abusive comments on
the physical appearance of women politicians are synaesthetically reframed as comments
on their alleged bad odour (including the odour of their private parts) and overall per-
ception of lack of personal hygiene.
Fat shaming is another common strategy, encompassing presumed eating habits and
calorie intake as well as weight changes, which seem to be attentively monitored. Such a
weight-related stigma is particularly impactful on women politicians, who suffer from a
higher social pressure to be thin compared to men (Harjunen, 2016).
British Labour MP Diane Abbott highlighted the highly intersectional nature of this
form of cyberviolence, recounting how frequently she is body-shamed and racially insulted
in one short sentence, when she is labelled “ugly fat black bitch” and “nigger” (Levesley,
2017). As revealed in a study by Amnesty International (2018), Abbott alone received
almost half (45%) of all the abusive tweets sent to female MPs in the run-up to the 2017 UK
general election, a result pointing to the highly intersectional patterns of vulnerability that
characterise cyberviolence, similarly to other forms of gender-based violence.

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Gender stereotyping and gatekeeping

Among the many established acts of semiotic violence working to reinforce gender inequality,
“rendering women incompetent” (Krook, 2020, p.198) is one of the most effective acts of
gatekeeping employed to exclude women from the political arena. This form of violence is not
to be mistaken with negative comments on female politicians’ political views, activities or
decisions, but consists of attacks aimed at discursively creating a fundamental incompatibility
between their gender identities and their role as politicians. In addition to body shaming,
women in politics are targeted with instances of violence that could be defined as “mind
shaming”, aimed at disqualifying them based on their alleged lack of intellectual and political
abilities.
It is commonly acknowledged that women politicians are expected to appear both com-
petent and authoritative as well as likeable and relatable, generating a “double bind” which
has proven particularly difficult to navigate (Campus 2013). Some cyberattacks show how
gender bias still affects perceptions of women politicians’ political expertise, as they draw on
the stereotype that women are “too emotional” to be trusted with politics. This very same
trope that characterises women as less rational, disciplined, and emotionally stable than men,
implies that they would be more prone to mood swings, irrational overreactions and mental
illness (tropes like “witch” or “crazy lady” are often employed, see Breeze, 2022). At the same
time, when women in politics show a higher degree of confidence, proactivity and express their
own opinions with conviction, they are often received with outrage and their attitude triggers
violent reactions on social media.
In their study of Twitter mentions of politicians around the 2019 UK General Election,
Esposito and Breeze (2022) highlight how claims of incompetence often begin by undermining
women politicians’ capability as mothers and housewives, but then build an association
between such “incompetence” at basic tasks and their unsuitability for public office. The study
also reports that none of the men in the sample were judged “incompetent” because of their
inability to clean and cook, or because of their children’s behaviour. Moreover, women are
often attacked for being tokens of gender equality policies, rather than legitimate residents of
the political arena on the same level as men. They are seen as being assigned political roles
thanks only to gender quotas or for the sake of representativity, but thought not to have the
competence to actually do their job as politicians.

Assertions of moral degradation

Morality seems to be particularly at stake when it comes to women in politics: a woman’s
interest in the political arena may be regarded as “immoral” per se, as it violates and
subverts the gendered social order that has always seen men in charge of high-status,
decisional roles. For this reason, women in politics are often subject to harsher judgements
and a general “moral suspicion” (Manne, 2017, p.271), encompassing every possible ground
for doubt about their competence and accomplishments, but also their very character.
Against this background, “slut-shaming” and other strategies questioning a woman’s
morality still prove to be an effective silencing act against women who try to advance in the
political arena. Some attacks entail the use of the most basic and widespread insults against
women, questioning their morality on the basis of their sexual behaviour, characterised by a
long-standing, established connection to their reputation in a way that sees no male
equivalent both in terms of conceptualisation and terminology.

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On a related note, an extremely common strategy to question the morality of a woman in

politics is accusing her of having obtained her seat in Parliament in exchange for sexual
favours. For example, in the case of Diane Abbott, given her past relationship with former
UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn when they both were early career politicians in the 1970s,
it was very easy for haters to craft an alleged connection between her political career and an
exchange of sexual favours with Corbyn.
As the social and political world is increasingly produced and communicated by means of
digital media as highly visual affordances, we are increasingly witnessing episodes of image-
based sexual violence against women politicians. Grounded in established strategies of
gender-based sexual objectification and shaming (Nussbaum, 2010), “digital visual misogyny”
(Esposito, 2022) is one of the strongest strategies for silencing, defamation and subjectivity
denial of women politicians across the cybersphere. Among the most widespread means of
realisation of digital visual misogyny is the creation and diffusion of sexually explicit images of
women politicians, either digitally altered (“image manipulation”) or misattributed (“false
identity attribution”). A famous example of image manipulation is Italian MP Maria Elena
Boschi’s 2014 fake “wardrobe malfunction” (a skilfully photoshopped image of her swearing
into office with an exposed purple G-string). This manipulated image was published by a large
number of Italian and international media, including the Daily Mail in the UK, the Bild and
Augsburger Allgemeine in Germany, and 20Minuten in Switzerland. Consequences are often
far-fetching: an alleged picture of Spanish MP Teresa Rodríguez fully naked on a nudist beach
quickly went viral a few days before the Andalusian regional elections. It was later revealed
that the picture depicts a private citizen who looks like Rodríguez and was taken and dis-
tributed without her consent. While the woman had long been battling to get it removed from
the Web, the false identity attribution to Rodríguez condemned the picture to virality (see also
Segarra and Anderson, 2019).

Direct threatening and abuse

Death threats impact politicians’ activities to the point of forcing them to suspend their
campaigns or move their offices to different and more secure locations, as shown by the
recent experiences of LGBT political candidates in the United States (Stack, 2018). It has
been observed that the increasing polarisation in the political sphere, especially during
heated debates over key issues such as Brexit, contributes to death threats (as well as other
threats) against political actors hitting unprecedented levels (Sabbagh, 2019). Regrettably,
although MP Jo Cox’s murder raised some urgent questions about politicians’ security in
the UK and beyond, death threats are often not taken seriously, not always investigated,
and do not necessarily translate into stricter security measures, such as being granted a
police escort (Fitzpatrick and Grierson, 2019). Whilst, as the 2021 murder of MP David
Ames starkly demonstrated, violent threats are not unique to women politicians, the gen-
dered nature of these threats is most in evidence in relation to rape threats, which target
women almost exclusively. For example, British MP Jess Phillips has reported receiving
over 600 rape threats on her social media profiles in a single night (Rawlinson, 2018). As
social media platforms support a vast range of multimodal data, indigenous forms of rape
threats also proliferate, such as “virtual rape” or “rape memes”, where images are ma-
nipulated and/or animated to portray a forced sexual act with the victim (Powell and Henry,
2017). Violence often extends to the family members of targeted MPs, such as in the case of

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rape threats made via Twitter against the 10-year-old daughter of Indian politician Priyanka
Chaturvedi (News18.com, 2018). These attacks on family members are a form of violence
which targets political actors indirectly and has a strong potential to affect them (and their
family members) psychologically.

Conclusions
Ever since the famous postcard sent to “Suffragette” leader Emmeline Pankhurst in 1909
(“You set of sickening fools. If you have no homes – no husbands – no children – no
relations – why don’t you drown yourselves out of the way”, see Krook, 2020, p. 53),
women interested in politics have been targeted with insulting, sexist and threatening
messages. But while showing hostility towards women in politics is a longstanding practice,
the advent of the Web 2.0 has contributed to facilitating the proliferation of gender-based
violence addressed to female politicians. The sheer quantity and vitriolic quality of cyber-
violence daily affecting women in politics across different political systems on a global scale
have been posing a problem of unprecedented scale and speed.
The vast array of malleable meaning-making resources that characterise the new social
media communication paradigm represents the most useful assets for perpetrating cyber-
violence. A number of interlocked discursive strategies can be identified: the unsurprising
result is that women politicians are not only shamed for not being pretty, thin and feminine
enough, but also attacked for not being intelligent or capable enough and despised for
being too emotional or too aggressive. Women in politics are increasingly sexualised and
objectified as visual forms of gender-based violence in the cybersphere grow, and image-
based sexual abuse emerges as a prime strategy to discredit and defame the public image of
women politicians. This paints an overall picture where gender stereotyping is still prev-
alent and calls for a conceptualisation and critical explication of cyberviolence as digitally
performed, but deeply rooted in the gendered nature of the political realm and society at
large. As part of a broader continuum with other forms of (physical, sexual, psychological
and economic) violence, the proliferation of gender-based cyberviolence contributes to
the delegitimisation of women’s political actions and their ultimate exclusion from the
political arena.
Only by means of a “continuum thinking” (Boyle, 2019, see also Kelly, 1988), can a
more comprehensive and systematic approach to gender-based cyberviolence be devel-
oped. This entails reflecting on the specifically gendered nature characterising the many
and varied experiences of violence suffered by women as political actors, by women as
simply “prosumers” of the cybersphere, and, as a result, by most female political actors
who voice their own visions in the cybersphere. Acknowledging this expanding continuum
of violence compels us to acknowledge the direct and indirect costs of cyberviolence on the
same level as other forms of gender-based violence that may be more easily tangible or
recognisable. It entails rejecting exculpatory topoi of virtualisation and dematerialisation
of our physical life-worlds to focus on how gender is embodied in the cybersphere, and the
gendered body is confirmed as a prime target and site of repressive power, domination
and sexualisation. This conceptual understanding would lay the foundation to respond to
an urgent global agenda calling for the mitigation and prevention of cyberviolence, to be
framed and tackled as a problem of gender-based violence, digital security and, ultimately,
gender equality.

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 44
VIOLENCE AND THE FEMINIST
POTENTIAL OF CONTENT
MODERATION
Carolina Are and Ysabel Gerrard

Introduction
This chapter addresses how violence on social media occurs through both their everyday use
and as a direct result of their content moderation, or the assessment of and intervention on
content deemed unacceptable by platforms (Gillespie and Aufderheide, 2020), showcasing
how this process disproportionately affects those who have historically sat at societal margins.
We begin by explaining what content moderation is, before turning to an in-depth dis-
cussion of some of its core problems. In addressing content moderation through a feminist
lens, this chapter then highlights a striking lack of attention to the feminist potentials of
content moderation in academic literature. We tackle “violence” as a core concept under-
pinning both the processes and consequences of content moderation, focusing on two case
studies: (1) the experiences of young transgender TikTok users who were blocked from
posting and/or de-platformed in 2021 when other accounts disapproved of their content, and
(2) the inconsistencies in the application of shadowbanning and account deletion on
Instagram, which allows, for example, nude content to be posted by celebrities but not by sex
workers. Underpinning these two case studies is a profound discrepancy in the immense
strength platforms use when tackling content about nudity, sex and gender identity, versus the
light-touch issues like political speech receive. This chapter argues that, for those with mar-
ginalised identities, this discrepancy is itself an act of violence. We conclude by presenting a
practical toolkit to highlight how platforms can embrace the feminist potential of content
moderation. Readers will notice that our toolkit places responsibility on platforms instead of
users: we argue that current content moderation is an online repetition of offline systems
enabling gender-based violence, and that platforms would benefit from mirroring long-
standing feminist principles of focusing on survivors’/victims’ needs rather than their duties.

What is content moderation and how does it work?

Content moderation can be defined as “the detection of, assessment of, and interventions
taken on content or behaviour deemed unacceptable by platforms or other information in-
termediaries, including the rules they impose, the human labour and technologies required,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-51 473

 Carolina Are and Ysabel Gerrard

and the institutional mechanisms of adjudication, enforcement, and appeal that support it”
(Gillespie and Aufderheide, 2020, p.2). Although our chapter mainly focuses on social media
content moderation, we note that this process has happened on a smaller scale in other online
spaces hosting user-generated content (UGC) for years. Take e-commerce platform eBay as
an example: when you buy something, you leave your seller a review and a “star” rating. But
eBay wouldn’t want people leaving, say, hateful or threatening feedback and has therefore
always allowed users to report inappropriate feedback for review. This process is called
content moderation.
Although content moderation is an older phenomenon, academics and public com-
mentators only began addressing this topic in-depth around the mid-2010s. It is difficult to
pinpoint a single watershed moment to explain this uptick in interest, which occurred due to
a blend of infrastructural, societal, political and legal factors and events.
For example, on the infrastructural side, the move to a “participatory” web in the mid-
2000s increased opportunities for ordinary internet users to share UGC like text, images,
videos, emojis and GIFs. But tech companies soon realised that leaving people in charge of
publishing their own content was risky business. The stunning rate at which new content
was being uploaded to the Web – coupled with recognition that platforms were facing
increasingly “bad” content problems – prompted tech companies to act. They created new
automated systems and/or scaled up their human workforces to scrub their problems away.
But even during this phase, platforms like Facebook preferred to define themselves as
communications utilities or technology companies rather than entities with publisher-like
powers over content posted by users (Ball, 2017; Gillespie, 2020; Zuckerberg, 2018). This, as
we will see later on in this chapter, largely changed with the approval of FOSTA/SESTA in
the USA 2018. An exception to Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act known as the
Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex
Traffickers Act, FOSTA/SESTA forced platforms to pay particular attention to sexual
content and was the legal factor that suddenly made sure platforms were indeed expected to
behave as editors and publishers when it came to nudity and sex, ruling over the accept-
ability and visibility of content (115th Congress, 2017–2018).
On the societal side, commentators and experts have pinpointed the aftermath of
6 January 2021, when crowds of pro-Donald Trump protestors who engaged with social
media far-right conspiracy theories stormed the US Capitol looking to allegedly stop
President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration, as one of the moments when civil society as a
whole paid more attention to content moderation and its shortcomings (York, 2021). A
visibly US-centric, Western political watershed moment, the storming of the Capitol
nonetheless saw Meta and Twitter – private companies – de-platform a sitting US president
following his apparent online incitement to violence, triggering global debates about plat-
form power (ibid).
All social media companies “do” content moderation in some way, but their approaches
differ and their proficiencies vary wildly. Reddit, for example, borrows from a longer-standing
internet tradition of relying on volunteer moderators to enforce its content policies, “giving
communities delegated power to define their own governance” (Matias, 2019, p.2). Reddit is
divided into “subreddits”, discussion boards for interest groups on topics ranging from
conspiracy theories to dog training advice. But this form of internet governance – what
Caplan (2018) calls a “community-reliant approach” – is rare. Instead, social media compa-
nies tend to adopt the “industrial” approach, wherein “tens of thousands of workers are
employed to enforce rules made by a separate policy team” (ibid, p.16).

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Companies adopting the industrial approach use a combination of automated and

human moderation methods. Automated moderation methods tend to be ill-defined
(Gillespie, 2020), but for the purposes of this chapter should be understood as “the range
of systems designed to remove problematic content from social media without direct,
consistent human intervention” (Gerrard, 2022, p.82, emphases in original). Examples
of automated moderation include “pattern matching”: the process of “comparing new
content to a blacklist of already known examples” (Gorwa et al., 2020, cited in
Gillespie, 2020, p.3). Such methods might also include the use of skin filters to detect
pornography, a notoriously problematic example that we discuss at length in this chapter
(Roberts, 2017).
But for content that manages to evade automated detection, social media companies
employ a human workforce. This role is known as Commercial Content Moderation (CCM)
and is broadly defined as: “the large-scale screening by humans of content uploaded to social-
media sites — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and others” (Roberts, 2017, n.p.).
Content is brought to humans’ attention for one of two main reasons: it is either identified by
automated tools and placed in a queue for human review (Gorwa et al., 2020), or a social
media user may have “flagged” it, bringing it to the platform’s attention (Crawford and
Gillespie, 2016). “Flagging” is essentially the language of complaint on social media. Most
platforms allow users to signal that a particular piece of content – or perhaps a user – has
broken the rules and does not belong (Crawford and Gillespie, 2016).
As we write these words, however, we can already begin to see the flaws in the logics of
content moderation.

What’s wrong with content moderation?

There are too many problems with the current content moderation landscape to discuss
succinctly in one chapter. But the issue that has received perhaps the most academic and
press attention concerns the mental health of CCM workers. Investigations into this form of
labour tell a bleak story: CCMs are required to view the most distressing content the
internet has to offer, day in and day out, typically for little pay and few worker rights
(Roberts, 2019). CCMs tend to be contract workers – or “ghost workers” (Gray and Suri,
2019) – who are based in call centre-type setups in places like the Philippines, rural Iowa and
Silicon Valley in the US, India, Canada and Mexico (Roberts, 2019). Their non-permanent
status means they often can’t access the same healthcare benefits as permanent workers at
tech companies, despite notoriously high levels of mental health conditions among current
and former CCMs (Criddle, 2021).
There are several other significant problems we can tease out of the above definitions, one
of which – perhaps the most central to this chapter – is how we define what counts as
“harmful” content. Platforms are, as Gillespie powerfully puts it, the arbiters of taste: the
“setters of norms, interpreters of laws, […] adjudicators of disputes, and enforcers of whatever
rules they choose to establish. Having in many ways taken custody of the web, they now find
themselves its custodians” (2018, p.5). They get to decide what content stays or goes, with little
responsibility placed on them to explain why. Companies communicate their rules through
documents called “community guidelines” (sometimes known as “community standards” or
similar). These public-facing documents are essentially the rulebooks of social media: they tell
users how they are allowed to behave on a particular site and what kinds of content are and
are not acceptable.

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But not all social media companies share the same views: some are more or less conserv-
ative; some welcome identities and vocations that others ostracise, which means their rules
have been the subjects of intense debate. Some content – and we won’t list it here – is deemed
universally harmful and warrants consequences from platforms. Other posts are blatantly
harmful but platforms fail to act on them, like inciting self-harm (Colliver, this volume) or
distributing intimate content without the consent of those pictured (Semenzin and Bainotti,
this volume). Some posts spur fierce debate: for example, in the opening to Custodians of the
Internet, Gillespie shares the widely told story of the “Napalm Girl”: a 1972 Pulitzer Prize-
winning photo by Associated Press photographer Nick Ut which shows “several children run
[ning] down a barren street fleeing a napalm attack, their faces in agony, followed in the
distance by Vietnamese soldiers. The most prominent among them, Kim Phuc, naked, suffers
from napalm burns over her back, neck, and arm” (Gillespie, 2018, p.1). In 2016, some
combination of “graphic suffering” and “underage nudity” led Facebook to controversially
remove a re-shared version of this image, igniting older discussions about what kinds of
mediated imagery can be shown in “the public interest” (Gillespie, 2018, p.1).
Community guidelines at globally popular social media companies are typically written for
all users, without taking into account nuances between different localities, contexts or cul-
tures. While they have their flaws (see Squirrell, 2019), community-based moderation systems
like Reddit’s – a forum style, largely community-moderated platform split into “subreddits” –
are arguably better equipped to read the room and understand what counts as “harmful”
content for that particular group. That said, a community-first focus may also result in groups
becoming more insular or more extreme, highlighting further issues with platforms’ one-size-
fits-all approaches to moderation, which do not account for specific communities’ needs or
risks. The breadth and variety of users and content is one of the main challenges of content
moderation, and one of the reasons why, at present, many of the issues we discuss here are
strictly related to platforms’ failure to cater for the diversity of user experience on the Web.
Further to this issue, the rulebooks used by CCMs to make moderation decisions are
hidden from public view, brought to light only via press leaks and whistleblowers – see for
example The Guardian’s “Facebook Files” series (Hopkins, 2017). We know very little
about how the rules are made, and in whose interests. As a result, content moderation is a
complex cocktail of legitimate concerns about online harms, political and commercial
interests, and moral panic, thereby potentially leading to more online harms.

What aren’t we talking about when we talk about content moderation?

We have established that content moderation is a crucial part of internet governance:
without it, the internet – particularly participatory social media platforms – would be
unusable (Diaz and Hecht-Felella, 2021). However, at present, platforms’ own content
moderation approaches and the research literature around them lack feminist approaches,
as well as strategies to repair harm and/or protect victims and survivors. Content moder-
ation research has so far overly focused on harms like misinformation, conspiracy theories,
online abuse, and fraud, with responses reflecting carceral, Western criminal justice systems
that allow for no rehabilitation or appeal (Schoenebeck and Blackwell, 2021).
We argue that too little attention is paid to the agenda shaping discourse around content
moderation; agendas that often have very little to do with user safety, and more to do with
political views. Indeed, the field of content moderation is a complex blend of different,
competing interests, blending the commercial, the legal and the cultural.

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Agendas are a crucial, overlooked factor in discussions and legislation surrounding content
moderation, whether it is platforms’ agendas, leading them to over-censor to protect their
economic interests, or conservative lobbies’ agendas to restrict access to specific information
or content (Are and Paasonen, 2021; Cooper, 2021). Uninvestigated, unquestioned agendas
have been found to lead to moral panics about the blocking of specific content, bringing
governments to approve ad-hoc laws which, in turn, trigger unintended consequences
affecting mainly marginalised users (Diaz and Hecht-Felella, 2021). The United States
Congress’ approval of FOSTA/SESTA in 2018 is a prime example of this (115th Congress,
2017–2018; Are and Paasonen, 2021).
As we have briefly introduced above, Section 230 kept online services immune from civil
liability for the actions of their users, but FOSTA/SESTA reversed this immunity with regard
to content that may facilitate sex trafficking, effectively rendering platforms liable for at least a
portion of what was posted on them (Are, 2021; Blunt and Wolf, 2020). At first glance,
tackling internet-enabled sex trafficking may appear like the best moderation choice.
However, a closer look at the driving forces behind FOSTA/SESTA shows that the bill was
pushed into the US Congress as a result of an alliance between banks, lawmakers, right-wing
pressure groups and religious extremists, who used sex trafficking as a cover to push an anti-
porn, anti-sex agenda (Cooper, 2021; Nolan Brown, 2022). Post-FOSTA/SESTA, sex-related,
sex worker and “nude” social media content has been viewed as both disposable and dan-
gerous while, in reality, this governance of sex seems tied to agendas regarding monetary value
and protection from legal challenges more than to a sense of safety (Are and Paasonen, 2021).
While FOSTA/SESTA has not so far been found to prevent sex trafficking, it has instead
closed a variety of online spaces for sex workers, even forcing US bookstore Barnes &
Noble to cut erotica from its eBook store (Blunt and Wolf, 2020; Cooper, 2021). Its legacy
shows what could happen if a new law were to force platforms to pay specific attention to a
certain type of content (e.g. journalism, science, etc).

Content moderation as an act of violence

There is a misconception that content moderation is only set to mitigate harms committed by
users and enabled by platforms. However, both research and users’ experiences have shown
that content moderation itself can cause harm, and that it can be in itself an act of violence.
Schoenebeck and Blackwell (2021) separate platform-enabled harms – which are only
facilitated by platforms, but perpetrated by users – from platform-perpetrated harms,
caused and enacted by platforms’ own design. Furthermore, Gerrard and Thornham (2020)
argue that elements of platforms’ infrastructure such as content recommendations and
community guidelines “assemble” to perpetrate sexism. In short, far from being neutral,
platform infrastructure actually reflects offline inequalities such as sexism, racism and
homophobia (Haimson et al., 2021; Schoenebeck and Blackwell, 2021).
This chapter uses two examples to illustrate the harms caused by moderation: (1)
TikTok’s moderation of content by transgender users and (2) Instagram’s moderation of
nudity and sex work following FOSTA/SESTA, including these platforms’ moderation of
harassment targeted towards the aforementioned marginalised creators.

TikTok’s moderation of transgender users’ content

While social media can provide a much-needed sense of community for marginalised people,
platforms also expose them to virality and exponential views, potentially triggering online

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abuse. After their content became visible on TikTok’s main feed (the “For You” page), a
series of transgender TikTok users received views in the millions and became the target of
transphobic abuse (Perrett, 2021a). After other viewers weaponised the platform’s flagging
system, reporting the creators’ videos as a violation of community guidelines, their content
was removed and their posting privileges limited. But the abuse against them – which had
also been flagged – remained on the platform (Perrett, 2021a).
Online abuse has offline consequences on victims’ well-being and a chilling effect on their
speech. Following repeated cases of similar online abuse, in 2021 TikTok released new
features to limit the spread of harmful comments, offering creators the option to filter
comments and prompting users to consider whether they wanted to post something
“unkind” ahead of publishing (Perrett, 2021b).

Nudity and sex work on Instagram

After FOSTA/SESTA, online spaces for sex, sexuality, nudity, sex education, sexual ex-
pression and sex work shrank. In a slippery slope of attempting to comply with Section 230’s
exception and to avoid being seen to be facilitating sex trafficking, social media platforms
have been censoring an increasing amount of content, from sex work to sexual communica-
tion, from artistic nudity to sex education (Are, 2021; Blunt and Wolf, 2020). From sha-
dowbanning – a light censorship technique which dramatically reduces posts’ visibility by
hiding them from platforms’ “Explore” or “For You” feeds without warning – to outright
content removal and account deletion, platforms proceeded to identify a specific population –
sex workers and creators posting nudity and sexuality-related content – with danger (ibid).
With platforms being based largely in the US, this has been linked with a typically North
American mentality showing wariness towards sex (Kaye, 2019), and replicating “puritan,
conservative values that conflate trafficking with sex, sex with a lack of safety and a lack of
safety with women’s bodies” (Are, 2021, p.14), effectively “othering” a variety of user groups.
This resulted not only in distress and loss of livelihoods and networks by these creators, but in
the physical and offline endangering of sex workers, who previously found having an online
intermediary with clients safer (Cooper, 2021; Nolan Brown, 2022). Indeed, Blunt and Wolf
(2020) equate content moderation, shadowbanning, and denial of access to financial tech-
nologies with the violent policing that sex workers are targeted by on the street. Social media
users who post about nudity, sexuality and sex work – among many others – are dis-
proportionately targeted by online abuse which goes unremoved by platforms, and yet it is
sex-positive users’ content that bears the constant burden of deletion (Are and Paasonen,
2021; Perrett, 2021a; Stokel-Walker, 2021).
The above examples show that, while women and marginalised users are dis-
proportionately targeted by both online abuse and platform censorship, the onus of pro-
tecting themselves from both practices as they navigate their lives online remains on them.
Users themselves have to insert keywords into TikTok and Instagram’s comment filtering
system, anticipating the abuse they are going to receive by inserting keywords they do not
want to see, partaking in the never-ending trade-off between allowing comments to increase
engagement with their content and choosing which comments to allow on their profile by
going through sets of potentially abusive messages before approving them (e.g. see Perrett,
2021a). Users themselves have to anticipate that their content, despite being within com-
munity guidelines, will be removed, and so they have to self-censor to avoid account
deletion – and loss of livelihoods – as a result.

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These things happen while platforms often deny that censorship techniques are being
applied to specific content, in a form of gaslighting that targets women, femme presenting
and marginalised users and nude bodies specifically (Are, 2021; Diaz and Hecht-Felella,
2021). During this process, users are being asked to either comply with these mechanisms of
self-protection from violence or to leave, in a digital replication of gender-based violence
and victim-blaming culture. Furthermore, this emphasis on and targeting of sex results in
platforms sexualising users without their consent: a nude body, a post educating about sex,
or a performance are, for platforms, inherently sex acts – whether users are indeed seeing
themselves as engaging in that sex act or not. By identifying women, femme presenting and
marginalised users and bodies as inherently sexual, platforms are essentially viewing these
users’ presence as sex by default, preventing nuance and self-determination by replicating
patriarchal objectification and sexualisation of bodies.

The feminist potential of content moderation: a practical toolkit

Among other issues, this chapter has highlighted how the lack of transparency, clarity
and accountability in content moderation might disproportionately affect particular
users, like women and those with marginalised identities. In a world where the internet
and social media are often necessary networking, administration and self-expression
tools, moderation systems which discriminate against users and make them responsible
for their own protection, resulting in both online and offline violence, require much-
needed reconsideration.
Although it might seem from the title of this section that we are proposing a set of
solutions to platforms’ moderation problems, we want to be clear from the outset that the
issues we discuss cannot simply be overhauled with a toolkit. One of the main flaws of current
social media governance, which we discuss in greater depth below, is the lack of meaningful
channels for users to challenge content moderation decisions. If a person’s content or
account is removed from social media – with or without a clear justification – it is incredibly
difficult for them to meaningfully challenge this decision. Indeed, it is often journalists and/
or Public Relations (PR) specialists who help users to reinstate their content or accounts,
but, of course, not everyone has access to these networks (Stokel, 2021).
Without wanting to fall into the trap of false equivalence, we feel we cannot ignore the
parallels between this process and the politics of reporting, for example, sexual or other forms
of gender-based violence. Maris, Libert and Henrichsen make a similar observation about the
politics of consent when people view online pornography: the research team identified ex-
tensive privacy issues on some of the world’s most popular porn sites, whose visitors “have
their sexual interests inferred by third-parties that surreptitiously track web browsing, often
without user notice or consent” (2020, p.2019). The authors argue that this power imbalance
mirrors problematic norms of consent often seen in sexual encounters: the “consent” in both
cases must be affirmative (i.e. “silence does not equal consent, someone must communicate
their consent for true sexual autonomy”), but it often is not (Maris, Libert and Henrichsen,
2020, p.2031). The loss of knowledge and power over one’s social media usage, the onus on
users to fend for themselves, platforms’ gaslighting over real moderation concerns, and
privileged accounts’ ability to fight content moderation harder – both in relation to porn sites
and also content moderation – are fundamental, structural issues, replicating the offline harms
of the patriarchy and sense of powerlessness online. Content moderation therefore cannot be
meaningfully improved unless this system is dismantled. In some respects, we propose a

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“toolkit” precisely because dismantling the current system takes time and immediate changes
are needed.
The problems with content moderation we highlight in this chapter include an over-
reliance on automated content moderation, a one-size-fits-all approach to social media
governance, and a lack of communication between platforms who rule over content – and
therefore over income, visibility, expression, safety – and users. These problems may arise
from abstract, systemic notions of platform governance, but they result in challenges to
users’ online and offline lives, and require practical solutions. We have grouped these
solutions into a toolkit including five spheres of action: (1) protection; (2) accountability; (3)
clarity; (4) nuance and (5) oversight.

1 For protection: Harnessing the feminist potential of content moderation means that
different users may require different protection, and that one user’s safety might be
another user’s danger. We, therefore, recommend that platforms should move beyond
the automated “prevent and punish, and ask questions later” approach to online harms
by conducting regular consultations with under-represented communities to tackle the
issues with their current one-size-fits-all approach. As such, we argue that site-wide rules
need to be supplemented with community-specific rules that address the needs and
nuances of specific user groups.
2 For accountability: An independent moderation ombudsman should be monitoring plat-
forms’ adherence to human rights standards in content moderation. While Meta unveiled
their human rights policy in 2021 (Sissons, 2021), nobody at present is holding the company –
or other internet platforms – accountable for it. A push towards accountability would
require every internet platform to publish its human rights policy and to be assessed for it by a
global, independent ombudsman.
3 For clarity: Too many internet users have found their content and/or profiles removed or
uploaded without their consent, having to jump through hoops to speak to platform
workers for help. A dedicated user service – not unlike customer service – would give
users access to platform workers within reasonable time frames to find out why their
content is being moderated and to provide information to challenge the decision.
4 For nuance: Platform moderators and community guidelines often make split-second
decisions about content they are not sufficiently knowledgeable on. Outsourcing some
aspects of moderation – namely those related to cultural knowledge and taste – to
users, in the same fashion as Facebook group moderators or subreddit community
managers, could tackle “outsider” moderation from platforms. Community outsourced
moderation could be a “perk” users active in specific communities can receive, or can
be integrated within profile preferences, asking users what they do and do not want to
see. However, given the already precarious working conditions of CCMs, it remains
to be seen whether community-driven moderation would be treated as labour by
platforms and rewarded as such.
5 For oversight: A lack of diversity and oversight within platforms often results in biased
moderation (Diaz and Hecht-Felella, 2021). Platforms should therefore be required to be
transparent about the decisions they make over content and accounts through audits and
reports that go beyond statistics of how many posts and profiles were removed, and that
showcase the nuances and reasoning beyond their approach. By better visibilising the
mechanisms and frameworks behind moderation, public, civil society and governments
can make better-informed recommendations and interventions.

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Closing thoughts
To be clear, the moderation problems we discussed above cannot be meaningfully overhauled
with a “toolkit”. While we can – and do – make some tentative recommendations, we do so
with the knowledge that they will be limited while content moderation operates within a
patriarchal system, and also that any advice we give may have unintended consequences.
We often see – and are personally involved in making – recommendations for what we call
patchwork repairs to content moderation (think of “Band Aids on bullet wounds” as a met-
aphor), but ad hoc policies and laws targeted to particular issues – e.g. hashtag moderation
(Gerrard, 2018) – create a messy mix of rules for users and platforms to navigate. So while we
can provide recommendations that tackle very apparent problems, without a systemic rethink
of platform moderation and governance – and which should come from society as much as
from platforms – it is, unfortunately, very hard to imagine a completely safe space on the
internet for women and marginalised genders.

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 PART 4

Feminist responses
 FEMINIST RESPONSES
Introduction to Part 4
Susan Berridge and Karen Boyle

Whilst Part 3 focused on how media and communications technologies could be used in
abusive ways, Part 4 is concerned with their activist and educational potential. This builds
on discussions in Parts 1 and 2 which recognised the ways in which media could give voice
to feminist analyses of violence – and to victim/survivors themselves – albeit often within
limited parameters, to focus on how activists and educators mobilise media and commu-
nications technologies in their work. Given the relatively minimal equipment and techno-
logical skills required, it is not surprising that digital – and specifically social – media
features strongly in this section. Just as in Part 3, this means that many chapters are cen-
trally concerned with the “feedback loop between online and offline realms” (as Belotti,
Bernardini and Comunello put it in Chapter 49), but here this is explored primarily in
relation to organising and working for change at a local and national level. Importantly,
whilst supposedly global hashtags such as #MeToo are acknowledged, Part 4 unsettles the
ahistorical narrative of exceptionalism which has become one mainstream media narrative
about #MeToo (Boyle, 2019; Phipps, 2020).
In this sense, the chapters collectively allow for another kind of continuum thinking to
emerge, one centred on a continuum of activism that allows for connections to be made
across different activist spaces (online and offline), places and, to a more limited extent,
historical periods. For instance, Gabriela Loureiro (Chapter 46) describes a “continuum of
hashtags and street marches in Brazil”, demonstrating how activism in one space can inform
and, in turn be informed by, activism in other spaces. These connections are not only
spatial, but also thematic. For Loureiro, but also for Munira Cheema in the Pakistani
context in Chapter 51, this involves understanding the interconnections of feminist cam-
paigns against sexual violence and for reproductive freedoms. For Jia Tan (Chapter 52) and
Gary Needham (Chapter 53) it involves making links across feminist and lesbian and gay/
queer campaigns in the US and China respectively, whilst for Sonia Núñez Puente and
Diana Fernández Romero in Spain, it is the women’s strikes and anti-austerity protests that
provide the vital context for understanding protests against sexual violence. These essays
thus speak to the core principle of feminist understandings of violence outlined at the
beginning of this collection: namely, that gendered violence and societal gender inequality
are inextricably linked. Moreover, by placing Loureiro’s chapter alongside others which

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 Susan Berridge and Karen Boyle

consider activist practice and hashtag politics in the UK, Canada, Spain, US, Argentina and
Pakistan, we are able to see the common character underpinning these differently located
protests even as each chapter speaks to the contextual specificities of the cases they examine.
Whilst many of the feminist responses to violence mapped in this section had widespread,
and sometimes transnational, engagement, scale and success are by no means equivalent.
Indeed, a recurring concern for authors in Part 4 is with how media can be used in quite
targeted ways to address specific communities (whether of survivors, students or legislators)
in order to effect change at different levels. This is a rather different focus than that adopted
in Parts 1 and 2 where the emphasis was primarily on mass media, commercially produced.
Here, media are tools in the hands of activists and educators. Unsurprisingly, this also
means that chapters in Part 4 deploy a wider range of methodologies, with textual analyses
of media texts sitting alongside interviews with activists, autobiographical commentary,
archival work and pedagogical reflections.
We have chosen to book end Part 4 with pedagogical reflections from different sites, to
keep in view the links between activism and education. Michael Flood’s chapter (Chapter
45), which opens Part 4, provides an evaluation of existing online interventions to engage
men and boys in the primary prevention of men’s violence against women, with a focus on
educational programmes in the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Notably many of
the aspects that make online media a particularly conducive context for gender-based
violence, including scale, reach, accessibility and anonymity (see Jane, Chapter 33;
Semenzin and Bainotti, Chapter 36; Colliver, Chapter 38), are identified here as also pro-
viding opportunities for effectively engaging men and boys in violence prevention. As Flood
notes, this is a new and developing field and results of effectiveness have been mixed so far,
with much still to learn about the most impactful forms of practice in terms of transforming
patriarchal masculine norms and diminishing men’s violence against women.
The following two chapters by Gabriela Loureiro and Angela Towers use interviews to
foreground the experiences of participating in feminist digital campaigns against gender-
based violence, emphasising the affective impact of activism and digital consciousness-
raising. Chapter 46 by Loureiro insists on the importance of understanding feminist
hashtags in the specific historical, political, affective and national contexts in which they
emerge. Her chapter focuses on the hashtag #PrimeiroAssédio (#FirstHarassment), created
by the Brazilian, feminist, non-profit organisation Think Olga in 2015. 2015 has been cel-
ebrated more widely as a year of particularly visible feminist online and offline activism in
Brazil, but was also marked by the rise of the far-right in Brazilian politics. Based on an
analysis of hashtagged Facebook posts and interviews with some of those who posted,
Loureiro explores the way in which engagement with #PrimeiroAssédio acted as a form of
digital consciousness-raising. This engagement enabled participants to make sense of, and
share past experiences of sexual violence, and in turn, challenge the way in which these
experiences are so often normalised and internalised as part of their everyday lives. Loureiro
highlights the powerful role that #PrimeiroAssédio played in drawing attention to the
structural nature of sexual violence and establishing spaces of gendered solidarity.
Angela Towers explores the affective experiences of four women activists who founded
highly visible online feminist campaigns between 2010 and 2017 in the UK, Quebec in
Canada and US. Using oral history, her chapter identifies the inherent tensions involved in
these women garnering political power through their positioning and visibility as feminist
leaders, particularly given the mainstream media’s tendency to individualise and commodify
feminist issues – as demonstrated in Parts 1 and 2 of this collection. In this context, Towers’

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chapter plays an important role in foregrounding women’s voices, labour and experiences in
order to challenge dominant meritocratic media discourses that attempt to position feminist
campaigns to end gender-based violence as ahistorical “one-woman projects”. What is
particularly useful about Towers’ and Loureiro’s approach is that their interviews with
women involved in founding viral hashtags (Towers) and people circulating them (Loureiro)
help to expose what is not visible in the mainstream media stories told about these cam-
paigns. Like Jilly Boyce Kay (Chapter 17) and Tanya Serisier (Chapter 18) in Part 2, they
use these accounts to interrogate the media logics and processes which shape their speech
and activism in both enabling and constraining ways.
The next five chapters trace different forms of activism across platforms including Twitter,
Soranet and Weibo. Each chapter has a specific national/regional focus, demonstrating the
ways in which online activism remains rooted in materially-situated communities in Spain,
Argentina, the US, South Korea, Pakistan and mainland China. In Chapter 48, Sonia Núñez
Puente and Diana Fernández Romero focus on feminist online responses to a 2016 gang rape
in Spain. Their chapter considers the tensions inherent in the mediatisation of women’s rage in
response to the judicial process following the rape, which initially minimised the men’s vio-
lence and reinforced victim-blaming rape myths. They consider the different “mobilising axes”
of women’s rage in public discourse, embodied in offline protest and online activism via the
hashtag #YoSiTeCreo [#I believe you], and trace the significant social and political impact of
these expressions of anger which led to concrete legislative change.
The following chapter by Francesca Belotti, Vittoria Bernadini and Francesca
Comunello also considers questions of national specificity in relation to feminist online
activism, offering a comparison between #NiUnaMenos, originating in Argentina in 2015,
and #MeToo, originating in the US in 2017. Their chapter uses Liz Kelly’s (1988) “con-
tinuum” of sexual violence to highlight the similarities between the two hashtags, both of
which seek to draw attention to the structural nature of men’s violence against women and
render visible forms of violence that have often been hidden. At the same time, they
demonstrate that each hashtag offers distinct mobilisations (physical protests in the case of
#NiUnaMenos vs. online activism in the case of #MeToo) and, in turn, uses particular
discursive strategies that garner different affective responses (anger and sympathy in the
case of #NiUnaMenos and empathy in the case of #MeToo). Overall, the chapter dem-
onstrates the powerful impact that specific socio-cultural contexts have on women’s digital
campaigns, challenging the universalising tendency of discussions of hashtag activism.
In Chapter 50, Kaitlynn Mendes and Euisol Jeong move away from hashtags to focus on
the multifaceted activism of Digital Sexual violence Out (DSO) in South Korea. Centring on
the pornography site Soranet, they detail some of the specific forms of technology-facilitated
sexual violence featured on that site, evidencing a continuum of pornographic sexual violence
where non-consensual images taken in public places sat alongside live and interactive gang
rapes. In turn, they demonstrate the variety of tactics DSO used to respond to this violence,
showing how their approach evolved in light of both the changing nature of technology-
facilitated sexual violence and police failure to recognise the material harms to women.
In Chapter 51, Munira Cheema considers online gendered discourses in Pakistan. She
begins by recounting a parliamentary debate about the legitimacy of offline feminist protest
– namely a women’s march in 2020. The debate was then picked up on a television talk show
before moving to Twitter. Focusing on two hashtags that emerged on Twitter following the
talk show – #MeraJismMeriMarzi (“My Body, My Choice”) and #WhyICannotMarch –
Cheema explores the ensuing debates that took place between conservative and liberal

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publics, illuminating the difficulty of separating out gendered and Islamic discourses in a
country in which religion plays a powerful role in shaping hegemonic constructions of
femininity. There are parallels in Cheema’s data from Pakistan and the data from mainland
China discussed in the following chapter by Jia Tan, in that both point to the ways in which
conservative commentators seek to discredit digital feminist activists in their local contexts
by suggesting they are puppets of external, Western governments and NGOs. At the same
time, Cheema highlights the way in which Twitter enables women to participate more fully
in public life and also creates a space for citizens to interact on gender issues.
In Chapters 52 and 53, Jia Tan and Gary Needham highlight how feminist campaigns
against gender violence connect with lesbian, gay and queer activism. Tan traces the rise of
online feminist and queer activism in mainland China in the 2010s, exploring how this
digital activism is shaped by national specificities of regulation, censorship and digital
infrastructure. Tan situates this new wave of campaigns in relation to a longer history of
feminist media activism against gender violence in China, while paying attention to the
novel configurations that this activism takes on in the digital age. Exploring a range of
contemporary feminist and queer campaigns against gender violence and discrimination,
her chapter explores the productive ways that this activism has opened up discussions and
expanded understandings of gender-based violence.
While Tan’s chapter is concerned with contemporary feminist and queer media activism,
Gary Needham turns to archival research to explore earlier coalitions between feminist, les-
bian and gay rights activist groups in response to US films that featured sexualised – and in
some cases homophobic – depictions of violence against women. Focusing specifically on
responses to three controversial films released between 1974 and 1980, Needham reminds us
that feminist, lesbian and gay rights activists have long been concerned about fictional rep-
resentations. Moreover, Needham’s use of the feminist, lesbian and gay presses provides
a good example of how pre-internet organising worked, demonstrating the importance of
movement media in establishing connections as well as championing alternative models of
media production, distribution and representation. In the way these 1970s protests used media
platforms to support targeted local protests (in this case, at filming locations and cinemas), we
can see the seeds of the concern between the politics of representation and geographically-sited
protest which characterises many of the other chapters in Part 4.
Interestingly, for Paula Serafini in Chapter 54, the directionality of movement between
online and offline protest is the reverse of that in many of the other chapters. Her concern is
initially with offline, local protests which gained transnational recognition online, before
being adapted for offline protest in other localities. Specifically, Serafini focuses on
performance-based protests in Chile and Argentina that came to global attention as
mediated viral spectacles. Serafini’s chapter is characterised by continuum thinking in a way
which extends beyond male violence against women, to understand patriarchal violence
more broadly. To use an example from the Chilean performance protest Un violador en tu
camino it allows for an understanding that both the “oppressive state” and the individualised
“YOU” are responsible for rape. Her chapter traces connections between male violence
against women, colonial violence and contemporary extractivism, through the work of key
figures in Latin American feminisms, including anthropologist Rita Segato (2016), social
scientist and activist Verónica Gago (2019) and sociologist and activist Silvia Rivera
Cusicanqui (2004). In doing so, Serafini insists on the importance of returning these protests
to their point of origin, but also demonstrates how, having been encountered in the de-
terratorialised space of social media, they were then able to be adapted by feminist groups

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who were very differently situated. Serafini’s chapter thus speaks both to the potential of
social media for feminist protest and, specifically, for enabling international collaborations,
whilst demonstrating the importance of the local performances of that protest.
The final essays in this collection reflect, in varied ways, on the challenges and potentials
of researching and/or teaching gender-based violence in and through representation. In
Chapter 55, Eylem Atakav, a creative-practice-based researcher, reflects on the process of
filmmaking as a process of activist (as well as academic) engagement. Atakav has made two
films about gender-based violence, the first focusing on child marriage in Turkey, the second
on the experiences of frontline workers supporting domestic abuse victim/survivors in the
context of the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK. Atakav reflects on some of the ethical
challenges involved in making these films, but also highlights how the audio-visual record –
particularly when viewed collectively – can be a powerful force in raising awareness and
lobbying for policy change.
The final two chapters reflect on the teaching and/or researching of fictional texts in the
light of news stories and campaigns which have brought into sharp relief the problematics of
representing gender-based violence in entertainment forms. For Mary K. Holland and
Heather Hewett, and Rebecca Harrison, the external context is the post-#MeToo landscape,
which has – in different ways – placed the behaviour of authors and filmmakers under the
microscope, requiring critical reflection on how literary and filmic canons and modes of
teaching contribute to what Boyle (2019) has called the “cultural value of abuse”. Focusing on
Literary Studies, Holland and Hewett identify the key ways in which literary scholars have
responded to #MeToo. They recognise that the impact of #MeToo on the curriculum is not
singular, but is intertwined with broader discussions about power, authority and knowledge.
Building on her work on rethinking the Film Studies canon post-#MeToo (Harrison,
2018), Harrison considers the biography of the theorist, in this case herself, asking how our
own experiences of gender-based violence may inflect our teaching and research. This is a
question also posed by some of the scholars whose work Holland and Hewett discuss in
Chapter 56, and collectively they provide a welcome addition to debates about violent content
in the classroom, festival circuit and beyond. Reflecting their online origins, discussions of
trigger warnings have typically centred the (imagined) experiences of students and attendees
(Halberstam, 2017), and marginalised the impact of teaching, curating and research in this
area, marking a potential generational as well as sectoral divide. Yet, feminist scholars of
gender-based violence in social-science disciplines have long considered the impact of research
on the researcher and the role of emotion in the research process (e.g. Stanko, 1997; Hume,
2007; Campbell, 2022). Perhaps part of what is at stake here is the self-defensiveness those of
us in literature or media studies at times experience, not only in politically-regressive contexts
– where we are accused of “reading too much into things”, or as Andreasen argues (Chapter
39, this volume) of failing to “get” the joke – but also in more activist scholarly contexts where
our concerns about engaging with entertainment genres may seem to pale in comparison to
those of researchers whose ethical challenges are more directly linked to ensuring the safety of
others. Yet, Harrison reminds us of a core aspect of feminist epistemology – namely, the
explicit acknowledgement that knowledge is situated – and encourages us to reflect on what
that means when our subject is gender-based violence, whether in representation or reality, a
boundary that is (as many chapters in this collection note) frequently porous.
The chapters by Needham, Holland and Hewett and Harrison also point to the
importance of fictional representation, something this collection as a whole has deliberately
sidelined but which there is clear potential to explore in a more sustained way in a future

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collection. Certainly, gender and violence have been central to the ways in which feminists
have engaged with a range of fictional genres across film, television, games and literature, in
relation to questions of representation, theorisations of the inherent gendered power
dynamics of spectatorship and/or gameplay, and, increasingly, the abusive practices of
entertainment media workplaces (as Li acknowledges in Chapter 15).
Throughout this collection, however, we have amassed evidence of the continuing
importance of non-fiction media as a gateway to (and for) feminist activism, also re-
cognising that media activism can be a destination in itself. At the same time, this collection
presents a wealth of evidence that media distort the gendered and racialised realities of
violence, victimisation and perpetration, and centre some voices at the expense of others, in
turn having important implications for the kinds of solutions that can be imagined. This
reminds us that representation is not only an issue we study, it is a practice we are all
continuously engaged in and for which we, too, can and should be held to account.
In closing, we hope this encourages our readers to think about how you might use this
collection in your own learning, teaching and research, and to reflect on the implications of
doing so. Whilst we have aimed, in our editorial selections, to cover a range of types of
violence, consider representations which span different national and transnational contexts,
and include a variety of platforms and media types, there are inevitably gaps which we hope
you will be encouraged to address in your own work. In this respect, Holland and Hewett’s
and Harrison’s chapters provide a particularly fitting end to the collection as they remind us
of the activist potential not only of media – which many other chapters in this collection
also attend to – but also of the activist and ethical dimensions of own decisions as media
consumers, producers, activists, teachers, students and researchers.

References
Boyle, K. (2019) #MeToo, Weinstein and feminism. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Campbell, R. (2022) ‘Revisiting Emotionally involved: The impact of researching rape. Twenty years (and
thousands of stories) later’, in Horvath, M. A. H. and Brown, J. M. (eds.) Rape. Challenging
contemporary thinking – 10 years on. London: Routledge, pp. 12–27.
Gago, V. (2019) La potencia feminista. O el deseo de cambiarlo todo. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños.
Halberstam, J. (2017) ‘Trigger happy: From content warning to censorship’, Signs. Available at:
http://signsjournal.org/currents-trigger-warnings/halberstam/ (Accessed: 14 December 2022).
Harrison, R. (2018) ‘Fuck the canon (or, how do you solve a problem like von Trier?): Teaching,
screening, and writing about cinema in the age of #MeToo’, MAI: Feminism and Visual
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(Accessed: 5 December 2022).
Hume, M. (2007) ‘Unpicking the threads: Emotion as central to the theory and practice of researching
violence’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 30 (2), pp. 147–157.
Kelly, L. (1988) Surviving sexual violence. Cambridge: Polity.
Phipps, A. (2020) Me not you: The trouble with mainstream feminism. Manchester: Manchester
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Rivera Cusicanqui, S. (2004) ‘La noción de “derecho” o las paradojas de la modernidad postcolonial:
indígenas y mujeres en Bolivia’, Revista Aportes Andinos 11. Aportes sobre diversidad, diferencia
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Segato, R. L. (2016) La guerra contra las mujeres. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños.
Stanko, E. A. (1997) ‘“I second that emotion”: Reflections on feminism, emotionality, and research on
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 45
ENGAGING MEN ONLINE
Using online media for violence prevention
with men and boys
Michael Flood

There is growing interest in using online media among men and boys to prevent men’s violence
against women and girls, informed by three insights. First, there is an urgent need to engage
men and boys in the prevention of violence against women and girls: to lessen their likelihood
of perpetration, to harness their positive influence on other boys and men, and to address key
drivers of violence including patriarchal masculine norms and inequalities (Flood, 2019a).
Second, online media may provide a particularly effective means to reach and educate large
numbers of boys and men. Third, online media and communities are contributors to the
problem, as important sources of misogynist and violence-supportive norms among boys and
young men and as inciting and endorsing some men’s perpetration of both online and offline
violence and abuse.
This chapter reviews the use of online media in encouraging egalitarian and non-violent
attitudes and behaviours among men and boys. It explores four kinds of strategy: violence
prevention education; social marketing and communications; community mobilisation; and
interventions into misogynist communities. The chapter focuses on engaging men and boys
in the primary prevention of violence, leaving aside other strategies aimed at men specifi-
cally as perpetrators or as victim-survivors.

Working online
Online strategies, given their advantages for health promotion, may have significant value in
reaching, educating and changing men. Many existing violence prevention interventions
involve face-to-face and small group formats, and these are resource-intensive and with
limited reach and sustainability. In-person interventions are costly, time intensive and dif-
ficult to disseminate (Rizzo et al., 2021). An obvious alternative is online delivery, with
advantages including “lower cost of intervention delivery, greater reach, maintenance of
fidelity, the possibility of delivery in a wide range of settings, and ability to tailor content to
a variety of users” (Salazar et al., 2014, p. 2).
There are significant advantages to online educational interventions in relation to
reach, dissemination and fidelity. Given the widespread use of the internet and mobile

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-54 491

 Michael Flood

phones, online interventions have the potential to reach large audiences (Oesterle et al.,
2022). They may be deployed to make changes in organisations, scaled up to generate
institutional norm change (Pascoe, Wells and Esina, 2021a). Online interventions can be
particularly useful in contexts that are poor in resources, funding and personnel (Murta
et al., 2020). Using online media also enables the repeated and simultaneous delivery of
interventions with fidelity (Oesterle et al., 2022), and easy transfer and dissemination to
other settings or populations.
Online interventions allow for the tailoring or personalisation of content: to individual
users’ particular risk and protective factors, levels of self-efficacy, readiness to change, and
performance (Oesterle et al., 2022). Personalised feedback can be provided in response to
users’ inputted data, responses to quiz answers, or choices in branching narratives (Pascoe,
Wells and Esina, 2021a). For example, in the dating violence intervention Dating SOS,
participants receive tailored guidance based on information gathered beforehand on their
attachment styles, experiences of relationship violence, attitudes towards dating violence,
sources of social support and so on (Murta et al., 2020). Tailored feedback is said to be
more memorable, relevant and appealing (Murta et al., 2020), and immediate feedback is
said to improve people’s ability to engage in particular behaviours and tasks (Pascoe, Wells
and Esina, 2021a). Tailoring programmes among men to their individual risk factors may be
particularly valuable given the evidence that some programmes have had negative effects
among men at high risk for perpetration, increasing their sexually coercive behaviour
(Stephens and George, 2009).
Online educational programmes also have potential strengths in terms of skills
development and immersion. Digital programmes can give opportunities for participants
to practise desired behaviours without judgement and receive feedback on behaviour
choices in given scenarios (Oesterle et al., 2022). Online strategies that use virtual reality,
immersive story-telling and gamification may be particularly effective at engaging
participants.
Online educational interventions have demonstrated both feasibility and acceptability.
Recent reviews of interventions using virtual reality and gamification also find that they are
acceptable to users (Pascoe, Wells and Esina, 2021a, 2021b). For example, college men in a
US study of an online sexual violence prevention programme reported preferring an online
format because of privacy and the opportunity to complete the programme at their own
pace in their own time (Thompson et al., 2021).
Many of the advantages of online media for violence prevention education also transfer to
other strategies including social marketing and community mobilisation. Online media and
spaces offer scale and reach, instant and constant availability, visually and emotionally en-
gaging content, opportunities for informal engagement, both open access content and closed
communities, anonymity, and lower barriers to engagement (Washington and Marcus, 2022,
pp. 14–16). Feminist advocates and movements are making greater use of digital spaces to
shift social norms, galvanise activism and generate policy change (Washington and Marcus,
2022, p. 10).
Initiatives aimed at men and boys are an increasingly significant stream of violence
prevention activity. They have proliferated in recent decades with both the expansion of
primary prevention efforts and the emergence of an “engaging men” field, comprising
programming and policy focused on men and boys and directed toward the goal of gender
equality (Flood, 2021; Greig and Flood, 2020). One of the most common forms of inter-
vention comprises educational programmes.

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Educating men and boys online

Violence prevention education, including consent education and respectful relationships edu-
cation, is a well-established and effective stream of prevention activity. Online programmes,
particularly those with longer durations and greater interactivity, have demonstrated impact.
In the last decade, there has been a proliferation of online programmes, including initiatives
aimed at or including male audiences, and some show positive evaluations. For example:

• RealConsent is a bystander approach to sexual violence prevention which comprises six

30-minute interactive modules. In a study among US male undergraduate students, at
six-month follow-up participants showed a range of positive attitudinal and behavioural
changes compared to a control group, including in sexual violence perpetration and
bystander intervention (Salazar et al., 2014).
• On the other hand, a far shorter intervention, the 20-minute intervention Take Care, had
no positive impact on US university students’ feelings of efficacy in engaging in positive
bystander behaviour or their actual engagement (Kleinsasser et al., 2015). Among the
students (19% male), although those who viewed Take Care showed greater feelings of
efficacy for engaging in bystander behaviours and greater engagement in bystander be-
haviours than students in the control group at two-month follow-up this did not rep-
resent an increase in Take Care participants’ engagement in bystander behaviours but a
decrease in the comparison group’s engagement.
• In a cluster-randomised trial of Teen Choices, a three-session online programme for
healthy, nonviolent relationships in the US, participants showed a significant reduction
in perpetration and victimisation of violence at six and 12 months (Levesque et al., 2016).
• In a trial of All-In: A Culture of Respect, a 45-minute programme for US college ath-
letes, at one-month follow-up male participants showed significant improvement in
knowledge about and attitudes towards sexual violence and their perception of peers’
violence-supportive norms (Thompson et al., 2021).
• Haven – Understanding Sexual Assault, a one-hour sexual assault prevention pro-
gramme by Everfi, had no impact on US students’ legal knowledge of sexual assaults or
healthy sexual beliefs and attitudes, from data collected before and after students’ par-
ticipation in the programme (Kimberly and Hardman, 2020).
• In a randomised control trial of Project STRONG, a parent-son intervention for the
prevention of dating violence among early adolescent boys comprising six modules, the
programme showed positive effects at follow-up three months and nine months later on
US parents’ attitudes, boys’ general aggression and their emotional self-regulation, but
not their attitudes towards domestic violence (Rizzo et al., 2021).

Let us turn now to online educational initiatives that do much more to exploit the peda-
gogical potential of online media, through virtual reality and gamification.

Virtual reality and immersive storytelling

“Virtual reality” refers to computer-generated environments with scenes and objects that
appear to be real, making the user feel they are immersed in their surroundings. In virtual
reality (VR), users take part in an entirely computer-generated simulation of an alternate
world, doing so via a computer and typically a VR headset or helmet. Augmented reality

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(AR), on the other hand, is an interactive experience of a real-world environment, but where
the objects that reside in the real world are enhanced by computer-generated perception
information. Users perceive the world in ways shaped by visual, auditory, haptic and other
information, doing so using a smartphone, head-mounted display, special eyeglasses, head-
up displays and so on. VR is completely virtual, while AR uses a real-world setting and adds
layers of virtual objects or other information to it.
Both virtual reality and augmented reality technologies have been used in educational
and social change interventions addressing gender inequality, violence prevention, equity
and diversity, and empathy and prosocial behaviour. A recent rapid review of VR inter-
ventions in these areas, focused on publications over 2010–2021, on interventions including
at least 30% male participants, and providing evidence of impact, found eight relevant
studies (Pascoe, Wells and Esina, 2021b).
A strategy of immersive VR for embodied victim perspective-taking is used in three inter-
ventions aimed at violence prevention in the above review (Neyret et al., 2020; Steinfeld, 2020;
Ventura et al., 2021). All three use a VR scenario of sexual harassment, in which participants
(all-male in two studies, and mixed-gender in a third) take the perspective e.g. of a woman being
sexually harassed. Two of the interventions showed positive impacts. In one, men in the female
embodiment condition were less likely than men in other conditions to perpetrate male-
identified anti-social behaviour one week later, measured by the administration of electric
shocks to a female learner (Neyret et al., 2020). In another, men who watched a 360° video in
which they embodied a woman being sexually harassed were compared with a control group
who listened to a narrative of the same story. Comparing pre- and post-intervention responses,
although all participants showed higher feelings of empathy and lower violence-supportive
attitudes, the impact was greater for men in the VR condition (Ventura et al., 2021). In a third
experiment, participants consumed a story of a male manager’s ongoing verbal sexual
harassment of his female employee as a written script, two-dimensional video, or immersive
360-degree video. Comparing pre- and post-session responses, the method of consumption had
no impact on views of sexual harassment or empathy for and identification with the victim
(Steinfeld, 2020). The other five VR interventions in the review sought to cultivate empathy or
improved attitudes in relation to gender inequality, racism and homelessness, showing mixed
impacts on these domains (Pascoe, Wells and Esina, 2021b).
Virtual reality-based interventions show promise as a means of engaging men and boys in
violence prevention. VR interventions, particularly those based on immersive and
perspective-taking strategies, may be effective in demonstrating the future negative conse-
quences of present behaviours, allowing participants to practise prosocial behaviour, and
“priming” people such that they respond differently to particular sights or sensations
(Bowman, Ahn, and Mercer Kollar, 2020; Pascoe, Wells and Esina, 2021b). Users’ virtual
experiences are said to transfer to the real world to shift their attitudes and behaviours
(Bowman, Ahn, and Mercer Kollar, 2020, p. 8).
VR interventions may be particularly effective in building empathy and perspective-
taking. Men may increase their empathy for women or victim/survivors of violence by
taking part in VR programmes where they are able to see, hear, and feel as if they have
become another person and can, in a sense, share their lived experience (Bowman, Ahn, and
Mercer Kollar, 2020; Steinfeld, 2020). VR programmes also may foster skills development
through the kinds of immersive role-plays they can allow, in which users are able to see,
hear and feel as if they have become a victim, perpetrator, or bystander (Bowman, Ahn, and
Mercer Kollar, 2020, p. 9).

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VR, however, is not a “magic bullet” for generating change. Only a small number of
published evaluations exist, and interventions’ impacts are mixed. There are no evaluations
of violence-related VR interventions that include assessment of behaviour change, although
evaluations for other domains such as health and exercise do show behavioural impacts
(Bowman, Ahn, and Mercer Kollar, 2020, p. 9), nor any that include longer-term follow-up
(Pascoe, Wells and Esina, 2021b). Further, some studies find that participating in VR
scenarios of sexual harassment is no more impactful than watching a video or reading a
narrative of harassment (Steinfeld, 2020).
A second online-centred approach involves gamification. Gamification refers to “the use
of game design elements in non-game contexts” (Deterding et al., 2011, p. 9). It involves
bringing elements of game design into existing processes and services in order to engage and
motivate users (Schoech et al., 2013), including the use of “motivational affordances” such
as points, achievements, levels, a story or narrative, goals, feedback and challenges, and user
experiences of progress, mastery, autonomy or control, fun and social connection (Pascoe,
Wells and Esina, 2021a). Used in interventions, gamification also is referred to in terms of
serious games, social impact games, prosocial video games, game-based learning and so on.
A recent rapid review of gamification interventions in these areas, based on the same
approach as the VR review above, identified 17 publications, including 11 studies focused
on violence or abuse (Pascoe, Wells and Esina, 2021a). Nearly all used gamification within a
digital game. Key game elements used in the interventions included narrative (in which users
“choose their own adventure” in a branching narrative), quizzes and mini-games within the
larger game, rewards and progress indicators (points, badges, and leaderboards), and tai-
lored and immediate feedback. The application of game design techniques into non-game
environments is intended to increase and sustain users’ engagement and thus the inter-
ventions’ impact. The game elements are meant to capture users’ interest and enjoyment,
motivate their participation, facilitate immersion, allow connections with other users and
respond to learners’ unique needs.
Gamified interventions are a promising means of violence prevention, at least from a small
body of evidence. For example, in a randomised controlled trial in seven schools in Barbados,
the prosocial video game Jesse increased children’s and adolescents’ empathy towards victims
of intimate partner violence (Boduszek et al., 2019). In a study of two video games teaching
bystander skills in situations of sexual and relationship violence and stalking, both had
positive impacts on university students’ attitudes towards bystander intervention. The more
interactive, narrative-based game of the two was particularly effective in improving male
attitudes, including positive impacts at four-week follow-up (Potter et al., 2019). However, in
a more recent evaluation of these two games, although there were immediate increases
in bystander efficacy and bystander attitude scores, only women in one of the games sustained
changes in bystander efficacy scores at follow-up (Potter et al., 2020). Finally, a recent sys-
tematic review of prosocial video games found mixed but encouraging results, suggesting
that prosocial digital games can be used to promote prosocial behaviours and skills (Saleme
et al., 2020).

Shifting masculine social norms

A second stream of online violence prevention intervention relies on the use of social
marketing and communications, typically to shift violence-supportive social norms.
Violence prevention interventions based on social marketing and communications are well-

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developed and widely used (Flood, 2019a; Reidy et al., 2022; Smith-Darden et al., 2022).
These focus largely on offline strategies and they make use of online platforms primarily to
disseminate campaign materials and resources or for webinars or training. Dedicated,
formal, online social marketing campaigns are rare, and campaigns focused on engaging
men and boys are rarer still. One example is “Never Follow”, developed by the Australian
national organisation Our Watch, which seeks “to support young men to develop positive
personal identities not constrained by gender stereotypes” (Our Watch, 2019).
Grassroots online activism has, on the other hand, made significant use of the internet
(Washington and Marcus, 2022). “Hashtag activism” involves using social media channels
for advocacy – as discussed more fully in the chapters which follow within this collection.
For violence prevention this has included providing avenues for victim/survivors to speak
and be heard, challenging dominant conceptions of violence, enabling advocates to speak
out against online and offline violence and providing platforms for feminist counter-publics
(Sills et al., 2016). The most notable instance of hashtag activism against rape culture is
#MeToo (Smith-Darden et al., 2022). #MeToo campaigns have contributed to some slight
weakening of violence-supportive social norms, including positive shifts in men’s attitudes
and behaviours (Flood, 2019b).
Campaigns on social media may seek to challenge the hegemonically masculine social
norms that inform men’s violence against women, although only a few are aimed primarily
at men and boys themselves, such as White Ribbon Canada’s #BoysDontCry campaign
(2019) aimed at promoting a healthier masculinity and, similar to this, White Ribbon New
Zealand’s Challenge the #Unspoken Rules campaign (2019). In addition, when men’s
violence against women becomes the focus of social media attention, social media users
themselves certainly call for engaging men and boys in prevention (Maas et al., 2018). There
also are initiatives aimed at mobilising men online, and the chapter turns to these now.

Mobilising men and boys

A third way that men and boys may be engaged online in violence prevention is in efforts to
mobilise them in prevention efforts. There are growing efforts around the world to mobilise
men as violence prevention advocates, in grassroots men’s anti-violence groups and net-
works and national and international campaigns (Flood, 2019a). Where initiatives such as
the White Ribbon Campaign are well established, typically they are accompanied by
websites that promote the campaign. These seek to mobilise men both to take action in their
own lives and to join in collective advocacy.
Established strategies of feminist online activism can be used to recruit and mobilise men
in online spaces, but such work is underdeveloped and most campaigns aimed at men and
boys are focused on offline mobilisation. Nevertheless, there are calls for men to be allies to
women online, whether on social media, in gaming, or in other spaces. One example of a
focused appeal to men on social media is #HowWillIChange, one of the first significant
social media campaigns aimed at men.
The campaign #HowWillIChange was initiated on Twitter by an Australian male
journalist in response to the #MeToo campaign and intended to encourage men to commit
to specific changes in their behaviour to diminish men’s violence against women. One
analysis found that the hashtag prompted a range of responses, from active commitment to
dismantling rape culture, to indignant resistance, to hostile backlash (PettyJohn et al.,
2019). A second analysis found that three-quarters of responses to #HowWillIChange were

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positive, focused on challenging misogynistic and sexist statements, teaching children about
respect and relationships, and so on (Harlow et al., 2021). On the other hand, nearly one-
quarter (22.4%) of responses were negative, and these often echoed the themes of anti-
feminist “men’s rights” advocates or MRAs.
One productive avenue for engaging men and boys online, therefore, is “bystander
intervention”, in which individuals who are not the targets of violence-supportive or sexist
conduct can intervene in order to prevent and reduce harm to others (Flood, 2019a, p. 214).
One challenge here is that, at least in some studies, men are less likely than women to
intervene in abusive and violent behaviour and comments, less likely to do so in productive
ways (Flood, 2019a, pp. 120–122; Hayes, 2019), and their anticipated responses to men’s
online abuse of women are constrained by adversarial heterosexual beliefs and endorsement
of traditional gender roles (Hayes, 2019). Nevertheless, there are fledgling initiatives to
engage young men in intervening, for example, in online homosocial spaces when they
observe harmful gendered norms and behaviours such as sexist and misogynistic “banter”
(Haslop and O’Rourke, 2022).

Tackling misogynist communities

The final stream of violence prevention aimed at men and boys is intervention into
misogynist online communities. Discussion of the breadth of relevant strategies, particularly
legal strategies (Richardson-Self, 2021, pp. 117–129; Tomkinson, Harper, and Attwell,
2020), is beyond the scope of this chapter, and it focuses on extra-legal, online approaches.
Primary prevention strategies seek to lessen the initial development of misogynistic ex-
tremist actors and organisations. Online, this might include promoting the voices and
positions of women in the public sphere, using social norms strategies to promote gender-
equitable norms and lessen the social norms that feed into misogynist extremism, and
disseminating critiques of misogynist ideologies and ideologues (Tomkinson, Harper, and
Attwell, 2020). Positive social norms may be communicated through community standards
on online platforms, online training courses, and anti-hate campaigns teaching people to
recognise and confront misogynist ideologies and practices (Windisch, Wiedlitzka, and
Olaghere, 2021). Media literacy strategies could be used to “inoculate” boys and men
against sexist content and empower them to respond critically (Blaya, 2019, pp. 166–167).
Redirection strategies could be used such that men searching for misogynist and violence-
supportive content are redirected to content that challenges such narratives and provides
links to relevant social services (Windisch, Wiedlitzka, and Olaghere, 2021).
Feminist and anti-violence counterspeech represents a crucial response to misogynist
ideologies and actors. Acts of “speaking back” by individual victims and targets are important
forms of resistance, although limited by wider structures of authority and credibility.
Collective counterspeech is vital, involving social movements, organisations and other col-
lective actors “rebuking injustice en masse” (Richardson-Self, 2021, p. 133). Campaigns
deploying counter-narratives and counter-spaces (Blaya, 2019, pp. 167–169) could be used to
engage men and boys in challenging online misogyny. These are complemented by the
development of technological responses to hate speech such as automated counter-speech
generation (e.g. generating tweets in response to abusive commentary) and automated and
semi-automated moderation (Chaudhary, Saxena, and Meng, 2021).
Secondary prevention strategies are aimed at those already “at risk” of entering misogynist
extremist communities or showing “red flags” for such participation (Harris-Hogan, Barrelle

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and Zammit, 2016), and intervene with support programmes and counter-narratives to
shift their trajectories away from radicalisation (Tomkinson, Harper, and Attwell, 2020). The
field of Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) includes various strategies aimed at deradica-
lisation, at both the secondary and tertiary levels of intervention, and some may be deployed
in online settings.
Finally, tertiary intervention strategies are aimed at those already involved in misogynist
extremism. They are intended to facilitate those already considered extremist to disengage
from a violent extremist network and its violent behaviour (Harris-Hogan, Barrelle and
Zammit, 2016). “Exit” programmes are a well-established strategy in the CVE field
(Tomkinson, Harper, and Attwell, 2020, p. 162) and they could be used for the men who
have joined misogynist extremist networks.

Conclusion
Online initiatives intended to engage men and boys in the prevention of domestic and sexual
violence are burgeoning, but the evidence for their effectiveness is mixed. The field is nas-
cent, many existing interventions are pilots, and we need to know far more about effective
forms of practice.
In order to be effective, online education programmes require many of the same features
as offline programmes: a robust theoretical framework, attention to relevant risk factors,
sufficient dosage, engaging curricula, and integration in a comprehensive approach (Flood,
2019a). Whether on campuses, in schools, or elsewhere, educational interventions ideally are
incorporated into multi-strategy approaches to generate impact, rather than supplanting
more traditional programming (Potter et al., 2020). Similarly, social marketing and com-
munications campaigns must be evidence-based if their reach, relevance and popularity are
to translate into actual changes in social norms (Smith-Darden et al., 2022, p. 240). Large-
scale campaigns that challenge restrictive representations of masculinity and popularise
gender-equitable alternatives are sorely needed. Men and boys also must be mobilised, both
as individual pro-social bystanders and as allies with women in collective anti-violence
advocacy, and the latter is most likely to generate change if online and offline activism
reinforce one another (Washington and Marcus, 2022).
The most significant challenge of all in engaging men and boys perhaps is to prevent and
reduce their patriarchal radicalisation in violence-supportive online spaces. This requires
challenging patriarchal online media, lessening males’ recruitment into misogynist com-
munities and building more gender-equitable cultures both online and offline.

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HASHTAG FEMINISM
IN BRAZIL
Making sense of gender-based violence
with #PrimeiroAssédio
Gabriela Loureiro

Introduction
In the past 10 years, feminist hashtags have been gathering momentum in Brazil, receiving
significant coverage from mainstream and alternative media channels and at times rever-
berating in street protests and spaces of power, such as parliamentary sessions and the
creation of new laws. Hashtags that emphasise women’s sexual agency, focusing on the
body and resistance to violence, have been particularly successful in reaching the attention
of wider publics. For example, in 2014, the hashtag #EuNãoMereçoSerEstuprada
(#IDon’tDeserveBeingRaped)1 went viral with 44,000 tweets in a few days, leading to a
meeting between the creator of the hashtag, Nana Queiroz, and the first woman president of
Brazil, Dilma Rousseff. Coupled with hashtags, feminist protests led thousands to the
streets. For example, the Marcha das Vadias (Brazil’s Slut Walk), has featured marches in
23 cities of Brazil since 2012, and the mobilisation Pela Vida das Mulheres (For Women’s
Lives) saw thousands take to the streets in 2015 to protest against a new law restricting even
further the already restricted access to abortion in the country. As Hollanda (2018) defines,
there has been a “feminist explosion” (as reinforced by the title of her book Explos
o
Feminista) in Brazil, with a proliferation of feminist groups and demonstrations, articu-
lating historical struggles whilst raising new issues to be addressed.
The hashtag analysed in this chapter, #PrimeiroAssédio (#FirstHarassment), is part of
this feminist explosion and must be read contextually, considering the rise of digitally
mediated forms of political articulation and its transversality between private and public
borders. Coupled with other campaigns, #PrimeiroAssédio had significant repercussions,
including broadcast debates and civic organising, leading to a new law regarding sexual
harassment in public spaces. In the first part of this chapter, #PrimeiroAssédio will be
explained and contextualised, as it must be read as part of a broader political context
marked by the amplification of feminist visibility in Brazil that led to the naming of 2015 as
“the year of Women’s Spring” (Grillo, Oliveira and Buscato, 2015). Subsequently, I present
an analysis2 of the hashtag drawing both on interviews with those who used the hashtag,
and on Facebook posts which made use of it, demonstrating how reflections about gender-
based violence were made possible through sharing and reading each other’s stories online,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-55 501

 Gabriela Loureiro

challenging public and private boundaries and allowing a space of authorisation to speak
about topics previously deemed “taboo” or “unspeakable”.

The continuum of hashtags and street marches in Brazil

Instead of generalising feminist hashtags as an all-encompassing phenomenon that happens
online, going viral and fading, my argument is that they must be understood historically,
contextually and intersectionally. Contextualising hashtags within the political landscape of
the places in which they are first generated and gain traction is thus vital in terms of un-
derstanding the emotional and material circumstances that influence participation, and
provides important insights into the local, current structures and renewing cycles of
oppression that participants face. In the case of #PrimeiroAssédio, the hashtag was created
in 2015, the year that was later celebrated by scholars and the press as paradigmatic in terms
of feminist mobilising in the country (Grillo, Oliveira and Buscato, 2015). Whether this
framing reflects overly celebratory views of hashtags or truly mirrors the political events of
that year is up for debate and beyond the scope of this chapter. Nevertheless, as argued by
other Brazilian scholars (Almeida, 2020; Brito, 2017; Reis, 2017), the hashtag can be situ-
ated within other forms of political organising that worked as a collective attempt to
reframe sexual violence and defend women’s bodily autonomy in terms of culture and the
law, leading to important discussions in the public sphere.
One of the main threats at the time was the parliamentary discussion of the law project PL
5069–2013, authored by Eduardo Cunha, a conservative politician then occupying the role of
leader of Congress, which restricted the already highly circumscribed access to abortion that
women have in the country.3 In their studies of feminist hashtags in 2015, Reis (2017) and
Brito (2017) call attention to the rise of conservative backlashes in Brazilian politics in that
year, mainly headed by Cunha. The 2014 elections gave rise to the most conservative for-
mation of the National Congress since 1964 (Estadão, 2014), the year of the coup d’etat that
led to 21 years of military dictatorship in Brazil. The new formation of the Congress was
marked by the triumph of a coalition known as BBB, referring to bullets, beef and Bible
(“bala, boi e Bíblia” in Portuguese) – that is, the armed forces, agricultural businesses and
evangelical churches. This new far-right block – which included Jair Bolsonaro, the most-
voted for congressman in Rio de Janeiro in the 2014 elections and elected president of Brazil in
2018 – was trying to push legislation against the demarcation of indigenous land, abortion
rights, labour rights, gun control and gay marriage. It also advanced pro-deforestation pro-
posals (Cavalcanti, 2017) and sought to reduce the age of criminal responsibility – a move
critics argued would result in the increased incarceration of young Black men.
The new law PL 5069/2013 was approved by the Justice and Constitution Commission of
the House of Commons on 21 October 2015, the same day that the hashtag #PrimeiroAssédio
was popularised on social media. As a reaction, feminists created events on social media to
gather participants physically in the streets of different cities of Brazil, particularly on a
massive scale in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, the largest cities of the country. Thousands
of people marched against Cunha, denouncing the “sexist coup” against Dilma Rousseff
which was facilitated by Cunha and resulted in her impeachment in 2016. Thus, the themes of
sexual violence and reproductive rights that are historically part of feminist struggles for
women’s bodily autonomy (struggles which are morally condemned by Christian funda-
mentalism) were highly visible and the subject of much public discussion at the time when the
hashtag was created.

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Thus, feminist mobilisations in Brazil in 2015 must be situated as part of varied bat-
tlegrounds taking place in the Congress, the code of law, on the streets, on social media and
in the press between feminist activists and far right-wing politicians and Christian funda-
mentalist figures. While feminist organisers counted on massive engagement on social media
and a considerable level of support in the mainstream press, this visibility was used by their
opponents to justify the need to secure conservative Christian values before what they
present as the emerging threat of progressive political expansion. Luna and Owsiany (2019)
note that legislative spaces have become a notorious stage for public and heated debates
about moral values, particularly “controversial” themes that challenge the idea of a secular
state in Brazil. The moral battlefields involving conservative religion and feminism are not
new and there is a growing body of research focused on the disputes between religious
groups and women’s reproductive rights in Brazil (Gomes, 2009; Luna, 2013, 2015; Luna
and Owsiany, 2019; Miguel, Biroli and Mariano, 2017). So, whilst hashtags that “go viral”
entail political subjectivities that broad publics can be sympathetic to, this visibility is also
used as fuel by conservatives aiming to restrict social minorities’ rights.
While the moral debate is beyond the scope of this chapter, the scholarship mentioned
above offers relevant insights for the purpose of contextualising the political climate in 2015
and beyond. #PrimeiroAssédio, the hashtag which is the subject of this chapter, operates in
a context of intense, heated discussion centred on moral values that were used by both
feminist and far-right Christian groups to create validation within the public sphere. There
was a critical power imbalance in which the Congress was dominated by conservative fig-
ures and feminist groups reacted by trying to create instances of agency online and in the
streets by asserting the importance of protecting basic rights, such as access to the morning-
after pill in cases of rape. This particular affective background created a sense of urgency to
defend the already limited resources in place to protect women’s reproductive agency. At
the same time, feminists took space in the streets and on social media using hashtags,
demonstrating a highly visible resistance to conservative backlashes.
Additionally, as Almeida argues (2020), #PrimeiroAssédio must be understood as part of
a collective feminist struggle in demanding sexual citizenship (Carrara, 2015), questioning
sexual moralities and asserting young girls’ personhoods, that led to the creation of a new
law for cases of “importunação sexual” (“sexual importuning”). The new law classified as a
crime “practicing against someone non-consented libidinous acts in order to satisfy their
lust or that of a third party”, including acts formerly named as catcalling, wolf-whistling,
street hassling or other sorts of abuse, which nowadays are placed under the umbrella of the
collectively crafted definition of sexual harassment. #PrimeiroAssédio must be understood
as part of a collective mobilisation encompassing several feminist campaigns that were
fighting for cultural changes in regard to bodily autonomy and sexual citizenship and which
led to the production of a new law, fuelling hopes that these campaigns could, indeed, lead
to significant changes. Rage against gendered violence and hope for a better future based on
gendered solidarity are themes that are present throughout the interviews and posts shared
in this chapter and can be understood as the emotional repository from which the hashtag
was generated.

Digital consciousness-raising
The hashtag #PrimeiroAssédio was created in 2015 by a Brazilian feminist non-profit group
called Think Olga, as a reaction to abusive and sexually explicit tweets directed at Valentina

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Schulz – a 12-year-old contestant on the country’s Junior MasterChef TV show. Some tweets,
for example, called Valentina a “slut” and asked, “If there is consent, is it paedophilia?” In
response, the Twitter account of the organisation Think Olga invited women to share their
first experiences of harassment using the hashtag #PrimeiroAssédio. According to the orga-
nisation, the goal was to use the descriptions of sexual harassment to demonstrate the en-
tanglement between violent comments and sexual abuse against minors (de Faria, 2015b).
Four days later, more than 82,000 stories had been shared on Facebook, Twitter and other
social media platforms. Additionally, the Google Trends report highlighted the hashtag as one
of the most popular search terms on the Internet in Brazil in 2015, with more than 11 million
searches (Google Trends, 2015). The hashtag was ignited on Twitter as #PrimeiroAssédio
yet was soon surpassed on Facebook via the variation of #MeuPrimeiroAssédio
(#MyFirstHarassment), adding the possessive pronoun “my” to the hashtag. Rapidly, the
hashtags became a trending topic on Twitter and multiple media vehicles covered the cam-
paign and interviewed Juliana de Faria – the creator of the hashtag and director of Think
Olga. Later that year, the hashtag was designated one of the reasons why 2015 was the “year
of the Women’s Spring” in Brazil by Época –a then leading magazine in the country.
Differently to the initial orientation of #MeToo some two years later – where Alyssa
Milano invited users to simply identify themselves as having experienced sexual assault or
harassment – #PrimeiroAssédio was based on sharing the detail of the posters’ first ex-
periences of sexual harassment. Originated in a more clearly activist space than the
Hollywood version of #MeToo, in inviting participants to share details of the story and
defining it as harassment, #PrimeiroAssédio allowed Brazilian actors to articulate stories of
sexual harassment whilst conveying the recognition of past experiences of violence as part of
a structural social problem rather than simply a personal story. The analysis of the hashtags
demonstrates how participants take advantage of the immediacy and visibility of digital
media campaigns to share experiences of sexual violence, paving the way for a process of
digital consciousness-raising and helping to shed light on the structural and collective forces
operating behind what could be misunderstood as an individual and isolated event.
In total, in this research project, eight semi-structured interviews were conducted and 70
public hashtagged posts were collected on Facebook using the network’s search engine. In
order to maintain a less intrusive approach to digital data collection, only posts configured
as public by private individuals were sourced using Facebook’s search engine using the
search terms #PrimeiroAssédio and #MeuPrimeiroAssédio (with the variant “my” at the
front) in January 2017. Only original posts (not including other users’ comments and
shares) published during the timeframe when the hashtag went viral were considered, that is,
from 21 October 2015 until 1 November 2015, resulting in 70 posts. Facebook was chosen
over Twitter due to the network’s allowance of a greater number of words per post.4 A
spreadsheet was created assessing details of the post and including the original link and the
link to the author’s profile. Interviewees were drawn from the authors of the sample of
hashtagged posts analysed and were contacted directly using Facebook. All interviewees
still had hashtagged posts publicly available via Facebook and were located through still-
live links to their profiles recorded on the spreadsheet.
Both interviews and posts were analysed using feminist poststructuralist discourse
analysis (FPDA). As a feminist approach to the analysis of how people negotiate their
identities, relationships and positions (Baxter, 2003), FPDA is helpful in considering how
participants locate themselves in mixed discourses, allowing me to uncover intersecting axes
of differentiation among informants in their process of Facebook sharing, perpetuating

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and/or contesting hierarchical power relations. During my analysis, the most common
elements that emerged out of #PrimeiroAssédio discourses included: who the aggressor was
and the relationship the participant had with the aggressor; whether or not the post could be
understood as describing feelings, and if so, the feelings being described; whether and how
solidarity was expressed with other victims; and whether or not comments were made with
regards to the experience (including, potentially, the difficulty) of writing the post. Many of
these details can be traced back to the first tweets launching the campaign, authored by
Juliana de Faria and shared on Think Olga’s Twitter page:

My #firstharassment happened when I was 11. It did not stop there. I was harassed in
the streets, in the tube, in the school by strangers and by those who should protect me
(@ThinkOlga, 21 October 2015)

The following tweet, published by Think Olga again as part of the initial thread of
#PrimeiroAssédio, is a critique of the restriction of free access to public spaces that women
face in Brazil:

Since childhood, we are told that public space does not belong to us. And if we try to
take it back, there will be retaliation #firstharassment.

After that, Think Olga mentions de Faria’s TED Talk (YouTube, 2015a), in which the
creator of the organisation speaks about her first experiences of harassment. After
describing an episode of street harassment, she says: “I was horrified, of course. I would
always feel intimidated and humiliated. I felt fear and disgust”. The description of feelings
was a recurrent theme in the 70 posts analysed, with participants naming what had hap-
pened to them in relation to the emotions felt and their embodied experiences. The naming
was accompanied by a feeling of togetherness as well as a feeling of being authorised to
speak about what had, up until that point, been understood as unspeakable. This repetition
of information led me to categorise the posts under the following subthemes: description of
feelings (n = 33), embodiment of feelings (n = 9), definitions of sexual violence that vary
between harassment and rape (n = 48), authorisation to speak (n = 50) and a collective of
women’s voices (n = 33). This categorisation demonstrates that the focus of the hashtag is
registering different forms of abuse and creating a sense of authorisation to speak as part of
a collective, a feminist network of solidarity.
Whereas feelings can be present in subtle and varied ways in narratives about sexual
violence, the analysis of public Facebook posts with the hashtag #PrimeiroAssédio drew
attention to the frank description of emotions and of the embodiment of emotions. For
example, posts included metaphors or phrases that highlighted emotions or bodily states
connected to emotions, such as: “scared to death”, “I was never so afraid in my life”, “I felt
nauseous” or “too painful”. One participant used the Facebook feature: “how are you
feeling?” to declare, “feeling sad”. While I recognise that working with written words
involves ambiguities, power relations and contradictions, texts were considered descriptive
of emotions only when they were not mere descriptions of events and when they explicitly
referenced affective experience. The recurrence of certain emotional states (namely, fear,
shame and guilt) is indicative of a common narrative that created general parameters for the
form of expressing oneself, which can be helpful with individuals disclosing further emo-
tions and bodily reactions they never had the opportunity to express before. Such feelings of

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togetherness and authorisation to speak were reaffirmed in the interviews, in which parti-
cipants unpack how realisations about gendered violence derived from reading and sharing
about other participants’ emotions and stories – the topic which will be covered next.

Making sense of sexual violence

The eventfulness of recent years in Brazil emerged, somewhat inevitably, several times in the
interviews, particularly when I asked participants about what was happening in their lives
before and during their engagement in the hashtag campaign. For instance, five interviewees
mentioned other feminist campaigns circulating before #PrimeiroAssédio and the political
climate in which women’s bodily autonomy and reproductive rights were under threat.
Participants thus asserted that there was no “a-ha moment” that made them realise they had
been subjected to abuse, but a sequence of events that led to more clarity about what had
happened to them.
Most often, participants had a previous acknowledgement that a form of abuse had
happened, which points to one of the major strengths of #PrimeiroAssédio: the sense of
authorisation to speak as part of a collective of voices. For example, this interviewee whom
I will name Andressa,5 who already had an affinity with feminism, saw the hashtag as a
political act of a collective nature:

It was a very important moment, collectively, in terms of politics. These things always
touch me because I believe in the collective; it is impossible not to be affected.
However, there is also a personal process that led me to publish; a moment of
rediscovery as a woman, of understanding my body, of my 45 years, with therapy too.
From [my participation in] this hashtag, [I noticed] specific acts of violence stored in
me had left such a mark. That is what made me publish. I had carried these things
inside without realising how much they matter.

In her post, Andressa lists a series of what she calls “harassments” in chronological order
stressing that it is only now, when she is in her 40s, that she is actively dealing with the abuses
she was subjected to throughout much of her life. The emphasis demonstrates a signalling of
the understanding that women internalise oppressions as part of their everyday life, something
that “simply happens”, and which is not widely discussed or acknowledged: “harassments that
I endured and was always silent about”. Later in the interview, Andressa explains:

Until now, this was marked in me, in my way of positioning myself, of being in the
world. The creation of my consciousness involved grouping these stories that were
spread out in my mind – who knows where in my memories – and I realised how much
they had a mark on me. So from that work, I learned a different way to liberate
myself: not from the violence itself but to see this was important and to look at this
and see how much it has affected me was important. So from this point onwards, I
would be able to have a different relationship with it.

Andressa’s reflection offers valuable insights into the ways in which experiences are stored,
encapsulated in memories that seem unavailable for participants in the first instance. The
memories seem to be kept “who knows where”, but through the process of becoming
conscious of the experiences and their effects on her through therapy, the hashtag and her

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work, Andressa hopes to find a way to liberate herself, using the #PrimeiroAssédio as a
vehicle for that liberation. Her post becomes then a “sporadic burst of energy” (Morris,
1998, p.xiii) that is not random or spontaneous but builds on a long process of years of
therapy, feminist activism and ownership of her story.
This moment of recognition of memories of abuse and a sudden realisation of its rele-
vance is present in other participants’ accounts as well, including that of Luana:

This story that I spoke about in the hashtag, it was not a conscious trauma, you know?
It was something that was there, and I never thought about this “What was my first
harassment?” Then you review all of them, right? The day before yesterday this
happened and off you go. And I think it was this, “Wow, I have forgotten about this!”
Then, I remembered. And then, I spoke.

Reading others’ testimonies, Luana became aware of the presence of gendered violence in the
fabric of everyday life and refuses to remain silent, unearthing her own story and renaming her
past experiences as sexual harassment. She explicitly guided me through her process of fem-
inist consciousness-raising: the review of personal experiences in light of the sexism recounted
in the stories of others; the remembrance and examination of episodes from the perspective of
the scope and extent of gendered violence as an ongoing, quotidian and systemic reality; the
speaking up phase; and finally seeking shelter in a community. Another critical feature of
Luana’s interview is the role of memory and how one brings forgotten events to the surface for
a new evaluation. Luana speaks about the ways in which such events are buried in memory
and have to be intentionally excavated by an individual who is willing and determined to
reflect upon them. The forgetting of abuse is not due to an individual’s lack of care but is
rather part of an apparatus through which the systemic nature of gendered violence is denied
and normalised as part of what one must go through in life.
An important strategy of feminist activism is resistance to what is called “active
forgetting”– that is, the “struggle to keep the memory of hidden, every day, and private
violence fresh, public, and continuous” (Bold, Knowles and Leach, 2002, p. 127). According
to Bold and Leach (2002), active forgetting is part of the social control mechanisms that
work hegemonically to naturalise behaviours and attitudes to the point that they disappear
from consciousness and the public record. A way to resist this assimilation is through the
conversion of individual memory into collective memory. The importance of transforming
personal experiences into collective experiences is exemplified in the next fragment of our
conversation, in which I asked Luana if she had an epiphany. She denies that it was a
discovery and calls it giradinha instead – a Brazilian expression that refers to the turning of
the key that unlocks the door:

I did not have an epiphany, but there was a turning. I thought about many other
situations. (…) Walking on the streets, every day. Now (…) I cannot unsee it.

The excerpt above shows how the hashtag #PrimeiroAssédio triggered potent reflections on
a personal scale in terms of piecing together various definitions of sexual harassment. In the
case of Luana and Andressa, there is a common theme of continuous resurfacing of buried
memories, sometimes with the help of others (therapists or fellow feminists), sometimes by
oneself, and finally with the help of a collective of voices that virtually exert a pull to bring
more stories to the surface.

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Another participant, Antonia, also speaks about this decisive reflective moment of un-
earthing and what it meant in terms of her personal life:

I think many women thought they were the only ones to go through this and the
hashtag made them see it was not like that. I realised that eight out of ten friends of
mine have gone through something like this. I realised it was important to make this
visible. I had a moment of reflection: I realised that I had lived many harassments and
then, I could identify the first one. And I had not realised it was harassment before.

Antonia’s experience resonates with Luana’s account of her recollection of events that could
be understood as harassment under this new perspective, giving new meaning to other ex-
periences and areas of her life. After analysing 70 posts with the #PrimeiroAssédio hashtag, it
became clear that posters were not only sharing stories of abuse and trauma – often affirming
that they were “breaking the silence” and sharing stories they’d never told anybody before –
but were also using the hashtag to reconstruct their stories and, as a consequence, were
making meaning out of past events and reviewing their effects. Hence, in their use of the
hashtag, participants were able to reconstruct stories, reconnecting fragments of events and
situations, in a newfound ability to identify their experiences as harassment or sexual assault
and to visualise how that violence has affected them. This awareness flourishes through
identification with other participants’ accounts of violations, which helped them to define
sexual harassment in their own terms. It is a process of developing self-reflexive speech and
breaking the silence collectively and individually at the same time. The hashtag then becomes
a drive for participants to understand what happened to them and to share their stories on
social media in order to raise awareness about sexual violence.

Conclusion
In this chapter, I have contextualised #PrimeiroAssédio within the recent developments of
feminist activism in Brazil, showing the varied repercussions of this form of political
articulation and its effects on research participants. This context, marked by strong visibility
of discussions regarding sexual violence and reproductive rights, was influential in parti-
cipants’ decisions to speak up, leading to feeling an urge to resist gendered violence and
becoming part of a collective of voices rising up against tangible retrogress in terms of
women’s bodily autonomy. The understanding that gendered violence is not acceptable and
must be contested coupled with feelings of anger and hope represents the emotional
repository where the hashtag was generated and gained traction. In the interviews, in which
participants were able to express their processes of sharing in more depth, the hashtag
became an opportune moment to share personal stories through a sense of authorisation to
speak afforded by the collective aspect of the hashtag – a moment when thousands of
women were sharing their first harassment story together.
The hashtag #PrimeiroAssédio thus became a means via which women unearthed stories
of gendered violence and reflected on the internalisation of violence as something that is
“part of life”. In a digital process of consciousness-raising, #PrimeiroAssédio serves as a
review of personal experiences in light of sexism through the identification with the stories
of others. This led to the remembrance and examination of the episode at collective and
individual levels, challenging private and public boundaries by illuminating stories once
deemed “taboo” or “unspeakable”. The common-place aspect of the stories paved the way

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for the understanding of sexual harassment not as an isolated, individual event in one’s life,
but as part of the structural nature of gendered violence. Sexual harassment was understood
then not as a phenomenon that simply is, but as one that is made to be. Thus, whilst
wielding visibility and social impact due to the high number of posts, the hashtag became a
result of thousands of individual collaborations between participants who uncover very
personal affairs and offer their stories as a means to prompt others to reflect on violence
from a social and public perspective, instead of an individual and private one.

Notes
1 All translations are my own.
2 The data and analysis shared in this paper are part of my PhD research project “Embodiment,
emotions and collective struggle: hashtag feminism as digital consciousness-raising in Brazil”, carried
out at the University of West London and funded by the Vice-Chancellor’s PhD Scholarship.
3 Abortion in Brazil is considered a crime against human life, being prohibited in all circumstances
by articles 124–127 of the Penal Code. There are currently three exceptions: in cases of rape; when
it is necessary to save the pregnant person’s life; and under circumstances of anencephaly, a
condition in which the foetus develops without a brain and life is not viable. Conservative poli-
ticians, including but not limited to Cunha, have been trying to eliminate the first exception and
prevent women who were raped from having an abortion.
4 Twitter raised the number of characters from 140 to 280 in 2017 after the hashtag went viral.
5 All participants of the research project are anonymised in this chapter.

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 47
AFTER THE AFFECT
The tenuous leadership of viral feminists
Angela Towers

New feminist responses to sexual violence have been enabled by the affordances of digital
communications and social media platforms, including but not limited to feminist blogs,
hashtags, petitions and digital media projects. While increasingly varied, interventions of
this kind have often been collectively conceived of as digital feminist activism (MacDonald
et al., 2021). These developments have coincided with, or ushered in, a rise in the visibility of
feminist ideas, and a resurgence of feminism in the mainstream, described as “popular
feminism” (Banet-Weiser, 2018), and this period has been labelled by some as constituting a
“fourth wave of feminism” (Munro, 2013; Chamberlain, 2017; Rivers, 2017).
This chapter draws on a subsection of case studies from an oral history project with women
who have prompted digital feminist interventions that experienced virality, or a high level of
visibility, between 2010 and 2017, exploring how participants come to be positioned as leaders
through various processes. This oral history project aims to elucidate the various subjectivities
and relations these moments give rise to by examining long-form accounts of feminist events
(Rentschler and Thrift, 2015). It takes this period as a distinctive moment which requires
historicising because it generates new relationships between feminist work and the politics of
visibility. By privileging the voices of key women activists, this chapter opens out an analysis
of the lived tensions between visibility and the feminist project of resistance. Here it follows in
a long feminist tradition of both centring women’s voices and ensuring that the activism of a
generation is not forgotten (Jolly and Roseneil, 2012), and crucially, offering a challenge to the
“sanctioned public memories” (Stephens, 2010, p. 87) of these highly mediated feminist
projects, with sometimes global reach and popular interest.
Through a series of semi-structured interviews, participants from 12 case studies were
encouraged to tell the story of their interventions, reflecting on their evolution before, during,
and after the moment of virality or extreme visibility1. The case studies featured in this chapter
include IC Change, Je Suis Indestructible, Project Unbreakable and The Everyday Sexism
Project. IC Change is a UK-based campaign and online petition lobbying the government to
ratify the 2012 Istanbul Convention, the “strongest and most comprehensive legal framework
that exists to tackle violence against women and girls” (IC Change, n.d.), which gained global
attention in 2016 when one of its founders, Becca Bunce, received an accolade from former US
President Barack Obama. Je Suis Indestructible is a French-Canadian campaign against

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-56 511

 Angela Towers

sexual violence and rape culture, set up in 2013 by Tanya St Jean, which began as a Facebook
post and a website collecting testimonies relating to experiences of sexual violence and became
a pivotal campaign group within Québec. Project Unbreakable is a US-based photography
project on Tumblr, featuring over 600 survivors of rape and sexual assault, created in 2011 by
student Grace Brown, which gained global attention, appearing in news media across the
world. Finally, the UK-based The Everyday Sexism Project, created by Laura Bates in 2012,
began as a website for the public to share their experiences of sexism and has since collected
over 50,000 stories from across the world.
Rather than attempting to articulate the significance of these interventions by way of impact,
the nuances and potentialities of which have perhaps been best understood by proponents of
Black feminist thought (Loza, 2014; Jackson, 2016; Clark-Parsons, 2019; Jackson, Bailey and
Welles, 2020; MacDonald et al., 2021), this research focuses on the women who initiated these
projects. I attend to the way these events take shape as an affective practice (Wetherell, 2012),
and further understand this not as a linear process but as a space of struggle, drawing attention
to new challenges feminist activists face. Discursively narrating these public archives of feeling
(Cvetkovich, 2003) can help us understand this period in feminist history in which these feminist
events have become quotidian as a collective response to sexual and gender-based violence.
This chapter is structured across three sections exploring how participants come to be
positioned as leaders symbolically, discursively and politically. Firstly, I examine how the
affects which underpin viral feminist events give rise to a relation of leadership between my
participants and the feminist counter-public, through “affective solidarity” (Hemmings,
2012) and potentially as a route to “effective voice” (Couldry, 2010). Secondly, I explore the
tensions between this tenuous leadership position and the commodification and celeb-
rification (Taylor, 2014) of them as individuals. The final section is concerned with the
fleeting political power of the visibility they experience through their interventions, and how
they attempt to leverage this in pursuit of feminist aims.

Be my voice: grassroots leadership in feminist events

This project has helped so many who needed a voice. Thank you for all you have done
(Comment from Unbreakable Facebook page).

When there is a place to go with these experiences — and feminism is about giving
women places to go—the accounts tend to come out: a “drip, drip” becomes a flood. It
is like a tap has been loosened, allowing what has been held back to flow. Feminism:
the releasing of a pressure valve
(Ahmed, 2017, p. 30).

The Facebook page for Project Unbreakable is replete with comments like the one above,
where supporters embrace the empathetic recognition, witnessing (Boler, 1999) and voice
they felt the project offered them. An aspect of the phenomena of viral feminism which has
received little focus is the way in which leadership is implicit in the affective relations which
underpin these events. In the context of neoliberal societies, viral digital feminist inter-
ventions have emerged as sites where individuals feel their “speaking out” (Ferreday, 2017)
can be effective as part of a networked collective, or as Ahmed suggests, as a “place to go”.
Here, my participants are positioned as leaders and spokespeople by the public, through
various affective relations of trust, hope, “affective solidarity” (Hemmings, 2012) and,

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potentially, as a route to “effective voice” (Couldry, 2010). Many interviewees reported

feeling unprepared for the visibility of virality, the sheer force of its affective power and,
conversely, the challenges and responsibilities that they would be compelled to take on.
From the moment Project Unbreakable became active Grace Brown began to receive a
high volume of correspondence from survivors who wanted to share their stories:

I really did not anticipate the response at all. The plan was just to photograph a small
handful of people, maybe fifteen, to create a small body of work and then move on to
the next project.

Then the more people that I posted or photographed and then shared their images, the
more others wanted to participate. So, it kind of snowballed.

It was a lot. It was overwhelming (…) because suddenly this thing that I had created
just resonated (…) suddenly it went from I was just a random person on the streets of
New York to getting all these emails of people wanting to participate (…) it was very,
very heavy and it was a lot for me to take on. But I was definitely up for the challenge
and I felt so passionate about the work that I was willing to push through the com-
plexity of it.

Here we can see how fervour for this validation is channelled through the project, like a
pressure valve, with hundreds of survivors requesting to contribute, prompting a heavy
sense of responsibility for Brown, who reasoned: “you’re holding people’s most delicate
moments in your hands”. Further, in creating this space, she also found herself in a position
of relative authority:

I got emails from the start of people being like, ‘Here’s my story, was this rape?’ and
I’m like, ‘I can’t answer that for you.’ (…) it’s just questions a 23-year-old couldn’t
answer.

This suggests the public and the survivor community that began to coalesce around the
project saw Brown as a figure who could provide them with clarity about sexual assault
and their experiences, a position of responsibility she was not anticipating, and came to
struggle with.
When reflecting on the beginning of her online project Laura Bates describes a similar
sense of responsibility emerging as the submissions to the site began to come in:

It was really overwhelming, I think. It was very moving, often it was upsetting. A lot
of them were more severe than I’d originally anticipated (…) It felt like a big sense of
responsibility after a while, a sense of actually people are trusting me to do something
with this and I need to do more than just have it sit here on a website.

Speaking of her work during IC Change, Becca Bunce reflected that after a certain amount
of success, she began to feel pressure at being perceived, from the outside, as a “person who
could get something done”. This sense of duty as an expected leader demanded substantial
affective labour, here she explains how this demand was significant, and how she eventually
came to terms it:

513
 Angela Towers

I think one of the things that I was struck by was the demand for more is always there.
It was never enough and it can never be enough in the face of such violence. The bit
that I hope I can get to is (…) that I did my bit, and if I did nothing else in my life but
that bit (…) that’s enough.

The unpaid labour behind digitally enabled feminist activism can be monotonous, time-
consuming and largely hidden (Mendes, 2019), but often it is also an unexpected and over-
whelming responsibility. The emotional aspects and impacts of this work are less well-known.
Overwhelmingly, the study’s participants suffered eventual burnout. This is perhaps
unsurprising when we look at these experiences and see how the stakes become intensely high,
and the demand for leadership emerges, in the contemporary context of digital activism.

Feminist leaders, icons and celebrities: commodifying viral feminism and activists as
disciplining subjects
A common media response to viral feminist projects in these case studies is the “Meet the
leader” (Sternadori, 2019) or “feminist hero” narrative, where we are invited to familiarise
ourselves with the novel figurehead. Multiple participants in this study were subject to these
specific kinds of news pieces (Smith, 2012; Dazed, 2014; Batchelor, 2016). When discussing
her relationship with news media Tanya St Jean explained:

there was a lot of media attention at first and, to be true, I don’t like that. I don’t like
to be the centre of attention, I like the project to be in front and it was really important
to me. So when people were asking about my story I was never really answering that
because this is not the point.

Here we can see how she actively pushed back against what she saw as “sensationalist”
coverage of her intervention, namely that which focused on her own personal story as a
victim of sexual violence. She identified that this kind of framing, around her personally,
was a barrier to coverage that centred the project itself. Similarly, she is explicit in her
efforts to maintain the project as a collective, rather than being seen as a sole leader:

It’s not my project (…) I always say it’s not my project, it’s our project because, yeah,
it started with my story but it’s our story. So it was really important that it was a
collaborative.

Bates describes her experiences dealing with news coverage as a crucial learning curve. She recounts
multiple occasions where journalistic coverage centred on her, at the cost of the project:

There was one interview for a major national newspaper quite early on and the
interview was great but (…) the picture editor (…) said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, it doesn’t
really matter. The main thing is to make you look as sexy as possible.’ That was what
he said. I was like, ‘This is just so painfully ironic. Have you at all read what the article
is about and what the whole point of this is?’

But then it just wasn’t a one-off. I did another photo shoot for a newspaper where the
photographer said, ‘To be honest with you, because you’re blonde and young and

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pretty they’re going to cut out most of what you said in the interview and just put a
massive photo of you instead because that’s what the readers will really be interested
in.’ There was loads of that.

An obvious explanation for this is that traditional news media has been considered as
having a somewhat parasitic relationship with social media. Here, publications work to
share in the visibility these feminist events accrue on digital communications platforms,
attempting to commodify the affects which drive them (Jarrett, 2022, p. 43). Within this
practice, certain representations and discourses emerge in part because they are clickable –
easy to sell to the public and encourage audience engagement which is a key commodity
within a market governed by profit, competition and consumption. Through this “economy
of visibility” (Banet-Weiser, 2018) a synthesised, non-threatening, stylised version of fem-
inist politics is presented. From here we can see this terrain of negotiation that participants
found themselves in, the limited frames through which their work was able to appear in
mainstream media, and the specific barriers to effective coverage they encountered.
Relatedly, participants often found themselves being drawn on by media circuits to take
part in broadcast debates, radio shows and to give comments to magazines. In doing so they
become spokespeople for feminism-at-large, being asked to comment on contemporary
events and to represent feminist public opinion, opportunities they report feeling obligated
to take, as part of their sense of duty to the projects and publics they have created. This
dynamic, which others such as Boyle (2019) have identified, can have the effect of causing
feminism to be seen as an expression of opinion open to rebuke, rather than a source of
expertise, and potentially disavows the complexity of feminist knowledge.
Under these conditions of limited representation, the line between being seen as a leader
and an idol can be very slim. Participants are further iconified through various awards, for
example, Bates has been named a Woman of the Year by The Sunday Times, Cosmopolitan,
and Red magazine, similarly in 2012 Brown was named one of Jezebel’s “25 Up and Coming
Women”, a practice which has the effect of subjectivising them as feminist celebrities
(Taylor, 2014). In a particularly interesting development, Bunce was selected for a US
Ambassador’s young leaders project, and given a special mention by then President Barack
Obama, in a speech in which he gave a “shout-out” to 6 notable “leaders” in the UK (Ailes,
2016). We can see how Bunce tried to use this event as an opportunity for exposure. At the
time it happened, a BBC news article reported her reaction: “After Obama mentioned me, I
spent the next few hours trying to direct people to our campaign. And of course, I just
tweeted @POTUS, thanks for the shout out!” (Bunce, quoted in Ailes, 2016). Looking
back, she identifies having complex feelings about it:

It was amazing to get it; it felt a bit early on in terms of the work that we’d done with
IC Change. If anything it opened up all the doors but there was a crushing (…) there’s
this whole thing of leadership within a movement that can separate you and make you
into a false idol.

Like others, Bunce consistently narrates herself as part of a collective rather than as a single
leader, however, this event inevitably singled her out from the group, which, rather than a
moment of celebration, became a moment of idolisation and isolation.
Their experiences illustrate the various ways in which the visibility they garner is used to
boost the profile of media publications, and diplomatic programmes, which in some cases

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do very little to assist with the intervention’s objectives. As Bunce explains, contrary to the
size of the spotlight placed on her when the then President of the world’s biggest imperial
power labelled her a leader, the reality was quite different when it came to resources
accumulated for the work. Ultimately “the campaign ran off five grand over five years”.
The discursive constructions of leadership that emerge around these events are con-
sistent with postfeminism’s pernicious focus on individualism, which holds “white,
Western, heterosexual, cis-gendered women” (MacDonald et al., 2021, p. 7) as its ideal
subjects. Further, this individualising narrative implicitly promotes the false meritocratic
notion that with the right amount of commitment and hard work, anything is possible,
including significant social change. The feminist leader emerges as resilient (Gill and
Orgad, 2018) and resourceful, and crucially, as a disciplining subject in coverage of these
events, making it seem as if the answer to systemic social problems lies in individual
solutions, and that feminist social change is freely available to those who work hard
enough. The interviewees in this study were aware of the ways contemporary feminist
events can be open to commodification and depoliticisation, through the individualising
discourses and celebrification enacted in both traditional and digital media. Their testi-
monies illustrate their struggle over the constant tension between visibility and power, as
one participant noted “I knew there was a route which involved book deals or influen-
cing” something which she actively avoided, understanding how the influence of market
commodification would potentially stifle her capacity to speak and diminish her control
of the messaging.

Leveraging the power of viral feminism: visibility as a political asset, turning moments into
movements
While some participants foreground the social role of storytelling (Plummer, 2002) and
the associated affects of community and healing (Page and Arcy, 2020) that their inter-
ventions have allowed, others are concerned that voice in this sense cannot be equated
with power (Kay, 2020). In the latter case, activists understand the need to leverage the
visibility and attention they have accumulated as an asset and to mobilise collective voices
in traditionally political ways. As aforementioned, it was important for Bates that the
testimonies she received did more than simply sit on her website, similarly St Jean em-
phasised that “Je Suis Indestructible started from a movement on the internet but it was
really, really important to us that the movement didn’t only stay on the internet but also
came to life in real life”.
In some cases, the visibility they achieved opened political spaces for them. When dis-
cussing the work she began to undertake as a result of the campaign’s rising profile, Bates
explains:

Right from quite early on (…) when there was quite high public awareness of the
project, I started being asked to go and report to All-Party Parliamentary Groups or
meet with individual MPs and it was really useful, I think (…) I could give people
information that they didn’t have. It became really clear to me that there was this gap.
There were people who had all the power to change things and none of the infor-
mation about what needed to change and then people like me and other campaigners
who had all the information but none of the power to make the change.

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This observation demonstrates the ways in which online organising models and viral fem-
inist events can be mobilised as a resource. Here we can see how the project, and Bates
herself, had begun to be drawn upon within British parliamentary processes2, with various
MPs and parties inviting her to contribute to their work in different ways. Through these
relations, participants are legitimised as leaders and given a political voice.
In discussing the creation of the initial bill which pushed the UK government to ratify
the Istanbul Convention, in an interview on 14 June 2018, one of the MPs involved
explained that the visibility of the IC Change petition was a key factor in its eventual
success. The visibility the campaign group had garnered assisted with lobbying efforts
and put the convention back on the political agenda. This illustrates how this political
shift was brought about by a combination of decades of work by organisations working
to end violence against women and girls, politicians, and the digital feminist practices
employed by IC Change. This further exemplifies the routes to political voice that can
potentially become available to those who create such interventions, and how their role as
leaders emerges.
In 2016 and 2017 Je Suis Indestructible, alongside a coalition of feminist groups, organised
multiple vigils and protests under the hashtag #StopCultureDuViol (#StopRapeCulture),
which eventually led to the Québec Minister of Higher Education, announcing the adoption of
a framework law to counter sexual violence on the campuses of higher education institutions
(Nadeau, 2017). In 2018, on the anniversary of #MeToo, the group took advantage of the
moment by organising a collective press conference:

we got a lot of attention at first but through the years it became less. The last time Je
Suis Indestructible had big media attention it was for the one-year anniversary of the
#MeToo movement. We put all together all the political parties to come and make a
statement at the press conference that we organised, to make them say you have to
come forward, of all the action we made what’s your position on that?

Interestingly, this demonstrates how the group had a keen sense of the ephemerality of their
own visibility. At the same time as visibility waxed and waned, St Jean sought to build the
project’s political power, becoming part of a broad coalitional feminist movement in
Québec that was ultimately able to command a significant political audience. On a personal
level, as a result of her work with Je Suis Indestructible, St Jean was also invited to become a
trustee of la Fédération des femmes du Québec, a prominent feminist organisation in Québec,
further demonstrating how participants continually strived for, and in some cases were
given some access to, positions of relative power and influence. Overall, their experiences
speak to a productive relationship between their grassroots feminist projects and more
established and institutional feminist organisations.
In general, interviewees came to sense the unique agility and access to power that digi-
tally enabled interventions benefitted from. One participant observed of her own experi-
ences: “I’m now in a funding organisation and I know that sometimes we’re asking for not
even a third of what we did, and that can’t be delivered.” Similarly, regarding her decision
to avoid incorporating her project into a formal organisation, Bates noted:

I always felt that if we did that, I looked into it and there was just so much
bureaucracy and red tape and you’re basically then spending all your time writing
grant applications that depend on a three-year plan. It felt like there were already

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 Angela Towers

charities doing that (…) It felt useful to me that Everyday Sexism was something that
was able to be quite quick and adaptive and move with what was going on.

This comparison to working within an established organisational structure and the asso-
ciated political possibilities is significant.
Relatedly, Bunce explained of her project:

it’s given me, as a disabled woman, proximity to power that I truthfully would not
have got otherwise. I look back and I do not know how we did what we did.

When discussing her departure from the campaign she expressed feeling a sense of sadness
at the eventual loss of the leadership position, that she had effectively “given up the right to
speak on that issue”. This right she identifies was particularly pertinent since she understood
that the leadership role she found herself in, through the creation of her project and the
concurrent political spaces she was able to reach, and the legitimate political voice she was
able to command, would not have been so easily available to her as a disabled woman by
any other means.
In many ways, while participants in this study came to negotiate and utilise these
opportunities, there is opportunism at work too, from the political sphere. In the following
excerpt we can see how one participant came to deal with these kinds of encounters which
clearly exemplify the exploitation and celebrification of her and the project:

you have people who actually meet you and want to work with you and want to really
actually try and do stuff. And you have people who want to meet you so that they can
take a photograph and put on social media to make it look like they want to do stuff
and don’t actually want to do anything. I will always remember (…) going with
[colleague] to the Houses of Parliament to meet with [UK Politician]. He was laughing
at us, he was smirking at us the whole time and it just felt so … but, yeah, definitely
there were meetings like that where you just think, ‘You are just laughing out of the
other side of your mouth at us.’ So it’s varied.

On a similar note, another interviewee recounts experiences where political figures were
supportive in public but less so in private, and keen to share in the campaign’s media
attention without much contribution: “There was this influx of people who suddenly wanted
to be associated with the campaign but didn’t want to do the work necessarily.”
Like the visibility they garner, the power and social capital that my participants amass is
an asset, which can be leveraged politically. However, it is also often precarious and fleeting,
and subject to exploitation and commodification, where what begins as a radical idea can
quickly become quite modest once it has made its way through the machine of politics.
Additionally, some interventions and campaigns find leverage more easily than others, as
Alison Phipps has argued, mainstream feminist ideas, namely those which seek to work
within current systems, are more likely to find traction in “parliamentary politics, institu-
tional reform, and corporate equality work” (2020, p. 5), since, to put it bluntly, they pose
no challenge or threat to the status quo. However, what these testimonies demonstrate is
that this is not a process of cooperation, but rather of participants’ constant negotiation,
and in some cases of co-optation. Through the process of virality and visibility, they are
thrust into a position where they must make judgement calls on which opportunities to take,

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and when and how to best use their power, a leadership position for which there is no useful
feminist guidebook, as one participant laments:

there can be a frustration when (…) people come in and say “But why haven’t you
done more? Why isn’t there enough done?” And actually sometimes that thing of do
you not know how hard we tried?

Conclusion
In her 2018 TED talk in the aftermath of #MeToo Tarana Burke, perhaps one of the most
highly visible leadership figures associated with online feminist movements, posed the question
“what do we do with this thing we are holding?” This, it seems, is a central question and concern
for digital feminist activism of the last decade, where virality and visibility, the moment of
affect, is an “unstable entity” (Hemmings, 2012, p. 157), and which the participants in this
study felt, and feel, a duty to harness and grow. Leadership in these circumstances is implicit,
discursive, and tenuous. The task is a struggle, in which political power and influence are
transitory, dampened through representations by contemporary media economies that posi-
tion feminism as a one-woman project, and social change as freely available under the logics of
meritocracy. Through this intensive process, participants develop a pragmatism, under-
standing that the visibility they have achieved is a potentially political asset. However, they also
have a keen sense of the ephemerality of this political power, after the moment of affect, and
once attention has begun to dwindle (Hübner and Pilote, 2020). The fleeting nature of their
projects is often experienced as intense and requiring unsustainable levels of unpaid labour.
Indeed, the connecting thread throughout each of these considerations is the various forms of
labour – material, emotional and affective – that participants invest throughout. As Brown
describes, of her own experiences, “It was exactly as you’d imagine – a college student came up
with a viral idea and she tried to figure out how to do it for as long as she could”.
The testimonies in this chapter allow us to see how digital practices, and virality in
particular, have emerged as a site of feminist struggle for power, and the tension of feminist
leadership therein. Digital feminist activism in this context, I argue, is an affective practice,
whereby digital communications platforms have provided novel infrastructure for tradi-
tional feminist affects, such as hope, solidarity and healing, which have long underpinned
feminist work, to reach “viral” levels of collectivity and visibility. The political possibilities
of such digitally-enabled counterpublics are structured through neoliberal capitalist and
political contexts and nurtured through the unpaid labour of my participants, and here
the role of feminist leader emerges. Through these stories we see how individuals have
attempted to navigate this tenuous positioning, endeavouring to prolong the impact of the
affective charge which animates feminist virality, to transform these events into meaningful
feminist movements.

Notes
1 Whilst, due to their visibility, anonymity in these cases has not been possible, the decision has been
made to directly attribute only some of the quotations from the interviews in this chapter.
2 All-Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs) are “informal cross-party groups (…) run by and for
Members of the Commons and Lords, though many choose to involve individuals and organi-
sations from outside Parliament in their administration and activities” ( UK Parliament, no date).

519
 Angela Towers

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 48
MEDIATISATION OF WOMEN’S
RAGE IN SPAIN
Strategies of discursive transformation
in digital spaces
Sonia Núñez Puente and Diana Fernández Romero

Introduction
In the early morning of 6 July 2016, an 18-year-old girl reported a rape in an apartment
entryway by five men who called themselves La Manada (The Wolf Pack)1 in a WhatsApp
group chat. The gang rape took place during the 2016 San Fermín festival in the Spanish city
of Pamplona, which is characterised by bulls running through the city’s streets each morning,
followed by a bullfight each afternoon. In recent years, the festival has been linked to other
cases of sexual violence, leading to a City Council campaign in 2014 to address “sexist ag-
gressions” after years of demands by feminist organisations.2 In the La Manada case, the
rapists, five men under 30 years of age, were friends and residents of Seville. Among the
group was one member of the Spanish Armed Forces as well as a Civil guard; four had
criminal records having already been prosecuted for a previous crime of sexual abuse.3 The
victim/survivor initially remained anonymous, but some Spanish media outlets later provided
information that enabled her public identification. For example, the digital newspaper
El Español published an article with the title “The ‘normal’ life of the girl raped in San Fermín:
university, trips and friends” (Lozano, 2017), which provided details about her life and a
photograph of her back.
The ensuing judicial process led to an unprecedented social, political and media reaction
in Spain. The social outrage was sparked by the trial against the five defendants that began
on 13 November 2017. The judge admitted as evidence a report prepared by a private
detective firm, commissioned by one of the defendants, on the social media activity of the
victim/survivor in the period after she filed the complaint. However, the judge decided to
remove from evidence all the messages that the defendants shared in their WhatsApp group
on dates prior to 7 July 2016, such as those that referred to the aforementioned prior case of
sexual assault. The asymmetry in treatment aroused indignation at what was considered a
“secondary victimization” (Kohan, 2017). On 17 November, a feminist demonstration was
held in Madrid under the slogan “We are the ‘Wolf pack’” against what were considered
“judicial abuses” in the San Fermines trial.
The Spanish actress Leticia Dolera’s November 2017 tweet sums up the moral shock
unleashed by the successive judicial decisions surrounding the gang rape: “Estamos hartas e

522 DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-57

 Mediatisation of women’s rage in Spain

indignadas. Que se sepa” [We are fed up and outraged. Let it be known] (@leticiadolera,
15 November 2017). Although the public prosecutor requested a sentence of 22 years for
rape, the first two sentences, issued by the Provincial Court of Navarra and by the Superior
Court of Justice of Navarra on 26 April 2018, convicted the accused of multiple offenses of
sexual abuse with prevalimiento (taking advantage of a situation of superiority), but ruled
the abuse was committed without violence or intimidation. Because of this, the five assai-
lants were sentenced to nine years imprisonment for sexual abuse but were acquitted of
other crimes such as filming the events with a mobile phone and robbery with intimidation.
Shortly thereafter, the court’s decision and feminist support for the woman victim/survivor
of sexual violence became the main Trending Topics on Twitter in Spain.
One of the reasons for the popular indignation was the fact that one of the magistrates of
the first judicial sentence, Ricardo González, issued a dissenting opinion in which he
maintained that the defendants should have been acquitted. In the videos of the gang rape
that the men recorded and circulated via WhatsApp, the judge perceived consensual sex and
expressions of pleasure, as well as “sexual acts in an atmosphere of revelry and rejoicing” by
both men and women (Gil Grande, 2018). The credibility of the victim/survivor’s testimony
was especially questioned by the judge at the trial. During the trial, the judge was criticised
for asking questions to the plaintiff such as “Did you show opposition or refusal? What
statement did you make, in front of them, so that they knew that you were in shock and that
they were having sexual relations without consent on your part?”. She replied, “I didn’t know
how to react, and I didn’t react; I reacted by submitting” (Chientaroli, 2018). Also, the fact
that the spotlight was on the subsequent reaction of the victim on social networks following
the aforementioned report of the private detectives commissioned by the prosecution was
understood as “scandalous”. Gender expert Celia Garrido told Huffington Post in Spain,
“There has been a rape and what they have to prove is that she has been clear or firm in her
refusal but, what is being judged? The rape? Whether she can be raped or not? Do you have to
have irreproachable moral behavior so that you are not raped?” (Ramírez, 2017). Garrido
problematised the fact that the victim/survivor did not correspond to the concept of onto-
logical victim, that is, the stereotyped/reified representation of women as vulnerable subjects,
challenging dichotomous representations of the “good” versus “bad” victim.
The case known as La Manada generated such an outcry in the streets and online that the
Government proposed a revision of the Criminal Code to a Committee of Experts. The main
recommendations were that all crimes against sexual freedom be placed under the heading of
“sexual assaults” and the term “sexual abuse” (a crime that violates sexual freedom without
using force, violence, or intimidation) should be eliminated (El País, 2019). Finally, after the
appeal of the Attorney General’s Office, the case was reviewed, and in June 2019 the Supreme
Court raised the sentence to 15 years in prison after considering that there were multiple
sexual assaults with full knowledge of the perpetrators and without the consent of the victim.
In an additional result of the resonance of the case, in July 2021 the Government approved the
draft of the Organic Law on the Integral Guarantee of Sexual Freedom, known as the “only
yes means yes” law, which requires express consent and ends the distinction between abuse
and rape, as established by the Istanbul Convention (EFE, 2021).
For its part, the hashtag #YoSiTeCreo [#I believe you] emerged on Twitter in
November 2017 when the trial of La Manada began. The testimony of the victim/survivor
was thus supported in the digital realm by both everyday citizens as well as the feminist
movement that was involved with the cause and maintained a strong offline presence.
As of 11 March 2019, 500 tweets with this tag had been published, with nearly one and a

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half million potential impacts (Núñez Puente and Fernández Romero, 2019, p. 392). There
were a range of other hashtags that expressed support for the young woman, including
#LaManadaSomosNosotras [#WeWomenAreTheWolfpack], #EstaEsNuestraManada
[#ThisIsYourPack] #JusticiaPatriarcal [#PatriarchalJustice] or #NoEsNo [#NoMeansNo].
This was also the case when the sentence was made public. The hashtags linked to the case of
La Manada were articulated around concrete demands such as the revision of the legal
framework in cases of sexual violence.
Female rage has found an emergent space in the realm of digital protests and, specifi-
cally, in the context of political mediation. As we have seen, the politicisation of mediatised
rage around La Manada has led to social transformations and legislative change. However,
despite the emergence of women’s rage in public discourse, it has not always been pro-
ductive in terms of intelligibility.
Feminist media scholars have developed abundant literature on the ways in which rage
operates in contemporary politics and culture, including how racialised and gendered
dynamics affect who is entitled to rage, and have put the focus on how rage is generated and
mediated (Chemaly, 2018; Kay and Banet-Weiser, 2019). The political potential of anger
and the transformation — or lack thereof — of gendered power dynamics brought about by
processes of mediatisation are key to our analysis here. We also critically consider the
visibility that female rage has acquired and whether it constitutes a mode of co-optation by
neoliberal media culture (Gill and Orgad, 2018). Women’s anger has been politicised, first
and foremost, through its inclusion in the media debate.
The mobilising capacity of anger in social movements has been analysed in terms of the
dynamics that motivate protest action (Aminzade and McAdam, 2001). One of these mo-
bilising axes is that of moral shock that Jasper defines as the increase in the feeling of
outrage of a person that contributes to her inclination towards political action (Jasper,
1998, p. 409). In the case of female rage, and in the context of the mobilisations of the
women’s movement in Spain, it is necessary to identify the moral shock that determined
the success of movements such as #YoSiTeCreo, in which the politicisation of the testimony
of sexual violence led to concrete political action. The experience of anger produced by the
perception of multiple situations of discrimination and violence suffered by women, or
the experience of a moral shock, to use Jasper’s terminology, is in permanent tension with
the reactions to that expression of anger as articulated in media, political and social dis-
courses. In many cases, such expression of women’s anger in the face of a specific situation
of violence is portrayed in these discourses as madness or irrationality and, often, is linked
to stereotypes of rage associated with ethnicity and race (Chemaly, 2018). Thus, anger is not
rendered intelligible in the hegemonic configuration of the subjectivity of women (Traister,
2018; White, 2013). Women have been socialised and taught to recognise anger and rage,
argues Chemaly (2018), but also to ignore or fear it. This rage may be experienced indi-
vidually or collectively but is culturally mediated in social, political and media discourses
based on a social order designed to discipline and control women’s anger (Chemaly, 2018).
In this sense, Nussbaum (2013) discusses the social dimension of anger by pointing to what
she calls transitional anger as a possibility of politicising emotions in public discourse so
that they are productive and result in transformative initiatives.
Notwithstanding anger’s mobilising capacity in diverging from the dominant framework
of values, anger is understood as legitimate only when expressed by those who wield and
hold power (Flam, 1998). However, dominant social structures identify anger expressed by
those who do not hold power as a destabilising element and, therefore, not intelligible

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within hegemonic cognitive frameworks (Ost, 2004; Holmes, 2004). In considering anger as
a means of political activation, we do not refer to anger as a primary emotion, but as a
polyhedral mode that converges with other emotions such as pride, compassion or indig-
nation (Jasper, 2011). The emotions that underpin structures of domination are diminished
with the activation of anger which makes possible the challenging of hegemonic discourses
through the emergence of so-called subversive emotions (Flam, 2005).
In our opinion, and for our case of analysis, we are interested in identifying the activation
of new frameworks of understanding linked to Butler’s support for “counter-realism” in the
struggle for social justice. Butler advocates being unrealistic and imagining in radical ways
that allow us to open previously closed possibilities (Butler in Gesse, 2020). Butler asserts that
“reality” works in a socio-political way by rejecting considerations/stories/messages that
might imply greater possibilities of justice, democracy, or equality of freedom (Butler in Gesse,
2020). To address our case study, and considering the theoretical axes previously developed,
we have designed a series of dimensions that can be used to investigate how the mediatisation
of rage can generate an “anger competence” (Chemaly, 2018). That is, it allows women the
ability to use anger as a resource for the transformation and addressing of inequalities,
overcoming its stigmatisation and neoliberal co-optation. To this end, we operationalise the
theoretical concept of “anger competence” in three dimensions: the construction of the subject
that enunciates rage, what the mediatisation of rage allows to emerge from the theoretical
concept of “affective injustice” and the effects of affect, according to the productive dimension
of anger. The case study that we present in this chapter is, therefore, aimed at revealing the
dynamics of intelligibility of women’s rage as a subversive emotion in media discourses, as well
as the ways in which that rage can have the capacity to politicise feminist digital mobilisations
in the media.

Responses to the visibility of generated rage: towards an anger competence

According to the Macrosurvey of Violence against Women conducted in 2019 on a repre-
sentative sample of residents in Spain aged 16 or over, 1,322,052 women had suffered sexual
violence outside of a romantic relationship in their lifetime, 12.4% of which were group
aggressions. The survey shows that a total of 453,371 women reported having been raped
(Delegación del Gobierno contra la Violencia de Género, 2020). The explosion of social
indignation around the case of La Manada in Spain is part of an emergent context driven by
the first feminist strike in March 2017 (Núñez Puente, D’Antonio Maceiras and Fernández
Romero, 2021), the massive demonstrations and the follow-up of the feminist strike in 2018
(AmecoPress, 2018), the emergence of the Platform against Sexist Violence, the feminist
night march “El miedo va a cambiar de bando” [Fear is going to switch sides] (Zabala, 2015),
as well as in the anti-austerity movement that began with 15M in May 2011 (Orbegozo
Terradillos, Morales i Grass and Larrondo Ureta, 2019).
The mediatic and judicial questioning and blaming of the victim/survivor of La Manada
and her testimony activated viral support for the woman in social networks that reacted to
the moral shock using hashtags such as #YoSiTeCreo or #EstaEsNuestraManada
[#ThisIsOurPack] to symbolically consolidate support and create feminist affective
communities of resistance digitally (Khoja-Moolji, 2015). Analysing the hashtag
#HermanaYoSiTeCreo (#SisterIDoBelieveYou), García-Mingo and Prieto (2021, p. 11)
observe how “cyber-activists gave direct support to the victim, who became at the same time an
archetypal victim of sexual violence and an active political actor, which helped in the process of

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deconstructing rape culture from her new category of victim–survivor–brave”. Attending

precisely to the first dimension of analysis of anger competence, the construction of the subject
that enunciates anger, we can see how the agentic capacity and credibility attributed to the
denouncing woman sustained one of the three macro-stories of the conversation on Twitter
(Orbegozo Terradillos, Morales i Grass and Larrondo Ureta, 2019) that consolidated social
rebellion in the face of the “misogynistic bias” of “patriarchal justice” that put the victim/
survivor’s testimony into question (Bernárdez-Rodal, López-Priego and Padilla-Castillo,
2021, p. 253). One of the accusations made against the victim/survivor was the fact that her
testimony did not correspond to that of the “ideal victim”; that is, the validity of her testimony
was questioned because it was unintelligible according to a linear narrative. Thus, a hegemonic
narrative of trauma was imposed which differed from the fragmented real account of a painful
experience such as the one that started from her memory. Her testimony, despite the pressures,
was not angry; rather, it was the activists who enunciated their anger and disbelief at the failures
of justice.
With the hashtag #YoSiTeCreo, the promotion of a political response that goes beyond
the feeling of compassion became possible, in which the victim/survivor is no longer only
rendered intelligible in the context of damage inflicted upon her, but is repositioned within a
wider sisterhood. This is demonstrated in this tweet by singer Mala Rodríguez: “Nos acaban
de condenar a todas #yositecreo #lamanada” (@malarodriguez, April 26 2018) [“They have
just condemned all of us #yositecreo #lamanada”]. The expression of female anger in the
public space was collectivised and this allowed it to be seen as legitimate, in contrast to the
“affective injustice” which requires individual victims of aggressions to contain anger if they
want to be seen as credible (Kay and Banet-Weiser, 2019).
That rage is capable of mobilising groups politically – in other words, that the affect
produces political effects – is the third dimension of anger competence. According to
Fernández (2020, n.p.) this gang rape case was remarkable “because it exposed the func-
tioning of sexist violence to its roots, making symbolic, institutional and discursive forms
explicit”. Importantly, this was expressed through expressions of empathy and solidarity, as
illustrated by a tweet from the current Minister of Equality, Irene Montero: “Hermana, yo sí
te creo. Nosotras nos creemos. Basta de cuestionar a las mujeres violadas y dar credibilidad a
los violadores” [Sister, I do believe you. We believe ourselves. Enough of questioning the
raped women and giving credibility to the rapists] (@IreneMontero, November 15 2017). In
this tweet, Montero notably moves from the individual (“I do believe you”) to the collective
(“We believe ourselves”), closing down the distance between victim/survivor and political
actor, and positioning both in angry and definitive opposition to the unambiguously named
“rapists”. By shouting a sonorous and definitive “stop” to this type of behaviour, Montero
thus shows anger at attempts to challenge the veracity of sexual violence testimonies or to
defend those who commit such acts of violence.
The effects of these affects that were activated in the streets and on social networks appeal
to a productive dimension of anger that resulted in a strong social mobilisation. The affects
linked to both rage and indignation, solidarity and empathy, circulated in the flows of online
and offline mobilisation that materialised in demonstrations and protests, headlines in the
national and international press or hashtags and publications on viral social networks.
According to the social media monitoring and analysis platform Shokesu (2018), based on an
analysis of 466,864 Twitter posts in just three hours on 26 April 2018, following the delivery of
the first sentence, 27.8% of tweets deemed the sentence “outrageous”, 14.5% expressed feeling
“shame”, 11.16% described it as “terrible”, 10.70% “regrettable” and 8.13% “unfair”.

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In his study on the media coverage of the La Manada gang rape, Velte (2019) points out
that, in the face of the hegemonic Spanish media, the international press understood that
what made the case special was the social response that it provoked. This response reached
beyond Spain: for instance, actress Rose McGowan, whose testimony was crucial in un-
covering the abuses of film producer Harvey Weinstein, joined the hashtag #YoSiTeCreo in
solidarity with the victim and shared the news on her networks (eldiario.es, 2018). The
hashtags were a form of ethical witnessing (Oliver, 2001) based on the recognition of the
suffering of the Other. This made it possible to link victims of sexual violence with victims
of gender-based violence more widely and to establish the implementation of a network of
comprehensive care services like that which has existed since 2004 for women who suffer
gender-based violence (Requena, 2022). For example, the recently approved Law on the
Comprehensive Guarantee of Sexual Freedom from 2022 has come to fill the gaps of the
2004 Law on Comprehensive Protection Measures against Gender Violence by guaranteeing
nationwide medical and psychological assistance to victims of sexual violence from the
moment of their assault.

The reaction to women’s rage as illegitimate, indiscriminate and dangerous

In this context, the hashtag #YoNoTeCreo [#I Don’t Believe You] emerged as an example of
a negative response to the mediatisation of women’s rage. In keeping with post-machismo, the
hashtag was utilised to spread and reinforce an affective discourse about how sexual violence
(or being accused of sexual violence) hurts men (García-Favaro and Gill, 2016; Núñez Puente
and Fernández Romero, 2019). It presented the aggressors as the real victims, victims of a lie,
as demonstrated in this tweet: “#YoNoTeCreo Tal como ocurrieron los hechos y por mi ex-
periencia personal y por lo que estoy harto de ver, yo considero que los chicos de la Manada son
inocentes, lo han convertido en cabezas de turcos,” [#IDon’tBelieveYou Seeing how the events
happened and from my personal experience and from what I am tired of seeing, I believe that
the boys of La Manada are innocent, they have turned them into scapegoats (29 April 2018)].
In this Tweet personal reactions (“I am tired of seeing,” “I believe”) are used to respond to
collective struggles, with the support of the visibility, affects and spectacularisation afforded
by digital practices (Núñez Puente and Fernández Romero, 2019). The discourse of
#YoNoTeCreo sought to regulate and discipline female rage and reinforce those same heg-
emonic representations of gender that female rage originally attempted to challenge. This
phenomenon has a parallel with the hashtag #HimToo which emerged against the #MeToo
movement and was used in reference to men’s alleged vulnerability to accusations made by
women (Boyle and Rathnayake, 2019). There are also similarities between the two cases in
that (like #HimToo) #YoNoTeCreo had less political impact and mobilising capacity than
#YoSiTeCreo: with 69 tweets generating 126,345 total impacts, compared to the 500 tweets of
#YoSiTeCreo with 1.5 million potential impacts according to Tweetbinder.com (2019).
The effects of these affects can visibilise the reactions to any sort of transformative
advance of digital discourses on violence. The #YoNoTeCreo hashtag contributed to pa-
thologising female rage following the sentencing, which to some users implied that the
charges were without basis, as demonstrated by this tweet by police officer José Manuel
Sánchez Fornet (@sanchezfornet): “Ni violación ni abuso. Orgía consentida y tras ser
abandonada y robarle el móvil decidió denunciar. Esto es lo que opino en coincidencia con el
Magistrado-Juez Ricardo González” [Neither rape nor abuse. It was a consensual orgy and
after being abandoned and having her mobile phone stolen, she decided to denounce. This is

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what I think, in agreement with Magistrate-Judge Ricardo González (28 April 2018)]. With
this tweet, he questioned the context and production of accounts of rage by transforming
those who expressed it publicly into “objects of feeling” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 11). This response
not only dismissed the woman’s account as not credible but also implied that women in
general over-react in their responses to gender-based violence.
At the same time, some discursive structures which attempted to deactivate or divert the
fundamental axes of the protest were reinforced. This was the case, for example, when con-
servative political parties took advantage of the situation to defend life sentences (La
Sexta.com, 2018). Outside of formal political structures, this backlash was more personalised in
the manosphere, where details of the victim/survivor’s identity (name, image) were published on
forums including “Forocoches”, “Burbuja.info” or “Foroparalelo.com”. Notably, these sites
have extensive reach (Forocoches, for instance, has several million users, 95% of whom are
men), and their anti-feminism is situated relative to broader right-wing politics (e.g. Forocoches
is known for attacking journalists and feminist activists through doxing) (Solé, 2020).
Social media, which have become contested territories in the fight over victimhood, also
became the sites of circulation of early images of the five rapists. We can identify, in this way,
the diversity of effects that were mobilised from the mediatisation of female rage as a sub-
versive emotion. Despite the tensions involved in this mediatisation and the attempts made to
discredit women’s anger, the case of La Manada reveals the efficacy of collective feminist
reactions to the moral shock unleashed in the wake of this testimony of sexual violence.
Digital discourses promote, in some ways, and as we have seen in the case of La Manada, the
emergence of new knowledge linked to the subject who enunciates anger, to what anger makes
arise from affective injustice and, finally, to the effects of affect. It is precisely this last
dimension that shows the transformative potential of anger competence, in favouring changes
that affect the socio-political transformation based on the narratives on sexist violence,
thereby configuring a productive paradigm of enunciation of the mediatised rage of women.

Acknowledgements
This research was funded by Grant PID2020-113054GB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.1303
9/501100011033

Notes
1 All translations are by the authors.
2 For example, in 2008 nursing student Nagore Laffage was killed by Diego Yllanes after she refused
to have sex with him, and in 2013 the foreign press collected photographs of the non-consensual
touching of women at the opening party. The following year the City Council launched the
campaign “For sanfermines free of sexist aggressions” and since 2014 it has applied a protocol,
after years of demands by feminist organisations, which provides instructions on how to detect and
react to cases of possible aggression. The festival sees a rise in the number of sexual assaults of
various kinds, including collective rapes, because these large events allow the aggressors to feel
unpunished, since the culprit is “the group”, according to the president of the Federation Stop
Sexual Violence, Beatriz Bonete ( lavanguardia.com, 2016).
3 Specifically, prior to the rape in Pamplona, four of the five were prosecuted for a crime of sexual
abuse against a 21-year-old woman in 2016 in Pozoblanco (Córdoba), and one of those four was
also accused of a crime against the privacy of the young woman in the same case.

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 49
HASHTAG FEMINISM
STRADDLING THE AMERICAS
A comparison between #NiUnaMenos
and #MeToo
Francesca Belotti, Vittoria Bernardini, and Francesca Comunello

#NiUnaMenos (“Not One Woman Less”) is a hashtag-driven movement that began in

Argentina in 2015, in response to a wave of killings of women by men. A group of women
journalists used Twitter to call for a massive march against feminicidio.1 Year after year, the
mobilisations have multiplied throughout the country and across Latin America every
3 June, reaching Europe in 2017. The movement has turned into a decentralised interna-
tional network that incorporates different feminist organisations and scholars, and fights
against all forms of gender-based violence.
Two years after #NiUnaMenos first went viral in Argentina, #MeToo started trending in
the United States in 2017, in the aftermath of the disclosures of sexual assault by Hollywood
producer Harvey Weinstein. Actress Alyssa Milano suggested that survivors of sexual assault
tweet the phrase “Me Too” to raise awareness of sexual violence as a widespread cultural
problem. Millions of users quickly took to sharing their stories with the #MeToo hashtag,
contributing to a global transformation in public discourse and activism on gender-based
violence.
In both #NiUnaMenos and #MeToo, Twitter acted as a driving platform, with
hashtags aggregating responses to gender-based violence. Nonetheless, these mobilisa-
tions have originated in two very different regions (South vs North America), where two
different forms of violence against women (VAW) (feminicidio vs sexual harassment) have
triggered different kinds of mobilisation (online and offline protests vs a mostly online
campaign). Driven by literature on hashtag feminism and based on previous research
about #NiUnaMenos and #MeToo, this chapter analyses the online discussions about
VAW at the inception of each mobilisation in their home countries. We draw upon two
separate qualitative studies (Belotti, Comunello and Corradi, 2021; Bernardini, 2021) to
map out a situated and comparative characterisation of these two mobilisations against
VAW. This analysis provides a deeper understanding of the multifaceted forms that the
mutually shaped media/movements dynamics can assume in what has hitherto been
generally considered as a unified phenomenon, hashtag feminism.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-58 531

 Francesca Belotti et al.

Feminist digital media practices

When analysing #NiUnaMenos and #MeToo, we focus on VAW as “a form of gender-based
violence that affects women excessively as it is directly connected with the unequal distribution
of power between women and men” (EIGE, 2015, p. 3). We adopt Liz Kelly’s (1988) con-
ceptualisation of VAW as a “continuum” to highlight the “basic common character under-
lying the many different forms of violence” experienced by women in patriarchal culture
(p. 76). This continuum conceptualisation is especially useful to understand the specificity of
women’s digital activism against VAW.
In recent years, the sharing of feminist narratives through hashtags has become extremely
popular to raise consciousness on VAW. This practice serves to transcend the individuality of
each story and situate them within the continuum of patriarchal violence (Boyle, 2019). The
term “hashtag feminism” thus refers to “the use of online platforms and their hashtag feature
to counter or condemn discrimination, violence and sexual assault against women” (Myles,
2019, p. 509). By sharing personal experiences of VAW, women feel politically united
(Berridge and Portwood-Stacer, 2015) and build/express collective identities (Chen, Pain and
Barner, 2018). Hashtags work as compelling narrative agents that fuel their own growth
(Clark, 2016). By participating in the co-creation of the hashtag salience, individuals make
VAW visible as a social problem, promote new interpretive frameworks to approach it, and
broaden the movements themselves (Xiong, Cho and Boatwright, 2019; Clark-Parsons, 2021).
We consider hashtag feminism as inherent to contemporary women’s activism against
VAW, according to both a praxeological and ecological approach that values media
practices as constitutive of grassroots politics and situates them within their wider cul-
tural and political contexts (Mattoni, 2017, 2020). In this case, we refer to women’s
communities that struggle against patriarchy differently in the South and North of the
Americas, considering Argentina and the US as countries that belong to the Global South
and North respectively. This placement allows us to straddle the “abyssal line” (Santos,
2018) that distinguishes the specific politics of subjugated people in the South from the
struggles that arise in the North (Dutta and Pal, 2020). Additionally, we focus on the
hashtag as a social media affordance that enables users to mobilise through individualised
networked actions (i.e. “the logic of connective action”, Bennett and Segerberg, 2013) and
build concrete collective identities (Gerbaudo and Treré, 2015). We value the hybrid,
mutually shaped media/movement dynamics (Treré, 2019) that enhance the networked
nature of current activism in a feedback loop between online and offline realms (i.e.
“technopolitics”, Toret et al., 2015). This is particularly relevant when analysing feminist
activism given the interrelationship between body politics, trans-local actions and the
precarity of digital feminisms (Baer, 2016).
So far, research on #NiUnaMenos has highlighted that the hashtag served to pool online
testimonies of a wide array of men’s violence experienced by women, thus shedding light on
the broader problem of VAW beyond the initial focus on feminicidio (Laudano, 2017). Since
the first march, #NiUnaMenos has facilitated an increase in online discussions in Argentina
related to gender-based violence and gender equality (Batista et al., 2017). Afterwards, once
the inclusion of VAW in public discussion was consolidated, the hashtag redirected online
conversations to the more striking issue of feminicidio (Belotti, Comunello and Corradi,
2021). The hashtag also allowed activists to collect and analyse Big Data to build a VAW
index that was used both as a verifiable empirical leverage for institutions and as a tool to
broaden political participation (Chenou and Cepeda-Másmela, 2019). The index collected

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the alarming national rates of harassment, intimate partner violence, and obstetric violence
under the expression “male/machist violence” (instead of “gender-based violence”), in order
to culturally and politically situate the survey in the Global South (ibid.).
Studies on #MeToo, on the other hand, have conceptualised the mobilisation as an
expression of “popular feminism”, based on logics of media visibility and affective embrace
(Banet-Weiser, 2018). #MeToo is “a collectively produced story about sexual harassment”
(Boyle, 2019, p. 4) thematised around feminist protest, sexual violence and celebrity culture
(De Benedictis, Orgad and Rottenberg, 2019). This characterisation has generated criticism
for an excessive focus on the “celebrity components” that “distract us from systemic,
structural sexism” (Banet-Weiser, 2018, p. 17). Moreover, it has resulted in anti-feminist
backlash, with public discussion “invoking feminist overreach, hysteria, and irrationality”
(Fileborn and Phillips, 2019, p. 102) and comparing the mobilisations to a “moral panic” or a
“witch-hunt” (Bernardini, 2021). This backlash partly exposes the limitations of hashtag
feminism, as #MeToo stories were often disbelieved, contested or attacked by detractors in
the same media environments where the hashtag circulated. Therefore, activists consciously
developed “maintenance practices” (Clark-Parsons, 2021) in their tweeting, to keep the
conversations on VAW-related issues such as support for survivors, accountability of per-
petrators and bystander intervention in view.

Methods
We rely on two qualitative studies to carry out a comparative analysis of Twitter conver-
sations driven by two different hashtags. One analyses those with the #NiUnaMenos
hashtag, produced in Argentina (time zone: Buenos Aires; language: Spanish2) during the
first three years’ marches (between 1 and 3 June 2015, 2016 and 2017). The other analyses
Twitter conversations with the #MeToo hashtag produced in the US (geolocation: USA)
during the three peaks of highest online activity recorded in the first six months of mobi-
lisation (16–18 October 2017; 6–8 December 2017; 8–10 January 2018) in the aftermath of
significant media events (Milano’s tweet; the nomination of the #MeToo “Silence Breakers”
as Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year”; the Golden Globes ceremony). We use different
time frames to capture the early start and evolution of each mobilisation, as #NiUnaMenos
follows physical protest actions, while #MeToo fluctuates according to resonant media
events.
Given the dataset of each case study (292,700 total tweets for #NiUnaMenos; 425,691
tweets for #MeToo), we selected the 0.1% most popular tweets (the most retweeted and
favourited) from each of the three marches for #NiUnaMenos, and from each of the three
peaks for #MeToo. We coded these tweets both deductively and inductively, that is, by
referring to our theoretical framework to identify conceptual patterns in the data, while
finding new concepts that could offer new insights into the material. After coding the tweets,
we clustered them into descriptive and interpretive themes (i.e., “thematic analysis”,
Boyatzis, 1998; Braun and Clarke, 2006). Finally, we compared the themes identified for
each case study.3
Data were gathered without asking for users’ consent since they are aware that tweets
and accounts are publicly visible which makes this practice widely accepted by researchers
in terms of ethics and privacy (see Bruns, 2019). Public figures’ tweets are identified through
the username, while tweets by non-public figures are presented anonymously, though where
users adopt gendered usernames, this is noted.

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#NiUnaMenos and #MeToo in comparison

In this section we comparatively analyse the #NiUnaMenos and #MeToo Twitter con-
versations, contextualising the analysis in relation to the regions in which the mobilisations
originated.

Leveraging lethality and data to stir emotions and trigger mobilisation

The main differences between #NiUnaMenos and #MeToo directly descend from what the
two fight against. Each mobilisation places itself at a different point on the continuum of
VAW, with physical violence being the most mobilising form in both cases. #NiUnaMenos
catalyses moral indignation over the unrelenting killing of women (the most extreme form
of VAW), whereas #MeToo unmasks the naturalisation of sexual harassment (one of the
most widespread forms of VAW) by expressing affinity for the victims. They, therefore,
activate different affective responses (anger and sympathy in #NiUnaMenos; identification
and empathy in #MeToo), with the lethality of VAW hovering over the tweets in both cases,
respectively in terms of death and survival.
For example, in the third year of #NiUnaMenos, once it had largely fulfilled its public
awareness-raising function, the most popular tweets named the victims of feminicidio,
detailing who they were and how they were killed. Emotional reactions were triggered
through a two-fold strategy: on the one hand, horrific details of the violence suffered by
the victims before they died unsettled the reader and made VAW reprehensible; on the
other hand, indirect third-person testimonies reiterated the victims’ inability to speak out
because VAW is a deadly escalation. The most emblematic case is the Twitter activity of
the Argentinian illustrator @fenomenoide: on 3 June 2017, she posted one tweet for every
victim of feminicidio she knew about, thus testifying on their behalf what they suffered.
Therefore, following the historical practice of the Madres y Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo
(“Mothers and Grandmothers of May Square”) of naming the (grand)children who
disappeared during the military dictatorship, Argentinian users gave voice to women who
were no longer there.
Conversely, in #MeToo, especially in the beginning when the main frames for the public
discussion about VAW had yet to be set up, the most popular tweets highlighted the value
of being survivors of sexual harassment, thus re-signifying hashtagging as direct testimony
and tweeting as first-person storytelling. This survival narrative, based on the centrality of
the self (also implied by the hashtag itself), appealed to the sharing of pain among those
who suffered VAW but are able to tell it. The speaking out itself worked as a technopolitical
gesture generating a sense of belonging to a common story.

It’s been 5 years since I have been raped. To fellow survivors: You will -Trust again
-Love again -Feel safe again -Be you again #MeToo.
(@HeyThereImShan, 16 October 2017)

This rhetorical device was both known to and contested by those who used it. As the
following tweet denounces, women live in the paradox of having to border on death and
thematise VAW in terms of survival to transmit the urgency of the problem and mobilise
people against it.

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We shouldn’t have to out ourselves as survivors in order for people to grasp the
magnitude of how systemic assault and harassment are. #MeToo.
(@Femmefeministe, 16 October 2017)

Also measuring the extent of VAW proved to be an effective device to raise public
awareness of VAW, both in #NiUnaMenos and #MeToo tweets. However, the idea that
sexual harassment has happened to all women, encapsulated in the #MeToo hashtag,
appeared more effective at “sizing up” the capillarity of VAW than the more intangible idea
that you or any woman you know might be killed, implied in the #NiUnaMenos hashtag.
As the following tweet demonstrates, people concretely got an idea about the number of
harassed women from the tweets they counted in their personal Twitter networks.

Completely fucking horrified by the amount of women I know, love and respect
tweeting #MeToo. This shit must change.
(@therealKripke, 17 October 2017)

In #MeToo every tweet is a (self-)documented case of sexual harassment, so that data

activism ends up being inherent to tweeting itself. Conversely, in Argentina, data activism
only gained traction from the second year (i.e. when the problem of VAW was socially
recognised and people could focus on its magnitude) and in a more conventional vein (i.e.
some 2016 and 2017 tweets provided the number of annual feminicidios).

There are literally 4 tweets per second of women posting the #MeToo, indicating that
they were too a victim of sexual assault. This really shows the breadth of just how
serious Sexual Assault is […].
(male-identified user, 16 October 2017)

275 women murdered in one year, today Argentina says #NiUnaMenos.

(female-identified user, 3 June 2016)

The political meaning of the #MeToo hashtag resignified the tweeting itself: tweets
became the unit of measure for the spread of sexual assault. Conversely, in #NiUnaMenos
counting the feminicidios remained the privileged emotional lever to maintain attention to
the urgency of preserving women’s lives, also because the victims were no longer alive to tell
their stories first-hand, and it was up to other women to do so on their behalf.

In the last 24 hours, the hashtag #MeToo has been tweeted nearly half a million times.
(@kylegriffin1, 16 October 2017)

In Argentina every 30 hours there is a feminicidio. Let’s say #NiUnaMenos.

(male-identified user, 3 June 2016)

Turning the private into public while addressing social responsibilities

These considerations open a space for reflecting on the politics of the personal in the two
case studies. Since the early days of both #NiUnaMenos and #MeToo, the most popular
tweets have thematised VAW as a problem that concerns the whole of society.

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 Francesca Belotti et al.

This is not only a women’s struggle, but of the whole society. Wednesday 3, 5 pm, we
all say #NiUnaMenos.
(@MatiasLammens, 2 June 2015)

I’ve worked in government, entertainment, business, and publishing. This is a major

issue that needs addressed, b/c it’s everywhere. #MeToo.
(@yolondasweitzer, 16 October 2017)

Treating VAW as a civic issue that pervades every societal sphere implies recognising the
public value of an experience that has historically been relegated to the private sphere. To
support this paradigm shift, many tweets from both datasets highlighted the specific impli-
cations of being a woman in a patriarchal society, in response to some users who con-
ceptualised violence as a gender-neutral problem. In the #MeToo dataset, for instance, actress
Katie Stevens accounted for the specificity of women’s experiences of abuse by tweeting
“Some men will never know what it’s like to walk down the street, be catcalled, fear for their
safety or the sanctity of their space” (@Thekatiestevens, 16 October 2017).
Similarly, in the #NiUnaMenos dataset, a tweet shared by the digital illustrator
@ReniRossi (3 June 2015) contended that #NiUnaMenos “is about violence towards women
because of their mere existence as women”, who live with the fear of being raped or killed; a
kind of fear that men “never lived or will live”. In this view, VAW is different from other
forms of violence because it pervasively affects women for being women. The fear of being at
risk of VAW becomes inherent even to women’s choice of movement, clothing and lifestyle.

I want to feel free and not be labeled a whore for dressing the way I want.
#NiUnaMenos.
(@_Incredulas, 3 June 2015)

If you wear tight clothes. If you went out too late. If you went out with a guy. If you
talked to strangers via chat [you put yourself in danger]. #NiUnaMenos.
(@natijota, 3 June 2016)

These #NiUnamenos tweets represent an emancipatory social response to the sense of

permanent vulnerability that is culturally attached to women. Such claims are echoed by
some #MeToo tweets that detailed women’s strategies to cope with VAW through a
sequence of scenes illustrating their daily life.

#MeToo because saying you have a boyfriend is more effective than saying no. Men
respect other men more than consent.
(female-identified user, 18 October 2017)

#Metoo Watch a young girl walk home at night with her keys in between her fingers
and fear in her eyes and tell me that this isn’t a problem.
(female-identified user, 16 October 2017)

Therefore, the politics of the personal unfolds in the disclosure of the everyday lives of
women, who are framed as a collective political subject through their experiences of diverse
but recurring forms of VAW. However, in #MeToo conversations, personal disclosures

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mostly make speaking out the focus in and of itself. This is particularly evident in the second
peak, after Time magazine dedicated the 2017 “Person of the Year” cover to the “Silence
Breakers”, which included some celebrity women supporting #MeToo. Users celebrated
this public acknowledgement primarily by emphasising the need to speak out against VAW
in media contexts:

Here’s to the women who spoke up. You inspire us all to keep speaking up. Be brave.
You are not alone. #StandTogether #MeToo.
(@MaryEMcGlynn, 6 December 2017)

#MeToo constructs a “we-sense” along a network of singularities (the sum of multiple “I”
inherent to the hashtag itself) who dare to share personal experiences. In tweets like this latter
one, users reacted by creating networks of emotional support for women who, through the
hashtag, manage to denounce their experiences of sexual harassment. Being a woman also
means being together in a public arena with other women who respect (and often share) the
complexity of experiences of abuse. A sense of sisterhood flows through such tweets as a
collective response to the lack of institutional support in the fight against VAW. This is even
acknowledged by Milano herself when she tweeted “In 2017 women stood up and said
#MeToo. We overcame our fears to #BreakTheSilence. Technology and social media have
connected us all. […] We are connected to each other […]” (6 December 2017).
This spirit of sisterhood does not explicitly emerge from the #NiUnaMenos conversations,
likely because it is directly acted out in the massive marches that flood Argentinian cities every
June 3. When tweeting “if you touch one, we all break you! #NiUnaMenos” (3 June 2017), a
female-identified user effectively sums up this collective and physical response of Argentinian
women, who quickly rally in the symbolic places of their cities whenever a feminicidio occurs,
moved by the need to share their indignation in person. In #NiUnaMenos, the conversations
exceed the importance of speaking out to construct a broader political statement. It is not only
about breaking out of silence but about demanding a public and shared commitment, from
institutions and the citizenry so that no more women have to die or live under the threat of
death. Indeed, the most popular tweets circulating during the first march included the five
points of the public commitment demanded by the official account @NiUnaMenos_ to the
political establishment: (1) a National Plan of Action for Prevention, Assistance, and
Eradication of VAW; (2) a more easy-access and supportive judicial system; (3) an Official
Registry of victims of VAW; (4) a Comprehensive Sex Education Plan; (5) victim protection
by electronic monitoring of the perpetrators.
Claiming the public and political dimensions of VAW in these terms also entails chal-
lenging the cultural constructs according to which victims “have it coming.” Indeed, in both
datasets, several tweets condemned victim-blaming and instead called to make male per-
petrators accountable.

Stop asking “why didn’t she… … .?” and start asking “why did he?” #MeToo.
(female-identified user, 16 October 2017)

It seems that if a woman takes naked pictures of herself, she is authorizing to be killed.
#NiUnaMenos.
(male-identified user, 3 June 2016)

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 Francesca Belotti et al.

This invitation to move the pointing finger towards perpetrators rather than victims of
VAW is accompanied by a series of tweets targeting men specifically, to make them realise
that the VAW concerns them too. Some #NiUnaMenos tweets highlighted how VAW af-
fects men’s sisters, mothers and daughters, while #MeToo tweets invited men to (re-)
educate themselves and their male relatives to respect women.

For your mom, grandmother, sister or daughter: justice, education and respect so that
the shout of #NiUnaMenos can be heard today.
(@lamitadmas1, June 3, 2015)

Men, Don’t say you have a mother, a sister, a daughter … Say you have a father, a
brother, a son who can do better. We all can. #MeToo.
(@Pappiness, 16 October 2017)

Such tweets pursue the political goal of making VAW an issue that concerns all of society
while maintaining the focus on men’s responsibility. However, they adopt different rhe-
torical devices depending on how VAW occurs in each region. In Argentina, tweets lever-
aged family affection to arouse a protective instinct of men towards women by drawing on a
problematic logic of male ownership of/responsibility for female relations, which does not
seem to be contested by other users in the dataset. Conversely, in the US tweets adopted a
more educational approach that frames the fight against VAW as cultural work to be done
on men and by men. In Argentina, the aim was to provoke men’s visceral reaction to the
most brazen or lethal forms of VAW (such as feminicidio) that Latin American macho
culture otherwise naturalises. In the US, the purpose was to elicit a cognitive response to the
subtler, more insidious manifestations of VAW that predominate in North American
society (such as sexual harassment). In both cases, social indignation seems to be activated
by questioning normative constructions of masculinity with an appeal to family roles. Men
were not attacked as enemies but rather called upon as allies who were asked to recognise
their own privileged position in patriarchal society, take a stance on VAW and adjust their
individual actions accordingly.

Positioning the mobilisations while defining violence

In #NiUnaMenos and #MeToo, the physical and the digital are differently conveyed,
reflecting their different structures. #NiUnaMenos involves traditional protest actions
(e.g., demonstrations, strikes, sit-ins), interrelated with online activities (e.g., tweeting,
posting, and live streaming). It is a political subject with a collective identity that ex-
panded from a national to an international network. On the other hand, #MeToo takes
place entirely online and exceeds the national boundaries of the US (especially in the
northern hemisphere). #MeToo mobilisations are only anchored to the physical realm
through highly visible media events, rather than traditional offline protests. This different
relationship with physicality is also evoked by the hashtags employed in addition to
#NiUnaMenos and #MeToo. In Argentina, #VivasNosQueremos (“We Want Us
Alive”), launched in 2016, represents a positive, life-affirming counterpart to the killing of
women implied by #NiUnaMenos, thus centring the anti-VAW narrative on women’s
bodies. In the US, #WhyWeWearBlack, used during the 2018 Golden Globes, also

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represents a physical protest action, albeit in a less traditional sense, as the actresses wore
black dresses to symbolise mourning for VAW and enact it on their own bodies.
The different nature of the two mobilisations is also reflected in the different weight that
political controversy takes on in the two datasets. #NiUnaMenos tweets rarely include
debates on partisan politics. A minority of tweets, mostly in the third year, address the
inconsistent stance of some politicians on VAW and mention controversial judicial cases. In
#MeToo, instead, sexual violence is often weaponised politically, especially in the second
and third peaks, with controversies mostly regarding then-President Trump and other
political figures accused of sexual misconduct. The public statements of celebrities also
cause a stir, such as the “anti-#MeToo” letter signed by 100 prominent French women and
published in Le Monde shortly after the Golden Globes in January 2018. The authors ar-
gued for a “freedom to bother”, which they saw as “indispensable for sexual freedom”, and
contended that #Metoo had degenerated into an attack on men, women and sexuality.
Interestingly, such controversies also activated processes of meaning-making among
users over what VAW is and how each mobilisation stands before it. In #MeToo, for
example, users responded to the “anti-#MeToo” letter by re-stating their understanding of
what the mobilisation stands for in terms of sexual freedom vs. violence:

Creating fear of sex is the exact opposite of what #metoo and this entire moment is
about. It isn’t women saying we fear/dislike sex. It’s women saying, we’d like to get
through our day without being assaulted/harassed.
(female-identified user, 10 January 2018)

In #NiUnaMenos, the same stance is echoed by some “warning” tweets in which users
explicitly denounced the intimate partner violence that women too often mistake for ex-
pressions of love. In doing so, they traced the boundaries of what VAW is and what the
movement is about.

Shouts, insults, excessive jealousy and contempt are also violence.

(@DivulgandoRockk, 3 June 2016)

Conclusions
In this chapter, we observed the mutually shaped media/movements dynamics (Treré, 2019),
by focusing on two different cases, originating in the Global South and North. In addressing
the topic of VAW, the #NiUnaMenos and #MeToo mobilisations show several differences,
alongside similarities. The differences refer to the different regions where the mobilisations
arose and the specific forms of VAW they mainly target. While placing themselves at different
points on the “continuum” of VAW (Kelly, 1988), both #NiUnaMenos and #MeToo
highlight the common misogynistic roots of all forms of violence targeting women in patri-
archal societies, even in two socio-cultural contexts (South and North America) that are very
different in terms of cultural expressions of VAW and socio-political responses to it.
In both cases, VAW is collectively conceptualised as a wider problem that affects the
whole society. While individual stories are often at the core of each tweet, the use of a
common hashtag contributes to transcending them and situating them on the continuum of
VAW. Hashtagging translates the feminist claim that “the personal is political” into a social
media usage practice, thus connecting different experiences of VAW as a technopolitical

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gesture (Toret et al., 2015). In doing so, both mobilisations stress the boundaries between
public and private, exposing visible and invisible forms of patriarchal violence and pro-
moting new interpretive frameworks, while also broadening the mobilisations themselves.
The two mobilisations also share a common perspective on the sense of vulnerability
attached to being a woman in a patriarchal society. However, they adopt different dis-
cursive strategies that are rooted in the socio-cultural context where they arose and
developed: in Argentina, tweets mainly point to family relations to foster solidarity and the
protective instincts of men; in the US, they mostly frame their fight as cultural work.
Furthermore, the hashtagging allows for two different forms of data activism as a
“media-in-practice” (Mattoni, 2020) that nourishes the broader political practice of mea-
suring the phenomenon in order to install it in public discussion. This process appears as
constitutive in #MeToo, where each tweet represents a form of (self-)documentation of
sexual harassment. In #NiUnaMenos, this starts in the second year and employs more
traditional forms of data activism (i.e. providing official data on feminicidios).
The two hashtag-driven mobilisations combine online and offline activities differently
and also adopt different operating logics. In #NiUnaMenos, traditional collective action
interplays with digitally mediated mobilisations, according to the collective identity para-
digm (Gerbaudo and Treré, 2015). The hybrid mutual shaping relationship between polit-
ical struggle and media activities (Treré, 2019) unfolds in both the physical and online
realms, with the latter fuelling the former (Mattoni, 2017). Conversely, #MeToo is purely
based on the connective action logic (Bennett and Segerberg, 2013), as physical protests
consist merely of symbolic actions that gain political resonance through the use, again, of
platform affordances (i.e. additional hashtags).
In recent years, Twitter (along with other social media) has served as a driving platform for
feminist mobilisations, and the hashtag feature has worked as an aggregating tool for several
forms of activism against VAW, including data activism. In this chapter, we analysed two
cases that share a common understanding of VAW as a continuum, and the challenge to
connect men’s violence against women to the misogyny that characterises different societies
worldwide. By considering the specific sociocultural contexts where the two mobilisations
originated, we have also highlighted their different foci (feminicidio vs sexual harassment) as
well as the different ways in which they interpret the interaction between political struggle and
communication (both online and offline).

Notes
1 We use the Spanish feminicidio rather than the English femicide because it encapsulates an anti-
systemic claim against the misogynist grounds of the crime, the authorities’ negligence, and the
cultural and sociopolitical conditions normalising VAW in Latin America ( Lagarde y de los
Ríos, 2010).
2 The tweets in Spanish were translated into English by the authors.
3 We do not report quantitative data analysis but it is worth pointing out the difference between users
in the two dataset. The most popular #MeToo tweets are mostly produced by celebrities and news
media personalities, whilst #NiUnaMenos tweets are mostly authored by common users, with
marginal percentages of well-known public figures. This is consistent with our conceptualization of
#MeToo as an instance of “popular feminism” ( Banet-Weiser, 2018) and of #NiUnaMenos as a
leaderless, networked movement ( Belotti, Comunello and Corradi, 2021).

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 50
DIGITAL FEMINIST ACTIVISM
AGAINST GENDER VIOLENCE
IN SOUTH KOREA
Kaitlynn Mendes and Euisol Jeong

Introduction
For well over three decades, feminists from around the world have adopted digital technol-
ogies “to challenge contemporary sexism, misogyny and rape culture” (Mendes, Ringrose and
Keller, 2019, p. 2). From campaigns like #MeToo (USA), HarassMap (Egypt), #Nirbhaya
(India), #NiUnaMenos (Argentina), and Everyday Feminism (UK), feminists have en-
thusiastically and creatively made use of various technologies and their affordances to chal-
lenge, call-out and make visible oppressive structures that enable violence against women. The
aim of this chapter is to both document and historicise various high-and-low-profile “digital
feminist” campaigns that have challenged gender violence across time and space, and to call
on scholars to continue this work, particularly focusing on activism from the Global South.
The chapter begins by providing an overview of the diverse and creative mobilisations of
digital technologies to fight against sexual and gender-based violence. In doing so, we consider
the ways certain voices or campaigns receive greater recognition over others, and how scholars
and activists alike continue to fail to witness activism by women of colour, and campaigns
emerging beyond the Western world. As part of our attempt to rectify this gap, the chapter
provides an overview of one digital feminist campaign in South Korea called Digital Sexual
violence Out (DSO), which attracted public attention to a culturally specific form of digitally-
mediated sexual violence through the use of spy cams. Among the recent cases of digital
feminist activism in East Asia (see Fincher, 2018; Junxiao, 2021; Lai, 2021; Yang and Zhang,
2021), this South Korean case study not only addresses feminist resistance against gender
violence produced in a particular East Asian society, but also reveals the responsive, diverse
and context-specific nature of digital activism.

Tracing the history of digital feminist activism

It is always important when laying out the context in a chapter such as this, to acknowledge
that although global digital feminist activism has attained significant levels of visibility in
recent years (see Boyle, 2019; Dey, 2018; Fotopoulou, 2016; Guha, 2015; Jeong and Lee,
2018; Loney-Howes, 2020; Loney-Howes et al., 2021; Mendes, Belisário and Ringrose,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-59 543

 Kaitlynn Mendes and Euisol Jeong

2019; Núñez Puente, D’Antonio Maceiras and Fernández Romero, 2019; Skalli, 2014;
Zeng, 2019), the fight against sexual and gender-based violence is nothing new. Instead, as
media technologies have evolved, so too have the arsenal of tools that feminists use in this
battle (Fernandez, Wilding and Wright, 2002). For example, when looking back to the
internet’s early days, feminists were quick to make use of list-servs, emails and blogs to
specifically challenge gender-based and sexual violence (Friedman, 2017; Spender, 1995;
Tuzcu, 2016). As Web 2.0 technology developed, and digital tools became more accessible
to (some) feminists, we witnessed increased uptake in their use of vlogs, websites, social
media and mobile devices for this cause (Almanssori and Stanley, 2021; Friedman, 2017).
As scholars such as Friedman (2017) show, feminists’ experimentation and creative adop-
tion of available resources should come as little surprise, given their long history of media
use – from newsletters, newspapers, poetry, literature and zines (Chidgey, Gunnarsson
Payne and Zobl, 2009; DiCenzo, Delap and Ryan, 2011; Piepmeier, 2009; Steiner, 1992;
Zobl, 2009). As contemporary social movement scholars have noted, the advent of digital
technologies has resulted in activist efforts becoming (more) easily amplified, with the
potential to spread their message regionally, nationally, or internationally. For those
campaigning around sexual and gender-based violence, as Michael Salter (2013, p. 226)
notes, digital spaces have been crucial as “allegations of sexual violence are being received,
discussed and acted upon in ways contrary to established legal and social norms”.
Indeed, sexual violence and “rape culture” – or the “complex set of beliefs that encourage
male sexual aggression and supports violence against women” (Buchwald, Fletcher and Roth,
2005, p. 11) – have been particularly pertinent and affective issues around which feminist
activists have mobilised (Mendes, Belisário and Ringrose, 2019; Mendes, Keller and Ringrose,
2019; Nau et al., 2022). Amongst others, this includes the global anti-rape SlutWalk move-
ment which harnessed the power of Facebook and Twitter to organise and publicise anti-rape
marches in over 200 cities and 40 nations around the world (Mendes, 2015). It also included a
wave of digital feminist activism in India after the brutal gang rape and murder of 22-year-old
student Jyoti Singh (dubbed as “Nirbhaya” or “fearless” in Hindi), sparking fierce debate and
discussion on violence against women (Dey, 2018). Moving on to South and Central America,
as discussed by Belotti, Bernadini and Comunello in this volume, the Ni Una Menos (Not
one [woman] less) movement exploded in Buenos Aires, Argentina after the brutal femicide of
16-year-old Lucia Pérez in 2015, before spreading to other Latin American countries and
inspiring transnational spin-offs in places such as Italy (see Salvatori, 2021). As scholars
across the globe have documented, digital technologies play a crucial role in these modern
feminist movements – from organising direct action, communicating with the public, sharing
experiences, analysing cultural conditions and strategising plans.
As new digital technologies and social media platforms emerge, so too do feminists’
harnessing of these tools. It is also important to recognise that the tools used vary between
nations and age groups. Younger generations around the world have adopted Snapchat,
Instagram and TikTok. While Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and Instagram might domi-
nate in Western, Anglophone nations, Sina Weibo and WeChat are the platforms of choice
in places such as China.

High-and-low profile examples of digital feminist activism

It is difficult to write a chapter on digital feminist activism without mentioning the global
MeToo movement. Yet, while #MeToo and other high-profile campaigns previously

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discussed have attracted significant scholarly attention (Boyle, 2019; Phipps, 2020), there
are many other low-profile and “under-the-radar” initiatives worthy of exploration. For
instance, in her study of the Philadelphia-based feminist group Girl Army, Clark-Parsons
(2018) explored the challenges of creating safe, online communities for anti-rape activists.
Similarly, Mendes, Ringrose and Keller (2019) researched feminist groups in British sec-
ondary schools and explored the ways these teens at times avoided public social media such
as Twitter and the use of hashtags and opted for closed spaces such as WhatsApp or
iMessages to organise. These are just two examples of initiatives which deliberately avoided
the mainstream media or public attention as a safety strategy for participants, yet played
important roles in mobilising feminist consciousness, discourse and action.
It is also important to echo the persistent critiques from many scholars, particularly
those from marginalised and racialised groups on how the history of feminist activism has
long been whitewashed – with the voices of White, middle-class, heterosexual and cis-
gendered women’s experiences dominating mainstream representations of feminism (Davis,
1983; Hamad, 2020; Hooks, 1984; Moon and Holling, 2020; Roth, 2004; Zakafaria, 2021).
We need not look any further than MeToo to see evidence of this. Although MeToo was
started by African-American activist Tarana Burke in 2006, it only went viral in 2017 after
White Hollywood actress Alyssa Milano encouraged members of the public to join in and
showcase the systemic nature of sexual violence (for a discussion, see Loney-Howes et al.,
2021; Quan-Haase et al., 2021).
The omission of marginalised experiences and campaigns from the mainstream, despite
their rich and varied histories, is linked to broader structures of oppression – namely
patriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism and capitalism. Although there is no doubt that
the experiences of White, western, Anglophone women continue to attract the most
attention, scholars are increasingly filling knowledge gaps and making visible the geneal-
ogies of sexual and gender-based violence activism in the Global South and amongst other
marginalised communities (Dey, 2018; Friedman, 2017; Hasunuma and Shin, 2019; Moitra
et al., 2020; Phipps, 2020; Núñez Puente, D’Antonio Maceiras and Fernández Romero,
2021; Williams, 2016). Turning our attention to those campaigns which have been over-
looked is not only an important means of archiving feminist activism, but it also serves a
broader political purpose and functions as a means of “ethical witnessing” (Oliver, 2001,
2004). As scholars have noted, ethical witnessing is important and potentially transform-
ative, because it challenges audiences not only to witness familiar tropes of oppression, but
experiences that are “strange and unfamiliar” (Serisier, 2018, p. 193). In collating stories
and initiatives from diverse and marginalised groups around the world, scholars are
building a collective feminist memory and an archive of resistance to sexual and gender-
based violence.
In the next section, we turn to some of the lesser-known initiatives emerging beyond the
Western, Anglophone world, with an in-depth exploration of South Korea’s Digital Sexual
Crimes Out campaign, drawing on ethnographic data that Jeong (2020) collected as part of
a larger research project on the rise of digital feminism in South Korea.

“My life is not your porn”: development of DSO (Digital Sexual violence Out) campaign
The feminist activism we describe below reveals the responsive, diverse and context-
specific nature of digital activism. Here, we focus on how the “natives” or “inhabitants”
of digital spaces devise their own arguments and tactics based on their lived experiences

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online. In doing so, they articulate a political agenda that reflects their will to challenge
the gender violence that had been embedded in their specific cultural context. The
complexity and particularity of this activism relate to the specific association of what
they struggle with: South Korean patriarchy, online misogyny and ever-evolving tech-
nology that has been used to turn women’s everyday lives into “a kind of obscene
materials” (Tak, 2020).
On 14 November 2015, a group of anonymous women were online, doing a routine search
for offensive material on the South Korean illegal pornography website Soranet, which, at the
time, had one million registered members and 380 thousand Twitter followers.1 These women,
known as “Megalians”, were participants in the South Korean digital feminist movement that
began in May 2015, aiming to attack a “masculine internet culture” with the tools of “man-
hating” trolling (Jeong and Lee, 2018; Jeong, 2020; Kim, 2021). As an anonymous group, its
members routinely surfed the web, mobilising when they encountered sexual violence content
or perpetrators. They utilised misogynists’ own tactics – such as coining derogatory neolo-
gisms, insulting digital users, and other forms of trolling – against them. Megalians remained
anonymous to protect themselves from anti-feminist backlash (for further discussion, see
Jeong, 2020).
On this particular day, Megalians targeted a Soranet post featuring photos of a naked
woman who appeared unconscious. It included a message inviting others to join in an
imminent gang-rape of the unconscious woman in the photos. The original poster referred
to this woman as a “golbaengi girlfriend”. “Golbaengi” is both a type of sea snail that is a
popular Korean food, and slang for a limp-bodied woman who is drunk or drugged.
Making a “golbaengi” with alcohol or date-rape drugs, taking non-consensual photos, and
sharing them online, and sometimes inviting other members to join as “guest rapists” was
the most notorious activity on Soranet at that time. Constantly uploading photos to the
Soranet board showing what he was doing, the poster enticed others to leave comments,
saying he would select a few of them to join the gang rape. He eventually “invited” members
who had left the harshest comments, sending them DMs containing his location. After the
assault took place, the perpetrator and the “invited-guys” uploaded reviews of their gang
rape. To be clear, this was not an internet prank, but a felonious crime that was just one of
the many “deviant activities” taking place on Soranet.
As heavy users of South Korean digital space, Megalians were familiar with how
images and videos of ordinary women were shared as porn online (Jeong, 2020, p. 95).
Many women digital users had been aware of these practices on Soranet since at least
2011, calling out screenshots taken from its “voyeurism” board. Here, Soranet users
uploaded non-consensual photos of women’s bodies in public spaces using hidden cam-
eras – in underground trains, bus stations, and public toilets. As reported by the local
media, one teenager found herself amongst the screenshots taken in her neighbourhood,
and many women were disturbed by knowing that their everyday lives had become
pornographic material on the website (Kim, 2011). Knowledge about these non-
consensual image practices led to a number of women actively monitoring the website in
2015, when “ordinary” women began participating in digital feminism through the
emergence of the Megalian movement (Jeong, 2020).
Megalians initially targeted Soranet because it became known for its male-dominated,
sexist culture (Jeong, 2020). It became a space in which men objectified and exploited
women, justifying their sexual harassment by blaming victims for being “indecent” (Tak,
2020). Notably, Soranet emerged at a time when there was little regulation of South

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Korean digital spaces, meaning “deviant” behaviour was tolerated at best, and en-
couraged at worst. In response to the lack of moderation and rules, Megalians decided to
use some of the perpetrators’ own tactics against them as a means of making that harm
more visible while using familiar internet logic: they attempted trolling Soranet, shaming
Soranet users, and irritating them by involving the police where possible.
Megalians first attempted to “troll” Soranet by uploading prank photos and insulting
comments, such as uploading animated images of men or male genitals that were brutally
beaten, disguised with enticing/pornographic titles, and comments mocking the pathetic
masculinity of Soranet users, while producing “networked feminist humor” (Ringrose
and Lawrence, 2018). Secondly, they took screenshots of Soranet which they then used to
incite public anger and shame its users. Megalians spread these images on web pages and
social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, discussion forums, and online com-
munities to reach many other digital users who were likely unaware of Soranet’s
misogynistic culture (Jeong, 2020, p. 114). The disturbing and shocking nature of these
screenshots created an affective response, prompting the public to share these posts,
which often went viral. And third, they reported crimes on Soranet to the police, as
anonymous witnesses.
Here we can return to the 14 November example as this demonstrates how the
Megalians responded to the limits of their initial, strictly online-only and anonymous,
activism and evolved their tactics. On that day, they monitored Soranet and collectively
reported the crime to the police. Yet, despite their efforts, these users were not able to halt
this gang rape, with police reportedly saying: “the situation seems to be a prank that
enjoys reactions of other users” (DSO, 2016). Megalians had thought the Soranet users’
crimes would be interrupted by police intervention. However, the technology-facilitated
sexual violence happening on Soranet was not recognised as a crime by the police – or at
least it was not recognised as a crime that could, or should, be stopped. Instead, as
reported by Megalians, some police regarded the post as a prank, while others reproduced
victim-blaming stigmas blaming the “indecent” woman who was careless enough to get
drunk or drugged (DSO, 2017a). A more structural problem that also prevented police
interference was the fact that Soranet servers were hosted outside South Korea, meaning
its members could not be tracked by their digital records (Singh, 2016). The institutional
response to this case was a critical moment for these activists, who realised that in South
Korea, women would not receive police support if they experienced any form of
technology-facilitated sexual violence.
Taking matters into their own hands, Megalians recognised that their tactics were
ineffective in stopping this sexual violence. In the vein of pragmatism, as people who were
deeply involved in technologically mediated culture (Coleman, 2017; Postill, 2014), they
developed other ways to achieve justice, beyond “online vigilantism” (Phillips and
Miltner, 2012). Among other tactics, this involved using offline media. For instance, the
Megalians created a group “Soranet Accusation Project” and worked with a South
Korean popular television investigative programme, Unanswered Questions, in the making
of “A Dangerous Invitation: How Soranet became a Monster” which aired on 26
December 2015 (Kim et al., 2018). This programme made the rape culture and illicit
practices in Soranet national issues, with a spokesperson from the “Soranet Accusation
Project” group noting that every day, Megalians identified an average of 20 to 30 spy cam
posts, over a hundred non-consensually shared intimate images of users’ “girlfriend”
posts, and three gang rape invitations. The group also bought a billboard ad in downtown

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Seoul to gain publicity on the spy cam crime issue, spreading the message that spy cam
crimes should be halted by regulating perpetrators, not by regulating the behaviours of
victims. During their campaigning, they made connections with South Korean women’s
rights NGOs, aiming to attract more people to work together on the issue. They also
donated money to a politician who had spoken out about Soranet in parliament.
In 2016, they built the campaign group DSO (Digital Sexual Crimes Out) which had
begun as the aforementioned “Soranet Accusation Project” group, to organise online and
offline actions on these issues. This mode of activism resonated with the specific mode of
sexual violence that was exercised through online and offline practices. In March 2016 the
police eventually initiated a cooperative investigation of Soranet in collaboration with the
countries where its servers were held, and the following month, the website was taken down.
Thereafter, Korean legislators passed bills on sexual crimes, which intensified the punish-
ment for technology-facilitated sexual violence.
When taking a broad look at Korean women’s fight against digital sexual crimes, it is
clear they were responding to existing social conditions in South Korea. Here, Megalians
made South Korea’s rape culture visible, but also the masculine culture that defends
men’s “freedom” online to enjoy unlawful acts that hurt women. The Megalians also
demonstrated how evolving digital technologies provide new possibilities for committing
sexual violence. In doing so, they highlighted and challenged the misogynistic culture that
naturalises and encourages these behaviours, which has worked for solidifying “homo-
social” bonding of male misogynists (Kim, 2018). In part, Megalians argued that this
culture was made possible by the anonymity on the South Korean internet, which enables
participants to feel less responsible for what happens in the online space and to view
women’s bodies as “obscene material” (Tak, 2020). The harmful composition could be
recognised as a specific problem because it was identified by young women who were
technologically savvy and were directly involved in digital cultures. Megalians, therefore,
identified technology-facilitated sexual violence as a newly emerged form of violence
against women, pointing out the devastating impact it has on victims (Human Rights
Watch, 2021).
From trolling a website as anonymous users to organising a political campaign group,
the tactics that Megalians used in challenging South Korean misogyny reveal how Korean
women have been responsive to their social and cultural circumstances. This then shaped
their political agenda and the tactics they used – from attacking the pervasive misogynistic
culture, to pursuing public interventions on technology-facilitated violence. Since 2016,
DSO and other online-based activist groups have brought about changes in legal and
governmental decisions on spy cam crimes and enforced media sharing platforms to prevent
the spread of “sex offending-materials”2 (DSO, 2017b). While doing so, Megalians inter-
vened by monitoring how the police treat victims, pointing out where the police and gov-
ernment needed to concentrate their support. Megalians also used hashtag activism to
organise protests and to criticise the ridiculously soft penalties perpetrators of spy-cam
crimes had previously received, pressuring judges to give harsher sentences. Deriving from
what they experienced, these women campaigned to tackle an urgent issue that they were
able to identify because of their positionality as both inhabitants of digital spaces and as
women who lived with South Korean misogynistic culture. Together, this created situa-
tional knowledge of how to intervene.

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Concluding thoughts
This chapter served to trace the highly diverse and creative ways that feminists across the
globe have harnessed digital technologies to challenge sexual and gender-based violence.
While some of these campaigns, particularly those from the Global North, have attracted
significant media and public attention, this chapter also sought to draw readers’ attention to
the vastly understudied and at times invisible campaigns that have also emerged. By fo-
cusing our attention on one campaign from South Korea, Digital Sexual violence Out
(DSO), we begin to attend to this gap in scholarship while demonstrating how digital
feminist activism is shaped through responses to the specific complexities of digital en-
vironments. We do this by examining how DSO participants actively appropriated their
own experiences and resources obtained through inhabiting digital space for their feminist
end. Although this chapter briefly outlined some key trends, we conclude by arguing that
researchers must attend to the complexity, plurality, and diversity of digital feminist cam-
paigns, and how issues of power and privilege shape whose voices, experiences and in-
itiatives are heard and acted upon.

Notes
1 Followers were directed to Soranet’s ever-changing web address via Twitter. This allowed Soranet
to evade South Korean jurisdictional regulation which results in the blocking of specific web
addresses.
2 DSO members termed the photos and videos taken by spy cams or taken during sexual assaults as
“sex offending materials” to emphasise that these “materials” had been created and spread illegally
and against victims’ wills.

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 51
WOMEN 2020
How Pakistani feminisms unfolded
between Twitter and the streets
Munira Cheema

Pakistan is ranked 153 out of 156 by the World Economic Forum on the global gender gap
index (Global Gender Gap Report, 2021, p. 10). The rate of gendered crime is also quite
high in Pakistan. In 2020 alone, there were 430 reported cases of honour killings that
included 148 male and 363 female victims (Human Rights Commission Pakistan Report,
2021 p.16). Gender issues in Pakistan are mainly governed by customary laws, religion and
state law (Toor, 2007; Cheema, 2018). With little variation, all three are written in the idiom
of patriarchy. The customary laws prevail in rural areas while the state law is largely fol-
lowed in urban Pakistan. Shariah, on the other hand, enjoys the status of hegemonic dis-
course but it is difficult to determine its reach across rural and urban Pakistan. Under
Shariah, gender issues are largely governed by the public/private distinction laid by the
divine texts. In this arrangement, women are assigned the role of the queen of the house
while men, as their custodians, are the head of the family (Maududi, 1972). This classical
interpretation not only confines women to the private sphere but also disallows them to
participate in public life. This separation has become somewhat porous in the digital age,
where access to public life is possible without displacing women from the home (Cheema,
2015; 2018). Some liberal Muslim scholars have also attempted to rearticulate the rights of
women in Islam (Wudud, 1999; Barlas, 2002; Engineer, 1992; Ghamidi, 2010). These
scholars’ interpretation of the public/private distinction in Shariah acknowledges women’s
right to fully participate in the public life of society.
It is in this context that feminist activists have struggled for the rights of women in
Pakistan. In the Pakistani context, women-led movements can mainly be divided into liberal
women’s movements and pro-religion movements. The pro-religion movement is largely
governed by Jamaat-e-Islami’s women’s wing (pro-religion political party). According to
Jamal, Jamaat women “underline the explicitly and unmistakably political focus of their
struggle as intrinsic to their faith and expressed in their efforts to bring about Islamisation
of law and society in Pakistan through the power of the state” (2009, p.17). These women
and their followers subscribe to the version of Islam that allows women to seek modern
education and actively participate in the public/political life of society while adopting a
strict Islamic dress code (2009, pp. 21–24).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-60 553

 Munira Cheema

Opposed to these groups are the liberal feminists whose struggle involves pushing for
women-friendly laws. These activists belong to the elite class, are educated in the West and
appear modern in their outlook. The liberal women’s movement is led by civil society ac-
tivists. The beginnings of their movement are often marked by the activists’ struggle against
the policy of Islamisation under the military rule of General Zia-ul-Haque (between 1977
and 1988). Under this policy, Haque passed the Hudood Ordinance, a set of five laws
including the controversial Zina Ordinance. According to this Ordinance, it was difficult to
distinguish between adultery and rape (see Toor, 2007, p. 260). To challenge the law, women
activists got together to form Women Action Forum (WAF), but their activism was largely
“state-focused and adversarial” (Shaheed, 2021). While their struggle continued for years
without any change to the Ordinance, it was not until another General (Pervez Musharraf,
1999–2008) came into power that the Women’s Protection Act of 2006 was passed, clari-
fying the distinction between adultery and rape.
Since the mid-2010s, a new wave of feminist activism has emerged in Pakistan (Rehman,
2021). It is hard to define who leads it, but it seems dispersedly connected online (Shaheed,
2021; see also Phillips, 1995). It is also marked by the online presence of ordinary women
who identify as feminists and tend to express their allegiance to feminist causes. Their
activism focuses on battling internalised misogyny in society or challenging patriarchy in
everyday contexts (Shaheed, 2021). Twitter offers a space of performance/participation for
these women and a space for interaction between male and female citizens on gender issues.
This chapter focuses on the discussion unfolding in relation to hashtags that emerged after
the airing of a talk show that discussed the need for a women’s march on International
Women’s Day in 2020. This march is referred to as Aurat March (translated as Women
March) in Pakistan. While the government, pro-religion parties and women’s NGOs have
been celebrating International Women’s Day for years, there has recently been a “genera-
tional shift” in perceptions of how the day could be celebrated (Zia, 2022).
The year 2020 was unique in terms of events leading up to the protests on International
Women’s Day. On 3 March 2020, the Senate debated the need for the annual Women’s
March. In the session, Senator Faiz, representing the pro-religion party Jamiat-Ulema-e-
Islam, questioned the motivations of the activists leading the March, saying that “as
Muslims our daughters cannot chant ‘My Body, My Choice’”. Senator Sherry Rehman, the
Vice President of Pakistan Peoples’ Party, responded with “men do whatever they want to
do in public spaces while women are not even allowed to march on International Women
Day”. Following this session, a current affairs-based talk show Aaj Ayesha Ehtesham Kay
Sath (translated as Today with Ayesha Ehtesham) debated “Whether Pakistani Women
should march on International Women’s Day or Not?” The show invited Senator Faiz,
Khalil-ur-rehman Qamar, a renowned Islamist writer, and Marvi Sirmed, a liberal woman
activist, to take part in the debate. The discussion leaned towards debating the slogans
activists used in 2019 and the ones they intended to use in 2020’s March. The most com-
monly used slogan in the 2019 March was “My Body, My Choice”, but other slogans
included “My Body Is Not Your Battleground” and “Stop Being Menstrual Phobic”
(Bukhari, 2020). The talk show debate revolved around two issues: that the March is funded
by Western NGOs, hence anti-state, and that the slogans are against the moral code of
society. The conversation started with Senator Faiz saying that “women can march but not
use the slogan ‘My Body, My Choice’ since it’s against Islam”. Sirmed responded with
“gone are the days when men could control our bodies, it will now be our choice. We will
make the choice to have as many or fewer kids we want to have, we will decide whether and

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when we want to have sex with our husbands or not”. When Qamar was asked to share his
opinion on the issue, Sirmed interjected with the slogan “My Body, My Choice”. Qamar
retaliated by calling her “dirty”, “no man would even spit on a woman like you”, “no man
would want to control your body”, “a woman without shame is hardly a woman”. Note
that shame is framed here as the most desirable virtue in a woman and in the Pakistani
context it implies chastity, modesty, shyness, restraint, reservedness, concealment, silence as
well as honour (Alvi, 2013; see also Cheema, 2018).
The heated debate extended beyond the show onto Twitter – where both Qamar and
Sirmed have huge followings (382,500 and 558,500 followers respectively), and it is this
Twitter engagement that this chapter is interested in. Senator Faiz, on the other hand, is not
active on Twitter. The incident initiated several hashtags leading up to the International
Women’s Day March, including: #MeraJismMeriMarzi (My Body, My Choice),
#WeRejectMeraJismMeriMarzi (We Reject My Body, My Choice), #AuratMarch (Women
March), and #WhyICannotMarch.1 The chapter focuses on two main hashtags,
#MeraJismMeriMarzi and #WhyICannotMarch to evaluate how Pakistani citizens came
together on Twitter to reflect on the legitimacy of the protest, the slogans used, and the
attributes that define an ideal Pakistani woman.

Theoretical framework
The chapter’s theoretical underpinnings are derived from the debates on publics and
counter publics. I follow Dayan (2005) and Warner (2002) who tie publics to discourses and
performances. Following Warner (2002), I acknowledge that through its allegiance to a
discourse, a public can organise itself independently of state institutions. In the case of this
study, it is the gendered discourse in the Pakistani context that unites strangers through
either participation (likes, retweets, replying) or even following on Twitter. Previously
scholars have also sought parallels between popular culture, discourse publics and the
Habermasian public sphere (Cheema, 2018; Hartley, 1996; Habermas, 2006; McGuigan,
2005; Müller and Hermes, 2010; Klein, 2011). Others have rearticulated the notion of the
public sphere through a feminist lens. For example, Felski (1989) locates the feminist public
sphere in publishing, while Fraser (1990) traces it in movements. In my previous work, I
have also traced a feminist public sphere in Pakistani popular culture. My overarching
argument has been that gendered discourse on Pakistani television is Shariah-compliant,
though some counter voices that support liberal gendered discourse find spaces in slots that
are televised outside of primetime (Cheema, 2018). I call liberal or non-Shariah compliant
gendered discourse the counter discourse and those who follow this discourse, the counter
publics (following Fraser, 1990). In recent years, gendered discourse that could previously
be found on television has also been picked up on Twitter, and can take many forms
including hashtagging, retweets, likes as well as commenting.
Many scholars highlight the potential of social media to push routes for democratisation
by giving voice to minorities and counter publics (Bohman, 2004; Downey and Fenton,
2003; Hamdy and Gomaa, 2012; Papacharissi and Oliveria, 2012). In countries where media
is highly regulated by the state, such as Pakistan, social media can facilitate counter dis-
courses, although online anti-religion and anti-establishment discourses are not immune
from surveillance (Cheema, 2020). Given the nature of the space, the publics do not nec-
essarily arrive at a “common good through rational deliberation” but conversations start on
issues that are more difficult in other contexts (Benhabib, 1992). While there have been

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many different approaches to online publics (Jackson and Welles, 2016; Bruns and Burgess,
2011; Rambukanna, 2015; Papacharissi and Oliveira, 2012; Papacharissi, 2015), I refer to
them as pronounced publics for their long-term/offline association with gendered discourse
(for a detailed discussion on pronounced publics, see Cheema, 2018).
Using a customised tool, the study has located four hashtags (#MeraJismMeriMarzi,
#WeRejectMeraJismMeriMarzi, #AuratMarch, #WhyICannotMarch) trending between
4–9 March 2020. In the first stage, all tweets were extracted, quantified and then the data
was refined by retrieving the top 20 tweets under each hashtag based on the number of likes
and retweets. Then, using thematic and critical discourse analysis (CDA), I analysed the
encounters of conservative and liberal publics of gendered discourse in an otherwise po-
larised society. I argue that CDA offers a useful method to analyse the ideological
vocabulary used in the tweets (Cheema, 2020). Discourses are “socially conditioned pro-
cesses” and powerful discourses can take the shape of a nation’s collective commonsense
(Fairclough, 1996, p.26). I argue that religion is the hegemonic discourse that shapes the
collective commonsense of the Pakistani nation, greatly impacting national consciousness
(Cheema, 2020). In this study, the tweets shared by users are part of the wider discourse on
how religion is indispensable for defining the gendered realities of the nation.

#MeraJismMeriMarzi: debating the connotation of the slogan

Soon after the talk show where Qamar questioned the slogan “My Body, My Choice” aired,
Sirmed took to Twitter with a series of tweets using the hashtag #MeraJismMeriMarzi, one
of which shared a screenshot from an episode of a crime show (Sar-e-Aam translated as Out
in the Open) hosted by Iqrar-ul-Hassan Syed on ARY News Channel. Syed is an investi-
gative journalist who covers crime reporting through his shows. The screenshot was orig-
inally tweeted by Syed as a teaser/promo for Sar-e-Aam’s upcoming episode on domestic
abuse highlighting how he helped the victim escape her husband’s house. His tweet read “far
from the world of Marvi Sirmed and Khalil ur Rehman and beyond the slogan of my body,
my choice, I have helped Saira escape her husband. I asked her if she knows about Women
March, she replied what’s that?” (@iqrarulhassan, 6 March 2020). The tweet can be seen as
a critical take on the feminist activism of 2020. It implied that the real issues of women
revolve around the crimes they face in remote areas (in this case, Jacobabad) and that most
of the victims are not even aware of the march/activism. It also refers to the disconnect
between those who debate rights and those who are the victims of gender-based violence.
Replacing Syed’s caption with hers, Sirmed used the image of the victim to draw
attention to the issues of domestic abuse in society and to emphasise the continued need for
activism. Since I am using hashtag-led data, Sirmed’s tweet appeared among the top ten for
the #MeraJismMeriMerzi dataset, while Syed’s original tweet only appeared in the replies,
because he did not use the above hashtag. Using Sirmed’s tweet as the parent tweet, then, I
trace the discussion in the replies section. It is worth pointing out that these replies are
addressing Sirmed rather than Syed. Sirmed’s caption read:

She is from Jacobabad and was badly beaten up by her husband. Her head shaved.
Doesn’t she have any agency over her own body? Should our bodies be always
available to men for exploitation and violence? Think! #MeraJismMeriMarzi
(@marvisimed, March 6 2020)

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During the talk show, Sirmed did not highlight any such cases while Qamar continued to
question the slogan for its “vulgar” connotations (around sexual autonomy). Sharing the
image of a woman whose head was shaved by her husband could be interpreted as Sirmed’s
attempt to draw attention to domestic abuse. It can also be seen as a move to divert users’
attention away from the narrow connotation of sexual autonomy that the conservative publics
attach to the slogan. What is worth noting is how Sirmed uses “our” to refer to women’s
bodies, transcending class and the distance between her as an urban feminist and the victim in
rural Sindh. Her carefully worded tweet asks a question as well as invites the user to “Think!”.
One user responded to Sirmed’s tweet by sharing Syed’s original image with the fol-
lowing caption: “what a slap to so call Aurat March”(sic) (6 March 2020). The word “slap”
refers to the revelation made in Syed’s original tweet that the victim did not have a clue
about the Women March. The reference to the “slap” also reiterates that activists like
Sirmed neither reach the victims of gender-based violence, nor highlight gender crimes in
the mainstream media – their focus is on promoting personal freedom for privileged women.
This perception is further endorsed by another reply that says:

Majority of women in march will be those who are involved in domestic violence
especially toward their maids. Agenda of women march is being exploited by these
liberal and secular women which contradicts with islam (sic).
(7 March 2020)

Here, the tweet highlights a practice that is rampant in affluent, Pakistani households, where
young girls are often employed as a form of cheap household help. As Khan explains, violence
against these girls is common and, “In 2019, the Punjab provincial government had
promulgated a law to ban employment of children below 15 years of age as domestic servants”
(Khan, 2020). The tweet highlights an issue that is often not taken up by feminist activists on
television. This is the most recurring theme across the data that frames the supporters of the
march as women of privilege with secular leanings. For anti-march Twitter users, these ac-
tivists lack relatability. The tweet also rests on a generalised assumption that given their
privileged backgrounds, women activists also employ young women as house help. There is, of
course, no evidence to substantiate these claims. It is also evident that the user sees Sirmed as
the spokesperson for all liberal activists. Hence, anything she tweets is viewed not just with
scepticism but also as a conspiracy against Islam. The use of the word agenda further reaffirms
the point. Moreover, there is a conflation of the liberal and secular women in the tweet. These
terms are often used interchangeably in Pakistan to refer to all those who are not religiously
inclined. The anti-religion connotation also draws from the fact that in Islam, the body
belongs to Allah. Therefore, the slogan, “My Body, My Choice” directly challenges the idea
that humans can have agency and the right to make choices about their body. Sirmed’s
intention to share the news story was further questioned in the following tweet:

Why not hang the husband or whoever did this publicly? Will your dirty slogans are
helping her? Or expose those who did this & treat her well will heal her wounds?
#HumanityFirst (sic).
(8 March 2020)

Interestingly, “hang the husband” is a sarcastic take on liberal feminism that condemns
Shariah-compliant punishments for blasphemers, adulterers, rapists, murderers or killers.

557
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There is a long history of peaceful protests by human rights activists against the death
penalty in Pakistan (Chaudry, 2016). It is common for feminist activists to actively cam-
paign against the blasphemy law, which also lands them in trouble with the clergy
(Hoodbhoy, 2021). Feminist activists including Sirmed have played “a key role in the recent
campaign to free Rimsha Masih, a Christian girl who was wrongly accused of blasphemy
after a Muslim cleric planted evidence against her” (PTI, 2012). Perhaps it was for this
reason that Sirmed continues to be on the receiving end of threats and attacks from ex-
tremist groups (Sirmed, n.d.). This perception of liberal feminists as anti-Islam as well as
anti-state is further endorsed by another tweet:

Taking pictures to get foreign funds/aids is all that you care about. It’s all about the
money, it was never about helping these women. Just stop with these inappropriate
slogans, please, and stop screwing minds of young wimen (sic).
(8 March 2020)

It is a common perception that NGOs that work for women’s rights, as well as any women-
related protests (feminist protests) by the liberal public, are funded by the West. Some of these
activists have previously worked for NGOs, and Sirmed herself has worked for the United
Nations Programme in Pakistan. Therefore, leading activists (whether online or offline) have
the reputation of working on behalf of a foreign agenda. The use of “you” in the above tweet
implies the “other” that the conservative publics see in the liberal activists while the use of
“stop screwing minds of young women” implies the “us”, the “pious nation” that needs to be
protected from the liberal/foreign tide. The above tweet highlights the pronounced anxiety
about losing one’s culture and one’s religious values. Interestingly, in these tweets, the
Pakistani nation is also seen as what Sara Ahmed (2012), in a British context, calls a “soft
touch nation”, a nation that imbibes any idea that meets it. Across the #MeraJismMeriMerzi
tweets, this anxiety about the threat to culture, religion and nation is a recurring theme,
demonstrating how difficult it is to separate the gendered discourse from the Islamic one in a
Pakistani context. It is also clear how the conservative publics see Pakistani women as a
monolithic category that strictly adheres to the Islamic code on gender.

Societal barriers to participation: how liberal publics engage with the #WhyICannotMarch
The slogans were debated across media until 8 March 2020. On the day of Women March,
the organisers initiated a hashtag with a call saying: “For those who want to march today
but can’t due to societal barriers, please share your stories though #WhyICannotMarch”
(@AuratMarch, 8 March 2020). I argue that those who responded to the hashtag, and
shared personal stories, took the first step to denounce the silence around gendered crimes. I
see them as members of a liberal public. For instance:

#WhyICannotMarch Because I had a huge debate with my parents about it when I

went to ask. It ended with them telling me my childhood rape wasn’t even rape and I
keep thinking of it years later so it keeps hurting. And khandaan ki izzat mere aurat
march jaane se khatam honi hai (my participation in the march would put my family’s
honour at stake).
(8 March 2020)

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#WHYICANNOTMARCH Here’s why I CANNOT get peace of mind NOR safety

NOR financial security NOR justice: my abusive, violent, privileged, criminal ex-
husband XXXX outside my home now to snatch my girls #AuratMarch #IWD2020.
(8 March 2020)

The first tweet is a clear indication of how gender crimes are not even acknowledged as a
form of abuse in the society. However, what is worth noting is how the first tweet starts the
conversation with a reference to her childhood rape. It is evident that the rape faced by the
user was perhaps not reported but sharing the trauma on Twitter could be seen as em-
powering. Such tweets offer occasional moments of collective solidarity among the victim/
survivors and the online empathisers, which is significant because sharing ordeals with
those one knows in offline contexts can invite unwanted consequences such as shame to the
family. Indeed, the first tweet explicitly draws attention to that in situating her reason for
not marching as putting family honour at stake. Looking at aspects of honour, Mosquera
argues that the family’s honour is protected by correcting “reputation-damaging behav-
iors” while the “feminine honor is seen as the obligation of a woman in light of her tra-
ditional gender role by maintaining chastity and sexual modesty” (Mosquera, cited in
Anjum, Kessler and Aziz, 2019, p. 148). For the user’s family, participation in the march
would not only have challenged the reputation of the family but also their daughter’s
chastity and sexual modesty. In the second tweet, the user provides an even more direct
challenge to the notion of family honour, by naming her abusive ex-husband (I have re-
moved his name in quoting the tweet). With this tweet, the user attempts to rearticulate the
notion of shame that signifies “reservedness” and honour in silence (Alvi, 2013). By
sharing that she cannot get “justice” or “security”, she hints at how the system favours men
as “fathers”.
The reference to how women’s participation in the march would embarrass the family
continues in other tweets as well:

#WhyICannotMarch because my mom has been conditioned by my dad and her

parents into thinking that women have all the rights they need and anyone who’s on
the road exercising their right of free speech to demand justice and equality is a dis-
grace to the society. I really wanted to be a part of this revolution but sadly I can’t. I
stand in solidarity with all my sisters who are brave enough to fight for their rights!! Be
safe and smash the fucking patriarchy.
(8 March 2020)

The reference to “conditioned” refers to internalised misogyny among women, the roots of
which are found in patriarchy and religion. The reference to “women have all the rights”
also emerges from the perception that Islam can address all issues facing women. The
connotation is that it is “common sense” knowledge (to use Fairclough’s term) that Islam
has the answers to all societal problems. The use of “disgrace” implies how women are
treated as repositories of honour: their entire conduct, and the choices they make in ev-
eryday contexts, reflect on their family’s piety. Here, the disgrace also refers to the choice of
slogans for the march. However, in a context where perceptions of the gendered realities of
society are highly regulated by patriarchal culture and religion at both macro (state and
media) and micro levels (family), it is a welcome trend to see women express solidarity with
“sisters” who are marching.

559
 Munira Cheema

Conclusion
This chapter has traced how different publics engaged with the hashtags that emerged
around the events leading up to Women March 2020. The findings show that responses can
be divided into conservative and liberal publics. In a theoretical sense, both constitute what
I call the pronounced publics of the gendered discourse where the hashtag/slogan
(#MeraJismMeriMerzi) and the parent tweet by Sirmed became the stimuli for them to
participate/perform on Twitter. The findings reveal that largely conservative publics inter-
acted with Sirmed’s tweet. For them, the slogan represents anti-Islam, foreign/Western,
urban as well as elitist agendas. What one notices is the anxiety about losing the collective
identity of the nation, that is, “conservative Muslim”. In expressing that anxiety, the users
see liberal activists as the “other” or “bodies out of place” (Ahmed, 2012). The intention is
to discredit the liberal as well as the secular connotations of feminism while also com-
menting on their privileged status in society. For these users, feminist activists’ privilege
implies their exposure to Western education that inspires/conditions them to find answers to
women’s problems in Western feminism. In contrast, the hashtag #WhyICannotMarch was
engaged with largely by the liberal public. What one notices is a rare form of personal
disclosures from Pakistani women on Twitter. I argue that these disclosures offer oppor-
tunities (though rare) to push the boundaries of the thus far immutable discourse on gender
issues in Pakistan. Since the liberal public is in a minority, I see it as the counter public that
is attempting to rearticulate the discourse on gender in a Pakistani context (see Cheema,
2018; 2020). In doing so, this public can “invent and circulate counter discourses, which in
turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and
needs” (Fraser, 1990, pp. 66–67). Given the pressures from the conservative segments of the
society to boycott the march, it became somewhat easier for the liberal public to participate
if not in person than online (#WhyICannotMarch).
I would stress that in conservative societies, the offline march offers a limited space for
performance for liberal publics, particularly given the risks to the physical safety of
marchers. Twitter, on the other hand, offers a space to retweet and engage with the hashtag
as they would with the placard. While it comes with its own consequences around misog-
ynist abuse, it can still be seen as small steps towards change. What is unprecedented here is
how the conservative publics directly engage with liberal activists, a trend that was unheard
of in pre-Internet times. I see these moments of friction not as “a synonym for resistance”
but as the first step towards learning to deal with others’ opinions.

Note
1 Please note that I have done my best to translate all Urdu words into English.

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 52
DIGITAL FEMINIST AND QUEER
ACTIVISM AGAINST GENDER
VIOLENCE IN CHINA
Jia Tan

As of December 2021, over one billion people had access to the Internet in China, which
accounts for one-fifth of the four billion Internet users worldwide. Among them, 48.5% are
women (CNNIC, 2022). In this context, it is not surprising to see the rise of a new wave of
media-based feminist and queer activism and articulations in China in the last decade or so.
This heterogeneous wave of activism tackles a wide range of issues, such as employment
discrimination, gender identity, sexual orientation, sexual harassment, sex worker rights,
domestic violence, gender equality legislation, women’s political participation, rural wo-
men’s status, education and economic status.
In this chapter, I focus on the issue of gender violence in this new wave of media-based
activism in China. This digital activism is shaped by China’s distinct digital infrastructure,
regulation and censorship. China’s Internet is regulated by techniques such as the Great
Firewall – which blocks foreign websites and apps – keyword blocking algorithms and human
censors that filter materials the state deems sensitive. Because of this distinct feature, this
chapter looks mainly at mainland China, instead of various feminist practices in other
Sinophone societies and communities, such as Hong Kong (Lim, 2015), Taiwan or Singapore
(Lyons, 2004). Nevertheless, the situation in China contributes to the multiplicity of
Chineseness as well as Chinese feminisms (Chen, 2011), which is not confined to mainland
China. Moreover, how feminist activism takes shape is a historically and culturally variant
process that accentuates certain aspects of violence against women. For instance, a study
comparing mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, found that those in China relied most
heavily on the infliction of physical injury rather than psychological harm as a determining
criterion for violence against women (Tang et al., 2002, p.685). Accordingly, physical forms of
gender violence such as rape and physical domestic abuse have historically received the most
attention in feminist activism and prevention work in China. However, as this chapter will
show, the understanding of gender violence has gradually expanded in recent feminist and
queer activism.
The emphasis on physical injury partly explains the priority given to physical forms of
domestic violence, compared to more expansive definitions of domestic abuse used in other
contexts. One of the limitations of the term domestic violence or abuse, or jiabao in Chinese,
is that it usually only includes heterosexual married couples and cannot deal with couples

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-61 563

 Jia Tan

who are dating, in cohabitation or in same-sex relationships (Wang, 2017). Besides the
marginalisation of same-sex partners in the dominant framing of domestic violence, another
tendency in discussing gender violence in China is the emphasis on violence against women.
Recent queer activism in China opens up discussions about physical, psychological and
other forms of gender violence, such as those experienced by men, transgender and non-
binary individuals.
This chapter traces the history of feminist media activism against gender violence in
China. I then look at the specific configurations and characteristics of the creative actions
against gender violence in this new wave of digital feminism, including anti-domestic vio-
lence campaigns, online campaigns against sexual harassment, as well as #MeToo in China
and in Hong Kong. In particular, I highlight the convergence of feminist and queer
activism, which extends the previous understanding of gender violence to people of diverse
gender identities and sexual orientations.

A short history of feminist media activism against gender violence in China

The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women
(CEDAW) was the first human rights treaty China signed and ratified in 1980. The Law on
the Protection of Rights and Interests of Women was enacted in 1992 in China, prohibiting
discrimination against and maltreatment of women. However, it was not until 2016 that
China’s Anti-domestic Violence Law came under enforcement. In the 1980s, the discussions
on wife-beating (da laopo) were treated on a case-by-case basis. In the early 1990s, the term
domestic violence (jiating baoli) was introduced in scholarly discussions to re-interpret wife-
beating as a structural problem based on gender inequality (Milwertz and Bu, 2009). The
United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995, also intro-
duced terms such as “violence against women” from international women’s rights discourse
into policy as well as public debates (Zhang, 2009).
Translating global human rights law into local justice is a complicated process that must
be framed in local terms to be accepted and effective in altering existing social hierarchies
(Merry, 2006). In China, issues related to women tend to be handled by the All-China
Women’s Federation (ACWF), a state-sponsored institution. In the late 1970s, the eco-
nomic reform led by Deng Xiaoping introduced market liberalisation, whereby “non-
governmental” organising started to emerge in the mid-1980s and proliferated in the sub-
sequent decades. The collaboration between ACWF and “non-governmental” organisations
was heightened by the United Nations Beijing conference in 1995. Notably, the history of
feminist activism against domestic violence is a joint effort from people both within and
outside the state system (Milwertz, 2003; Wang, 2018; Wu, Feng and Lansdowne, 2019).
For example, the national Anti-Domestic Violence Network, originally an NGO, eventually
merged into the organisational infrastructure of ACWF.
Working against gender-based violence has always been a major concern for feminist
NGOs nationwide, including those – like the Media Monitor for Women Network (founded
in 1996) – that actively engage with the media. Their anti-gender-violence work has en-
compassed media monitoring of mainstream newspapers. Additionally, multiple feminist
groups wrote and performed Chinese versions of “The Vagina Monologues” in different cities,
addressing various aspects of gender violence, including contemporary stories of date rape,
human trafficking, domestic abuse and the enforcement of abortion or intrauterine contra-
ceptive devices for women under China’s one-child policy. Digital documentaries, such as

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Vagina Monologues, Behind the Scene Stories (2004), directed by Ai Xiaoming and Hu Jie, and
The VaChina Monologues (2013), directed by Fan Popo, helped disseminate the feminist play
to a wider audience. Whilst this offline work is not the focus of this chapter, it is important to
recognise that a concern with the media is not unique to feminist organising in the digital age,
although – as I will argue – the digital age does present specific opportunities.

Digital feminist activism and Weibo

The manifestation of media-based feminism also takes a variety of forms, from e-journals,
digital filmmaking, and multimedia theatre to the later popularity of social media activism.
In 2009, the Media Monitor for Women Network launched their website and started to
publish the weekly e-journal Women’s Voice. The e-journal analyses and comments on
current affairs related to women’s rights and gender equality, tracks and responds to mass
media reports on related issues, reports on the activities of women’s civil society organi-
sations, and translates information relating to international women’s movements. Women’s
Voice places a particular focus on combatting violence against women. Lu
 Pin, one of the
editors, later participated in launching the account @FeministVoices on Sina Weibo, the
Chinese equivalent of Twitter and the most popular social media platform in China, with
582 million monthly active users as of 2022 (Weibo, 2022). @FeministVoices was – at the
time of its launch – the largest feminist account on Weibo (Xiong, 2019). The New Media
Female Network (NMFN) (xinmeiti nu
xing wangluo, also known as Women Awakening),
based in the Pearl River Delta in southern China, actively uses the Weibo account @
WomenAwakening to disseminate feminist messages related to gender issues in mass
communication. These Weibo accounts are associated with the Youth Feminist Action
School (qingnian nu
quan xingdong pai). One of the features of their practices is the emphasis
on xingdong, or “action,” which means interventions in the public sphere and changing
public policy. The adoption of quan, or rights, in the naming of feminism, marks a para-
digmatic shift that underlines rights-related concepts and practices and forms a new wave of
rights feminism (Tan, 2023).
2012 was regarded as a landmark year when the new wave of feminist activism started to
receive considerable public attention. Between 2012 and 2015, over 40 actions and cam-
paigns took place aimed at battling gender discrimination, sexual harassment, violence
against women and homophobia (Xiong, 2019). Many of the participants were young,
college-educated students and graduates in urban areas, which corresponds with the profile
of Weibo users at that time. The Injured Bride action in 2012, for example, featured three
activists wearing bloodstained wedding dresses on Beijing’s Qianmen Street, holding signs
calling for the end of domestic violence. The blood stains on the wedding dresses symbolise
the consequences of domestic violence and offer a critique of the institution of marriage,
especially how it makes invisible the domestic violence suffered by women. Such offline
events or actions are usually carefully planned to attract the attention of journalists and to
facilitate later social media campaigns, especially on accounts such as @FeministVoices and
@WomenAwakening.
In this wave of contemporary feminist activism in China, media serves as a “core political
resource” because young feminists have a different relationship with the state (Li and Li,
2017). While the previous generations of activists were more likely to be working with the
state, ACWF and state-owned traditional media such as newspapers or television, the new
wave of younger feminists rely more on commercial digital media such as social media and

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mobile technology that is not state-owned, though still subject to censorship. Social media is
an important arena for young feminists to articulate different voices and build strategic
alliances (Wang and Driscoll, 2019). By politicising women’s “private” matters, many of
these women’s digital activist actions rewrite “the personal is political” by establishing
gendered and political subjectivity (Hou, 2020).

Social media advocacy against gender violence

Whilst the digital strategies mapped in the previous section were primarily proactive actions
by Chinese feminist groups, digital media also allows feminists to mobilise quickly – and
transnationally – in reaction to external events. It is also notable that reactive actions place
a particular emphasis on visibility and virality – but that this can be accompanied by
misogynist backlash, from the state and from individuals. Three different examples bring
together these points. Firstly, the Shanghai Subway protest illustrated the repertoire of
online activism. On a hot summer day in 2012, the official Weibo account of the Shanghai
Subway posted a photo of a female passenger dressed in a semi-transparent dress with the
comment “wearing a dress like this is bound to attract sexual harassment”. Responding to
this comment that suggests sexual harassment is the fault of the victim, activists uploaded
photos of themselves holding signs on the subway train or in the subway station onto
Weibo. These signs included slogans such as: “wo ke yi sao, ni bu neng rao (I can be pro-
vocative, but you can’t harass me)” or “yao qing liang, bu yao se lang (I want to cool down, I
don’t want perverts)”. While conveying the message of challenging sexual harassment, these
slogans also emphasise women’s liberty to wear what they like, highlighting their agency,
instead of positioning them as victims (Tan, 2023, p. 31).
Another high-profile action during this new feminist wave was the online petition for
legislation against domestic violence in 2012 during China’s 16 Days of Activism Against
Gender Violence. The Chinese 16 Days is part of a transnational campaign “Say NO –
UNiTE to End Violence against Women” which originated from the first Women’s Global
Leadership Institute in 1991 and has since been officially endorsed by UN Women. As part
of this larger transnational campaign, one of the most visible localised online events was the
campaign for the petition in support of anti-domestic violence law. The campaign started
with 18 Chinese feminists of varying ages and different backgrounds being photographed
nude, with their bodies adorned with written words to provoke the public. Most of these
feminists’ photographs use a similar red colour scheme highlighting text that reads “Anti-
Domestic Violence Law”, “Legislation”, “Calling for 10,000 Signatures” on the top, middle,
and lower part of the picture. Some of them have personalised slogans painted on their
bodies in red. For example, one feminist’s painted red characters state, “Shame on domestic
violence/Proud to have flat chest”, and two other feminists wrote “menstrual blood is not
shameful/domestic violence is reprehensible” on their bodies with sanitary napkins adhered
to different body parts. These posts were shared and reposted on @FeministVoices. The
online campaign achieved its goal as the petition garnered 12,000 online and offline sig-
natures altogether, and it contributed to the consciousness-raising actions that anticipated
the Anti-Domestic Violence Law in 2016 (Equality Beijing, 2020).
Katrien Jacobs (2016) uses the term “disorderly aesthetics” to describe how activists
deliberately use nude images to solicit feedback and form affective encounters. Interestingly,
while an online campaign with nudity and the potential to mobilise people is very likely to
be censored in China, the Anti-Domestic Violence with Nude Photos Campaign on Weibo

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was not entirely censored because of the interactive manner in which activists responded to
the public (Han and Lee, 2019). In the case of the aforementioned campaign, Han and Lee
(2019) argue that the interactions on Weibo, such as the commenting and sharing functions,
are less likely to stimulate escalating group actions, thus being less likely to be censored. At
the same time, activists are highly conscious of the censorship system and how to navigate
it. In this regard, the media affordances of specific platforms as well as censorship shape the
forms of activist expression. The self-conscious digital alteration of images to tactically
represent women’s bodies in public spaces also manifests itself as “digital masquerading”
while circumventing censorship and possible criminalisation (Tan, 2017).
In China and elsewhere, the increasing visibility of online feminist discourses has,
however, been accompanied by online misogyny (Huang, 2016). Examining the feminist
group Gender Watch Women’s Voice (GWWV), Han (2018) found that with their
increasing public visibility, GWWV had to navigate context-specific, appropriate strategies
to identify and manage online misogyny. Nevertheless, the group rarely responded to at-
tackers either directly or immediately; their operations against online misogyny mainly
relied on their network of followers to fight back. In this context, as the case of the GWWV
indicates, the rise of social media also assists the permeation of misogyny under the threat of
online censorship.

#MeToo movement against sexual harassment

Apart from anti-domestic violence feminist activism, another notable digital example is the
Chinese #MeToo movement. China joined the global #MeToo conversation in early 2018,
using the hashtag #RiceBunny (see Li, this volume). Trending first on social media, it
quickly spread widely to university campuses and workplaces in different economic sectors
(Lin and Yang, 2019a), and included disabled women (Lin and Yang, 2019b). Numerous
victims published material online to identify high-profile men as abusers – including uni-
versity professors (Liao and Luqiu, 2022), public intellectuals, NGO leaders and media
celebrities (see Li, this volume).
Similar to the previous feminist and queer activism discussed above, #RiceBunny has
been monitored by the authorities and the victims’ online posts have been censored and
deleted. The deletion of #MeToo content, including social media and online news reporting,
was systematic, and a large amount of #MeToo news and discussions can no longer be
found online. Indeed, #RiceBunny – a phonetic rendering of the English MeToo – was used
to replace #MeToo as a means of avoiding censorship (Zeng, 2019). In this process, Chinese
feminists living outside of mainland China have been crucial in documenting and dissem-
inating information. For example, #MeToo in China Archives, compiled by volunteers and
published by the Equality Rights project in Hong Kong (Zhou, 2020), provides a detailed
chronology of #MeToo events and online news, posts and discussions. One of the back-
lashes against #MeToo took place when a well-known Chinese public intellectual and
professor named Liu Yu considered the wave of #MeToo in China as an illegitimate
movement that should have followed legal procedures instead of causing social disorder.
Simultaneously, Liu’s article, published on her Weibo account in July 2018, gained wide
circulation and provoked criticism on various digital platforms and media outlets. The
polarised thoughts on #MeToo in Chinese academic circles and society are not only a
turning point in this anti-sexual harassment movement but also demonstrate the convoluted
relationship between different trends of intellectual thoughts, particularly liberalism and

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feminism in China (Ling and Liao, 2020). Drawing upon public and media discourses, and
debates around #MeToo, scholars found that “detection and decoding of discursive
strategies are key steps in the deconstruction of dominant discourses – particularly in the
context of digital media, where texts, images, and narratives shape the online public dis-
cussion and the opinions of individual users” (Ling and Liao, 2020, p. 912).
Meanwhile, apart from being attacked and censored by regulatory authorities, digital
feminism, including #MeToo itself, also has limitations that have not been overcome in the
digital age. Rural and working-class women have been excluded and largely marginalised in
China’s current feminist movement (Yin and Sun, 2021). Despite the fact that digital media
challenged traditional gender hierarchies in Chinese society, the structural inequality caused
by specific economic or social contexts has not been relieved by digital tools (Yin and Sun,
2021). This is an important point, as while there is a long history of female workers organising
in China, the issue of sexual harassment has largely been overlooked (Globalization Monitor,
2020, p.8). Before #MeToo, statistics gathered by Shenzhen Hand in Hand Workers’ Center
(2013), a female workers’ NGO based in Shenzhen, found that around 70% of women workers
had experienced sexual harassment in their work environment. Women facing sexual
harassment were unlikely to seek support from factory management, unions, or ACWF
(Globalization Monitor, 2020). Compared to university students or middle-class women (and
men), these working-class women, together with the large number of rural Chinese women,
are much less visible in digital feminist activism and #MeToo in China. Thus, an inclusive and
intersectional gender agenda remains urgent in the digital age. One of the few exceptions is Ye
Haiyan, who set up a website to advocate on behalf of sex workers in 2005, and subsequently
used online forums and later Weibo to actively call for the legalisation of sex work and the
rights of sex workers, most of whom are rural-to-urban migrants.

Queer activism and gender violence on sexual minorities

While most feminist digital activism in China focuses on domestic violence and sexual
harassment, the understanding of gender violence usually refers to a heterosexual relationship.
The queer movement in the past decades has expanded the understanding of gender violence
and questions its heterosexual norms. For example, dedicated to improving gender and sexual
diversity, the Beijing-based NGO Common Language launched The Rainbow Violence
Termination Institute project in 2016, which aims to change the heterosexual assumption
underpinning domestic violence legislation, policy, as well as services. The project promotes
legislation on domestic abuse to protect gender and sexual minorities, trains social workers,
organises support groups for queer communities, and provides direct services and training for
gender-based violence prevention and support services (Common Language, 2019).
Besides same-sex intimate partner violence, a variety of gender violence and discrimination
are related to gender expression, identity and sexual orientation, such as homophobic or
transphobic physical and psychological violence, and enforced conversion therapy on queer
individuals. Homosexuality, previously labelled as hooliganism, was decriminalised in China
in 1997 and later removed from an official list of mental disorders in 2001. In the absence of
laws that delineate or protect the rights of sexual or gender minorities, queer activists have
used digital filmmaking, websites and social media to build online queer communities and
educate the general public about queer rights (Tan, 2016; Bao, 2018). Social media and
hashtag activism generate connective actions and articulate alternative discourse about queer
rights and free speech that challenges the government’s hegemonic censorship on

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homosexuality, as demonstrated by the case of #IAmGay# on Weibo in 2018 (Liao, 2019).

The #IAmGay# hashtag activism emerged in response to Weibo’s three-month cleanup
campaign targeting content considered illegal, which included pornographic and violent
content, as well as content on topics relating to homosexuality. It could be argued that the
censorship of homosexuality casts gender violence on queer individuals on a symbolic level.
#IAmGay# and its affective storytelling offer “personal action frames, being flexibly linked
into digital networks so that what began as isolated personal expressions could give rise to a
sense of community and solidarity in carrying out connective actions” (Liao, 2019, p. 2328).
The #IAmGay# hashtag activism serves as a good example to counter the mainstream
homophobic sentiments and make visible the state’s hegemonic censorship.
Moreover, queer activists also use media to publicise court cases that deal with gender
violence against queer individuals. For example, in 2014, due to parental pressure, Yanzi
(pseudonym) visited a counselling centre in the city of Chongqing for therapy aimed at
changing his sexual orientation (BBC Chinese, 2018). At the counselling centre, he under-
went shock therapy and hypnosis and took pills that induced vomiting. After learning that
many people who identify as gay and lesbian had also undergone similar conversion
therapies in different facilities across China, Yanzi sued the counselling centre and the
search engine giant Baidu for allowing advertisements for conversion therapy to appear on
its website. A Beijing court ruled in favour of Yanzi and stated that homosexuality is not a
mental illness. Yanzi subsequently established LGBT Rights Advocacy China to support
marginalised social groups. Besides the actual verdicts, litigation has become an important
way for activists to attract the public’s attention in a media landscape where the repre-
sentation of homosexuality is restricted. In this case, Yanzi was interviewed by different
media outlets that highlighted his lawsuit as the first successful case against gay conversion
therapy. Hence, queer activism expands the understanding of gender violence and makes
visible the previously hidden forms of suppression.
Queer activism also converges with feminist activism in different ways. In the afore-
mentioned feminist theatrical production, “The Vagina Monologues,” issues for lesbian,
bisexual, and trans women were also incorporated in later versions of the performance (Ke,
2019). For example, some of the monologues engage with the sexual experience of a lesbian,
or the life of a trans woman. Many self-identified queer women have participated in feminist
digital activism, including the aforementioned Shanghai Subway action and online cam-
paigns for anti-domestic violence legislation. The involvement of queer women in Chinese
feminism is signaled in “the lala movement” (lala is a colloquial term used to describe
lesbians and queer women in China). Despite the fact that the lala movement predates and,
indeed, contributes to, the new wave of feminism, the queer presence in Chinese feminism is
often marginalised in mainstream accounts (Tan, 2023).

Conclusion: gender violence within Sinophone societies

Compared to previous offline feminist activism, the new wave of digital feminism and later
#MeToo have fewer connections with the government or ACWF. The feminist activists’
provocative actions, increasing social impact, and their ability to make alliances across
multiple cities in China have been impressive. However, this activism has also faced intense
resistance. In 2015, the government detained five feminists who were planning to dissemi-
nate anti-gender-violence messages on public transportation in different cities across China.
These activists were later called the Feminist Five, and their detention has received global

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attention (Fincher, 2021). In 2018, the social media account @FeministVoices was shut
down by Weibo ironically on the day after International Women’s Day. In the same year,
the Jianjiaobuluo Weibo account, one of the primary NGO-related accounts devoted to
female workers, was closed. Around the same time, other women-centred NGO accounts on
social media were also closed after citing statistics of the high prevalence of sexual
harassment among female factory workers (The Initium, 2018). The crackdown on feminist
social media accounts has been consistent with the government censorship of #MeToo. The
authoritarian context of China and its distinct Internet censorship have shaped the features
of digital feminism.
In this chapter, we can see an expanded understanding of gender violence in Chinese
feminist and queer media activism, as well as in the growing repertoire of activist practices.
From early feminist activism against domestic violence to digital advocacy and later
#MeToo, the relationship between feminist activism and the state, whether in the form of
collaboration or in the form of sanction and censorship, remains important. The perva-
siveness of the state in everyday life is essential in understanding gender violence.
Conversely, as gender dynamics are so embedded in state governance, it is worthwhile to
consider the gendered nature of political violence in the future. For example, Ting Guo
points out that political violence is gendered in mainland China and Hong Kong, where
Confucianism and traditional values are reinforced, if not reinvented, to serve “patriarchal
authoritarianism and familial nationalism” (2020, p3).
Digital feminism is also active in other Sinophone contexts. For example, #MeToo also
rocked Hong Kong in 2017 and subsequently converged with the Anti-Extradition Law
protest in 2019 and evolved into the #ProtestToo campaign against police violence and
sexual assault (Lai, 2021). Moreover, cross-border influences have been important for the
development of Chinese feminism and queer practices, including the aforementioned
international human rights legal framework that influenced anti-gender-based violence in
the 1990s, the localisation of “The Vagina Monologues” since the 2000s, the transnational
anti-domestic violence campaign and online campaigns in the 2010s, and the support from
diasporic Chinese people in the #MeToo movement (Sun, 2020). The development of queer
theory and practices in Taiwan and Hong Kong in the 1990s impacted queer activism in
mainland China, such as the translation of the concept queer into Chinese languages in
Taiwan and then other Sinophone societies, as well as the active appropriation of the
Chinese term tongzhi to construct a queer identity (Lim, 2008; Bao, 2018). Understood in
this light, the transnational dimension of feminist and queer activism remains important.
Moreover, comparative studies in different Sinophone communities can hopefully be fur-
ther explored in the future to contribute to a more holistic understanding of gender violence
and its prevention in multiple Sinophone contexts.

Acknowledgement
This article is partly supported by the funding from General Research Fund, Research
Grants Council, University Grants Committee, Hong Kong (number 14612818).

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 53
CONTROVERSIES, PROTESTS,
COALITIONS
Screen media’s lessons from the past
Gary Needham

Screen media have often been controversial for the perceived links between representation
and contemporary anxieties around gender, sexuality and violence. Screen media have also
been perceived to exploit those anxieties and package them as entertainment. For instance,
in the period when a serial killer was murdering women in the English city of Leeds (the case
discussed by Hannah Hamad in this volume), mainstream cinemas, as well as sex shops,
were targets of feminist rage and protest (Leeds Libraries, 2019). However, feminist and
lesbian protests of screen media have not been limited to those contexts where women and
lesbians have been under such visible, newsworthy threats. This chapter reflects upon
responses to several controversial American films released between 1974 and 1980 – a made-
for-television film, Born Innocent (Donald Wyre, 1974), an exploitation film Snuff (Michael
Findlay, 1976), and a Hollywood film Windows (Gordon Willis, 1980). Whilst Snuff and the
controversy it generated have secured its position in (at least some) film histories, the
campaigns around Born Innocent and Windows (and, indeed, the films themselves) are now
less well known but are worth revisiting because of the light they shine on the importance of
feminist, lesbian and gay coalitions to challenge the sexualised representation of violence.
The primary sources used in this chapter are drawn from the Lesbian Herstory Archives, the
Gay Activist Alliance 1970–1983 records and The National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce
records – all grassroots archives that privilege feminist, lesbian and gay materials. Using
these archival materials, this chapter explores the reasons for the protests of these three films
and what was at stake politically in protesting them. I argue that controversy and protest
serve as valuable sites for investigating contested understandings of gender, sexuality and
violence. Furthermore, these historical protests exemplify the importance of coalitions in
the 1970s and the links between feminist anti-violence and gay and lesbian liberation
movements. They serve as a helpful reminder that feminist and lesbian and gay protest
against and through media representation is not an invention of the digital era.
An unorthodox screen media history can be found in the materials of feminist and gay
and lesbian archives that provide a counter-history of what mattered, what was contro-
versial and problematic, and what was considered a success (in terms of boycotts and
protests rather than box-office, rave reviews, or works of authorship). I ask what those
archives tell us about Hollywood, network television, other popular screen media, and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-62 573

 Gary Needham

mainstream entertainment. Ann Cvetkovich is instructive here when she states that lesbian
and gay archives “leave ephemeral and unusual traces … and stand alongside the docu-
ments of the dominant culture in order to offer alternative modes of knowledge” (2003,
p. 8). In the grassroots and minoritarian archives, Windows appears to have mattered a lot if
measured by the number of articles, reports, correspondences and calls to direct action. The
trade magazines Variety and The Hollywood Reporter number barely a dozen articles on
Windows, primarily focusing on the opening weekend, box-office performance, production
and distribution context. In contrast, the grassroots archives include over a hundred articles
on Windows, including independent presses, newsletters, flyers, personal correspondence,
media releases, minutes and local campaigns against the film.
Throughout the 1970s, activist campaigns were filled with awareness and new knowledge
of how screen media reinforced and reflected discriminatory ideologies. Knowledge cuts
across both feminism (and the focus on gender) and lesbian and gay liberation (with its
focus on sexuality). The formation of coalitions across gender and sexuality was a strategy
to gather numbers and strengthen political allegiances that could challenge dominant,
patriarchal ideologies and practices. Representations of screen violence were deemed
important with a view that there was a correlation between screen entertainment and actual
acts of violence against women and minorities. While feminist organisations were tackling
rape and domestic violence as a major focus in the 1970s, screen media appeared to cast
those serious problems as the grist for popular entertainment. Similarly, screen media
reinforced stereotypes of gay and lesbian people as deserving victims, killers and psycho-
paths. Those issues would be brought together in films like Born Innocent, Snuff, and
Windows, which is why they became the subject of extensive protests.
For example, the 1970s would see an increase in what were called zaps, a term for
protests initially created by the Gay Activist Alliance to describe their direct actions
(Eisenbach, 2006). These zaps often targeted homophobic representations in network tel-
evision and would become a defining feature of the 1970s (Eisenbach, 2006). Feminist zaps
targeted heterosexual porn films (Deep Throat [Gerard Damiano, 1972]), European art films
(Last Tango in Paris [Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972]), exploitation films (Snuff), and billboard
advertising (The Rolling Stones’ album Black and Blue [1976]). Films like Deep Throat and
Last Tango in Paris have remained canonical works, suggesting the original protests were
not successful in eradicating them. However, the controversies have not gone away and,
most recently, the experiences of star Maria Schneider on the set of Last Tango in Paris have
been revisited in light of #MeToo (Izadi, 2018). What follows in this chapter is an account
of three historically important protests in the 1970s against films that sexualised violence
against women – Born Innocent, Snuff and Windows – two of them also linked that violence
to lesbian perpetrators. Each film will be dealt with in the order in which they were released
and in doing so I hope to exemplify the importance of coalition-building between feminist
and gay and lesbian groups.

Born Innocent: rape on network television

The feminist and lesbian archives reveal that Born Innocent was one of the decade’s most
troubling texts. Born Innocent is a made-for-TV film first broadcast on NBC in September
of 1974 and again in 1975. It was described as “notoriously homophobic” by Gay
Community News (“Born Innocent Returns … ” 1975, p. 2) and the mainstream press also
took issue with the network for broadcasting the film a second time, accusing NBC of being

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“negligent for displaying a lewd, indecent, and destructive sexual act during primetime”
(“Key NBC victory … ” 1978, p. 33). The film is advertised somewhat sensationally as a
women-in-prison film featuring a 14-year-old character played by “the sensational young
star of The Exorcist”. Despite the exploitation framing, Born Innocent typically fits with the
television format of “movie of the week” that deals with a social problem. The film centres
on Christine “Chris” Parker (Linda Blair) and her experiences in the social care system,
which includes time spent in an all-female juvenile detention centre. During her custody,
Chris is assaulted in the shower by a girl gang, raped by the stick-end of a plunger in “the
most explicit depiction of rape ever aired in television” (“NBC rapes lesbians again” 1975,
p. 6). The controversy around Born Innocent is twofold; the explicit representation of the
rape of a minor on primetime television and the depiction of the perpetrators as unam-
biguously coded lesbian.
Feminists used Born Innocent to challenge the ubiquity of fictional representations of
rape being framed as entertainment, in exploitative and sensational manners. Adding to the
furore surrounding the film, a court case against NBC and one of its affiliates, San
Francisco’s KRON-TV, was also mounted. Four days after the first broadcast of Born
Innocent, a nine-year-old Californian girl was raped by a gang of youths. The gang included
three girls and one boy and a beer bottle was used in the attack, suggesting a copycat crime
of the scene from Born Innocent (“NBC Wins … ” 1978). The court would eventually judge
in favour of NBC, citing the First Amendment that no broadcaster could be held respon-
sible for any actions that might be viewed as influenced, copied, or incited by programming
content (“Judge restricts … ” 1978, p. 31). Appeals against this decision would not conclude
until 1982 (“Born Innocent case … ” 1982, p. 62).
In addition to the protests, specifically targeting the film’s exploitative scene of rape,
lesbians challenged Born Innocent for the ongoing “inaccurate and sensationalist portrayal
of lesbians” in television (“Lesbian Feminist Liberation presented … ” 1975, p. 4).1 These
related concerns united several feminist and gay and lesbian organisations – the National
Organization of Women (NOW), Lesbian Feminist Liberation (LFL), the National Gay
Task Force (NGTF) and the New York Rape Coalition – when the film was scheduled for
its first re-run in 1975. These coalitions targeted both advertising sponsors and NBC’s
network affiliates, resulting in several sponsors (Chevrolet, Holiday Inns, Playtex) pulling
their ad spots during the re-run (“Sponsors back out … ” 1975, p. 48). The protests and calls
for a boycott of NBC were successful; the rape scene would be removed in all subsequent re-
runs of Born Innocent.
Another impact of the protests against Born Innocent was to raise awareness of the
increase in exploitative representations of sexual violence on US network television. Shortly
before Born Innocent’s broadcast, NBC had already aired the telefilm A Case of Rape (Boris
Sagal, 1974), and, a year earlier, its rival network CBS broadcast Cry Rape (Corey Allen,
1973). Elana Levine argues that rape was one of the “sex-themes” utilised by network
television in the 1970s in their ambition to treat social issues “seriously” (2007, p. 29). While
feminists and lesbians would not be credited for their actions or consciousness-raising, the
US federal government’s regulatory media body, the FCC (Federal Communications
Commission), would implement a short-lived policy for broadcasters in direct response to
Born Innocent’s and other television controversies. Indeed, it was the court case surrounding
Born Innocent’s alleged copycat crime that created the widespread backlash against network
television’s “sex-themes” and the subsequent action taken by the FCC (Cowan, 1979). This
new policy, which mandated that the 8 pm to 9 pm primetime slot be “family friendly”, was

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called Family Viewing Hour and lasted from 1975 to 1977, eventually being overturned in
1977 and deemed unconstitutional as an infringement of the First Amendment and a
broadcaster’s freedom to program.

Snuff and coalition building

Snuff was a particularly controversial film in suggesting links between the murder of
women, pornography and entertainment. The premise of Snuff, marketed as the “real”
murder of women as a pornographic extreme, is more provocative than the film itself. Snuff
was originally a 1971 exploitation film called The Slaughter (dir. Michael Findlay) made to
cash in on the Charles Manson Murders. A new ending filmed in a hand-held vérité-style
and stopping abruptly and without final credits was tacked on to the end of Slaughter. The
film’s release in 1976 prompted nationwide protests by feminists targeting all the major US
cities and the film theatres showing Snuff. Of all the feminist groups and direct actions
against the exhibition of Snuff, detailed in Carolyn Bronstein’s account of the protests
(2011, p. 88), one group stands out – Philadelphia’s radical lesbian collective DYKETA-
CTICS! DYKETACTICS! often made headlines with their zaps and were also plaintiffs in a
legal case, the first of its kind, against the anti-gay and anti-woman violence they experi-
enced from the Philadelphia police department. According to one of the group’s founders
Barbara Ruth, DYKETACTICS! were incensed when the National Organization of
Women (NOW) voted down action against Snuff (Ruth 2009, pp. 140-141). NOW’s
majority vote supported the First Amendment suggesting that Snuff may be abhorrent but
should still be protected under freedom of speech. Ruth recounts that DYKETACTICS!
“did protest Snuff all over the country, doing considerable property damage to theaters that
showed it in Southern California” (p. 143). The distributor of Snuff even responded by
saying, “these dykes are vicious. They’re militant..” (“Philadelphia Women …” 1976).
DYKETACTICS! were one of the many short-lived 1970s groups that made headlines
and inroads protesting against the use of men’s violence against women as sexualised en-
tertainment. However, the results of such campaigns were double-edged. On one hand, by
linking these campaigns to broader discussions of rape and other forms of sexualised vio-
lence, they were important forms of awareness raising. At the same time, the controversy
could make the films more marketable. It wasn’t long before Hollywood got in on the act,
re-framing “snuff material” as slick blockbuster content – Hardcore (Paul Schrader, 1979),
52 Pick-Up (John Frankenheimer, 1986) and 8MM (Joel Schumacher, 1999) are just some
of the examples.

The Windows protests

Windows was released in New York in January 1980. Its production had been shrouded in
secrecy, with filming taking place on closed sets throughout 1979. This was a response to the
ongoing disruption to the production of Cruising (William Friedkin, 1980), another, more
famous, film featuring a gay killer which was also heavily protested. Upon release, Windows’
reviews were even more scathing than those for Cruising. It was also the year of Dressed to
Kill, which had been at the centre of the Angry Women protests in Leeds during the
Yorkshire Ripper case (see Hamad, this volume). Unlike the well-documented protests of
Cruising (Ortleb, 1979; Pollack, 1979; Wilson, 1981; Needham, 2020), Windows and the
protests it generated have disappeared into obscurity.

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By the time of the protests against both Windows and Cruising, it was clear to the film
studios, companies and television networks that direct action could do financial harm;
demonstrations against Born Innocent resulted in advertisers pulling out of its broadcast and
protestors blocked the entrances to screenings of Snuff. Windows’ distributor, the
Hollywood studio United Artists, had already experienced protests against Last Tango in
Paris. From the following synopsis of Windows, it is not difficult to see why it was con-
troversial and worthy of coordinated demonstrations.
Windows opens with the rape of the central character, Emily (Talia Shire), which takes
place in her Brooklyn apartment. It is a challenging and long scene: Emily is grabbed from
behind and forced to the ground, where she is sexually assaulted at knifepoint, her pleading
and crying recorded by the rapist, who asks her to lift her top and say “ah”. As Windows
progresses, we learn that the rape was orchestrated by her neighbour Andrea (Elizabeth
Ashley) because she is in love with Emily. Emily decides to move across the Hudson River
into a more secure flat with a concierge, meanwhile becoming closer to the thoughtful and
kind male detective working on her case. Furious, Andrea descends further into psychosis,
killing Emily’s nosy neighbour, her own therapist, and Emily’s cat. Andrea sets up a massive
telescope in a loft apartment across the river so she can observe Emily and convinces Emily
to come to her new loft, where she declares that she is madly in love with her. Sensing
Emily’s rejection, Andrea brings out a switchblade and holds it to Emily’s throat, restaging
in exacting detail the initial rape. Detective Bob (Joe Cortese) does not come to the rescue;
instead, Emily surrenders, and through an ellipsis, we infer that she has spent the night with
Andrea to save her own life. When morning comes, we see flashing lights from a police car
superimposed over Andrea’s face. There is no dramatic rescue scene and the film ends with
Emily and Bob taking a slow walk back over the Brooklyn Bridge, arm in arm.
Some of the patterns of film style in Windows also support the anti-feminist and anti-lesbian
narrative themes. A pronounced repetition of shots emphasises Emily’s vulnerability, con-
stantly drawing attention to the fact that she is alone and persistently an object of surveillance.
Emily repeatedly appears as the only person in the shot and is filmed from a long distance.
These long-distance shots of Emily alternate between two looks in the film; the look of the film
through telephoto lenses (the narration) and the look of Andrea through her telescope (the
narrative). These aesthetic choices elaborate on Windows’s ideological message, common in
crime texts and thrillers, that women are constantly vulnerable. It is an anti-feminist message,
as Sheila Roher states in her account of Windows, that “any woman who leaves their pro-
tection of a man is making herself vulnerable to assault and rape” (Roher, 1980, pp. 1-2).
Windows takes this even further in its homophobic logic by portraying a lesbian as the
orchestrator and perpetrator of the film’s sexual violence. Roher was one of the many people
who organised demonstrations against Windows and pointed out the logic of patriarchy in
which men absolve themselves of “the responsibility for sexual violence against women” while
simultaneously framing women’s rape on-screen as a means of entertainment (Roher, 1980: 2).
Roher was one of the many women who bridged feminist and gay and lesbian activism. A
member and contact person for the National Association of Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers
(NALGF), she was also a Women Against Pornography (WAP) member. At the forefront of
the campaign against Windows were the National Gay Task Force (NGTF) and the New
York Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW) branch. Under a coalition
banner of “Feminist, Lesbian, and Gay Coalitions Against Violence Against Women”, those
organisations were joined by several smaller groups. The NGTF and the NALGF sent out a
joint press release on 11 January in advance of their Windows demonstrations on 18 January

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with further planned actions, including a lecture presentation by Vito Russo.2 The NALGF
presented Hollywood with a series of demands – to withdraw Windows from exhibition, to
stop censoring and erasing lesbian and gay lives on screen, and to include them in decisions
when gay or lesbian people were represented in Hollywood productions.
None of these demands or extensive reporting on the protests and actions against
Windows would surface in the screen industry trade presses. Instead, reports on the New
York demonstrations of Windows appear in a March 1980 Woman Against Pornography
newsletter. These weekly feminist newsletters were an essential source of information that
bridged the feminist and the gay and lesbian news and actions in working together. Roher’s
“Smashing Windows” report explains to WAP’s readers why Windows needed protesting
before she names the “more than twenty-two feminist, lesbian and gay organizations” that
protested together (1980, p.3). The overlap in reporting on feminist issues in gay and lesbian
grassroots publications and gay and lesbian issues in feminist publications appears to be
shared practice throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. For example, one of the earliest
reports on Windows that appears in a February issue of Womanews is provided by the
Responsive Gay Collective (RGC) (“Close Windows” 1980, p. 4). In another feminist
monthly Plexus, the contact details for arranging boycotts in the San Francisco area was the
National Association of Lesbian and Gay Filmmakers (“Windows Image” 1980, p. 3). In
the monthly publication Sojourner: The Women’s Forum, contributing writer Jill Dolan
reported that three hundred protestors demonstrated against Windows – a “heartening show
of strength” as “Boston gay and women’s communities rallied together” (1980, p. 20).
Windows appears to have solidified these allegiances if measured against the substantial
cross-reporting of the same protests in feminist and gay and lesbian publications. While the
examples above are from feminist publications, the same accounts of events also appear in
Gay News, Gay Light, Thursday’s Child, Gaze, High Gear, Our Own and Gay Community
News, to name only a few grassroots periodicals. Like the many protested films that pre-
ceded Windows, the struggle over homophobia and gender-based violence united feminists,
gays and lesbians around a particular problem – patriarchy.
Patriarchy was how the screen industries were organised ideologically and institutionally
and what they expressed explicitly and implicitly on screen. Thus, the protests against
Windows were not only against the movie’s content but the companies and organisations
involved in creating the film and bringing it to the screen. On the reverse of NALGF’s “Why
Protest Windows?” flyer, they explain.

WINDOWS is almost laughable in the viciousness and predictability of its distortions.

It is as if every lie, every fear about lesbianism, about rape, about female friendship,
and women’s independence has been rolled into one ridiculous “plot” … What isn’t
laughable is the fact that United Artists chose this film, this concept to promote –
making a commitment of millions of dollars to finance and advertise … All this in the
face of a film industry that has refused to produce even one film with a positive lesbian
protagonist in the 60 years of its existence, a film industry that continually uses vio-
lence against women to sell tickets.
(Lesbian Feminist Liberation, 1979)

Windows was released in January 1980, just a month before United Artists’ Cruising, and
the two were often discussed together at the time of their releases given not only the link to
United Artists but also their shared homophobia and focus on sexual violence. The feminist

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publication New Salt City Press mentions both films in the same article (“Cruising and
Windows Protests” 1980), as does Freedom Socialist (Nelson, 1980), and the report on
Windows in the Woman Against Violence Against Women newsletter notes that “the film
industry is also marketing paranoia about homosexual violence in Cruising” (“Windows”
1980, p.3). The connections between the two films did not escape the mainstream press
either, with the Washington Post’s film critic writing

Does United Artists plan to double-bill William Friedkin’s messily deplorable

‘Cruising’ with Gordon Willis’ exquisitely deplorable ‘Windows’ in their near second-
run future? Their timing and loathsome tendentiousness make them uniquely com-
patible co-features.
(Arnold, 1980, p. 11)

I mention the proximity of Windows and Cruising because the latter has built up a legacy
and a re-evaluation as a cult film. Windows has been almost entirely forgotten and neither
re-evaluated nor reclaimed in ways similar to Cruising. One can only speculate that attempts
to shut down Windows were more successful because of the historical alliances between
feminist and gay and lesbian coalitions. Furthermore, Cruising was the first film in a decade
to generate considerable protests in relation to an anti-gay male-themed Hollywood film
since Boys in the Band. Nonetheless, in their 1979 press release “What’s all the fuss about the
movie Cruising”, LFC sought to establish continuities with prior feminist and lesbian
protests by referring to Cruising as “a glamourized ‘snuff’ movie about gays” and a
reminder of the “emulation of screen violence” in Born Innocent (“What’s all the fuss …”
1980). Historical continuities and links to other protests appear to be crucial to the nar-
ratives that developed around both Cruising and Windows.
The striking difference between these two films about sexual violence is between a film about
(gay) men and another about women. Nonetheless, their shared homophobia, release dates and
status as products from United Artists, do ask us to consider them together despite their dif-
fering contexts within feminist and gay politics. The Windows protests were well-informed and
organised because of a decade of coalition-building in the 1970s, and because of the labour of
lesbian activists who traversed the women’s movement and gay liberation. Furthermore, les-
bians were more active in the protests against Cruising despite the much smaller number of gay
men who reciprocated lesbian and feminist campaigns against individual films.

Conclusion
When screen media histories use feminist and gay and lesbian archives, they can tell a
different story from established narratives – the films that were important to feminist and
gay and lesbian coalitions, the success and failures, the boycotts and the reasons for pro-
testing. Contrary to this, screen media’s official or “dominant” histories often depend on
existing values attached to individuals as auteurs or large companies with established film
stars and studio histories. An important question raised by the archives is why some texts
like Windows disappear and others like Cruising endure in film canons and histories. The
archives demonstrate that both these United Artists’ films were protested simultaneously,
for similar reasons, but that Windows has somehow been forgotten. How much of Windows’
erasure is related to the success of particular campaigns can only remain speculative.
Nevertheless, archives point towards rich histories of films that are worthy of revisiting in

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light of their importance to feminist, lesbian and gay coalitions and the challenges against
the sexualised representation of screen violence. It is difficult not to interpret this in relation
to gender, in which the anti-woman, anti-lesbian film disappears, and the anti-gay male film
develops into a cult film text. There are more germane reasons too. Objectively and without
value judgment, Cruising is better in terms of the art of film. Nonetheless, this chapter is
concerned with an archival search to find out about the films that did matter. Minoritarian
and grassroots archives reveal differently prioritised historical information. In this case,
Born Innocent and Windows have been significantly contentious and notably protested yet,
remain marginal and unknown after their initial controversies. Through privileging these
archives, this chapter has sought reparation, not of the films but rather the place of alter-
native modes of knowledge in constructing feminist and lesbian histories of screen media
and entertainment. Why is Windows obscure, and what does it tell us about the place of
anti-feminist homophobia, sexual violence and gender-based violence in the construction of
controversial film histories? Perhaps, because Windows’ homophobia and misogyny are
presented through relations between women and fundamental feminist issues. On the other
hand, Cruising is about men; it stars a male method actor and has the reputation of its
Oscar-winning male director. Apparently, not all controversies are created equal.

Notes
1 Born Innocent was often discussed alongside a homophobic episode of Policewoman (‘Flowers of
Evil’ 1974) that resulted in the Lesbian Feminist Liberation’s mock prize for the network, the
‘Peacock of Evil Award’ (‘Lesbian Feminist Liberation presented … ’ 1975, p. 4).
2 Russo was an active member of the Gay Activist Alliance (GAA) since the early 1970s and a
columnist specialising in film and entertainment. He would become better known as the author of
The Celluloid Closet published in 1981, an important book on the representation and erasure
history of gays and lesbians in Hollywood film.

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Nelson, S. (1980) ‘Windows, Cruising and Other Garbage’. Freedom Socialist, 6(2)13.
New Salt City Press (1980) ‘Cruising and Windows protests’, 6 June, p. 3.
Ortleb, C. (1979) ‘The context of “Cruising”’, Christopher Street, September, pp. 7–9.
Plexus (1980) ‘Windows image’, May, p. 3.
Pollack, D. (1979) ‘Cruising in war zone: Finished on Sked, Bow Set’, Variety, September 12, p. 6.
Roher, S. (1980) ‘Smashing windows’, Women Against Pornography, newsletter report, March 24, p. 1–2.
Ruth, B. (2009) ‘DYKETACTICS!’, in Avicolli Mecca, T. (ed.) Smash the church, smash the state.
San Francisco: City Lights Books, pp. 137–146.
Russo, V. (1981) The celluloid closet. New York: Harper and Row.
Windows coalition (NGTF/NAGLF/WAVAW) (1980) ‘For release to the press’, press release,
22 January.
Womanews (1980) ‘Close windows’, 4 February, p. 4.
Women’s Press (1975) ‘Lesbian feminist liberation presented a peacock of Evil Award’, 5 (4), June-
July, p. 4.
Women’s Press (1980) ‘Movie protests’, 10 (2), April-May, p. 1.
Women’s Press (1975) ‘NBC rapes lesbians again’, Women’s Press, 5 (8), December, p. 6.
Wilson, A. (1981) ‘Friedkin’s “Cruising”, ghetto politics, and gay sexuality’, Social Text, 4, Autumn,
pp. 98–109.

Mediography
8MM (1999) Directed by Joel Schumacher. [Feature Film], Sony Pictures Releasing.
52 Pick-Up (1986) Directed by John Frankenheimer. [Feature Film], Cannon Group.
Born Innocent (1975) Directed by Donald Wyre. [Broadcast Film], NBC, September 10.
Boys in the Band (1970) Directed by William Friedkin. [Feature Film], National General Pictures.
A Case of Rape (1974) Directed by Boris Sagal. [Broadcast Film], NBC, February 20.
Cruising (1980) Directed by William Freidkin, [Feature Film], United Artists.
Cry Rape (1973) Directed by Corey Allen. [Broadcast Film]. CBS, 27 November.
Deep Throat (1972) Directed by Gerard Damiano. [Feature Film], Bryanston Distribution Company.
Dressed to Kill (1980) Directed by Brian De Palma. [Feature Film], Filmways Pictures.
Hardcore (1979) Directed by Paul Schrader. [Feature Film], Columbia Pictures.
Last Tango in Paris (1972) Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. [Feature Film], United Artists.
The Rolling Stones (1976) Black and Blue. [Recorded Album], Rolling Stones.
The Slaughter (1971) Directed by Michael Findlay. [Feature Film], Distrifear.
Snuff (1976) Directed by Michael Findlay. [Feature Film], Monarch Releasing Corporation.
Windows (1980) Directed by Gordon Willis. [Feature Film], United Artists.

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 54
COLLECTIVE ACTION,
PERFORMANCE AND THE
BODY-TERRITORY IN LATIN
AMERICAN FEMINISMS
Paula Serafini

Introduction
Latin American societies have been marked, in different ways, by a series of interconnected
forms of violence. The region displays high rates of femicides and other forms of gender-
based violence, including institutional violence (CEPAL, 2021). In recent years, we have
also seen an increase in environmental and territorial conflicts, as the extractive frontier in
the form of mining, fossil fuel extraction and deforestation for agriculture, among others,
advances upon new territories, often at the hand of foreign capital (Svampa, 2019). As new
forms of extractivism expand, so do state and corporate forms of control and violence, with
the aim of preserving the interests of landowners and corporations against the territorial rights
of rural – and increasingly, urban – communities. In this context, it is mostly marginalised
communities (geographically, socially and racially) who are resisting at the frontlines, and it
is often the women in those communities who organise to fight the encroachment on their
territories.
The political organising of women and disidencias1 against gender-based violence and
against extractivism often takes the shape of collective, embodied actions that are not only
forms of denunciation and enacting resistance, but also generate spaces for community
building. Moreover, when women put their bodies on the line in resistance to violence, they
weave into their narratives the different forms of territorial, environmental, patriarchal and
colonial violence their bodies are subject to, building on traditions of collective action that
are anchored in the territory and in a history of women’s mobilisation around social and
gender rights (Giarracca, 2001). I propose, therefore, that a defining element of Latin
American feminisms is an understanding of the political act as both embodied and terri-
torialised. Because of this, the concept of cuerpo-territorio [body-territory] is key to un-
derstanding contemporary Latin American feminisms: in the first place, it connects the
different kinds of violence experienced by women and feminised, racialised bodies with the
violence exerted upon territories since the colonisation of the continent, and second, it situates
feminists as political actors who assert sovereignty over their bodies and their territories,
standing against patriarchal mandates, extractivism and neoliberal policies. In this chapter,

582 DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-63

 Latin American feminisms

I demonstrate the understanding of the political act as both embodied and territorialised by
looking at one of the most visible expressions of Latin American feminism: collective action.
Specifically, I look at symbolic forms of collective action and collective performances.
What I set out to do in the following pages is to construct an understanding of Latin
American feminist politics and feminist performance that centres the body-territory. To this
end, I draw from the work of anthropologist Rita Segato, social scientist and activist
Verónica Gago and sociologist and activist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, all key figures of
contemporary Latin American feminisms. I then discuss two cases of feminist political
action: the performance Un violador en tu camino [A rapist in your path] by Chilean col-
lective Las Tesis, and the performative walk Basta de Terricidio [Stop terricide] by the
Movimiento de Mujeres Indígenas por el Buen Vivir [Movement of Indigenous Women for
Good Living, henceforth MMIBV] in Argentina. I argue that these collective symbolic
actions and performances, as embodied, territorial acts, are marked by this particular
conception of politics. Moreover, I understand performance as a medium for political ex-
pression as well as a vehicle for the development of political subjectivities. While these two
cases were highly mediatised, particularly through social media, here I focus first on their
“on the ground” aspect, to help us understand them as embodied, territorialised acts in
addition to mediated ones. Having done this, I discuss the transnational dimension and
possibilities of such performances beyond their original context, at a time of interconnected
crises at the global scale, and widespread assaults on the rights and lives of women and
other minoritised groups.

Gender, violence and feminism in Latin America

Anthropologist Rita Segato argues that the foundational and perversive form of power is
the patriarchy (2016, p. 16). The patriarchy and the appropriation of women’s bodies is the
first colony (Ibid, p. 19). Within this logic, Segato’s thesis frames rape as an act that is
primarily political, not sexual; it is about asserting power (2016, p. 18). Segato argues as well
that this form of political violence is an underpinning element in the founding of republics in
Latin America after the colonial period, a moment that gave way to a new era of post-
colonial extractivism. This moment is characterised by further expropriation of land from
indigenous peoples and, in places like Argentina, genocidal campaigns aiming to ex-
terminate those groups. In this context, “The masculine pedagogy and its mandate become
a pedagogy of cruelty, functional to the expropriatory greed, because the repetition of the
violent scene produces the effect of normalising a passage of cruelty” (Segato, 2016, p. 11,
my translation from Spanish). Indeed, as Rivera Cusicanqui has argued, patriarchal vio-
lence is key to understanding colonialism and its aftermath. She proposes, specifically in
reference to the Andean region, that westernisation and patriarchalisation of the gender
systems can be understood as parallel processes (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2004, p. 3).
From these colonial roots to the present day, women in Latin America have been exposed
to different forms of violence and oppression. Verónica Gago (2019) explains that it is
important to make the connections between those forms of violence and that this is in fact
strategic because it allows a deeper understanding of how violence operates. She calls, for
instance, for analysts to relate forms of gendered violence in the home with lands destroyed by
agribusiness, with the violence of austerity measures, something many on the frontlines re-
cognise well. In turn, she emphasises how, in places like Argentina, these forms of violence
are confronted by a feminised form of activism and popular economy (Gago, 2019, p. 66). She

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adds: “only by producing a political cartography that connects the threads that make vio-
lences reveal themselves as interrelated dynamics can we denounce that their segmentation
looks to lock us into isolated boxes” (Gago, 2019, p. 14, my translation from Spanish).2
Connecting the different forms of violence is one of the ways in which we arrive at the
notion of the cuerpo-territorio, or body-territory. Cuerpo-territorio is “a practical concept
that shows how the exploitation of the common, communitary territories (urban, suburban,
peasant and indigenous) implies exerting violence upon the individual body and the col-
lective body through dispossession” (Gago, 2019, p. 97). Cuerpo-territorio is where we find
the “potencia feminista” [feminist potency]3, located in the individual body and in the
collective body (Gago, 2019, p. 14). In other words, cuerpo-territorio is a way of under-
standing the embodied and situated aspects of feminist politics simultaneously: “A situated
thinking is inevitably a feminist thinking. Because if the history of rebellions, of its con-
quests and failures has taught us anything, it is that the potency of thinking always has a
body. And that this body brings together experiences, expectations, resources, trajectories
and memories” (Gago, 2019, p. 15).
Thinking about situatedness in Latin America invites us to think about the centrality of
territory in social mobilisations in this region. Scholars from different disciplines have
worked with and within territories in conflict to develop theories that explain the central
place of territory in political organisation and in social and cultural life. Arturo Escobar
(2008), for instance, writing about and thinking with Afro-Colombian activists in
Colombia’s Pacific rainforest region, speaks of the local epistemological and ontological
construction of territory and its place in the formation of collective identities, themselves
political in a context of long-standing marginalisation and oppression and territorial con-
flicts under neoliberal globalisation. Raúl Zibechi, on the other hand, speaks of the terri-
torialisation of movements across the region, defining this as a strengthening of the
connection to territory as a central aim in social demands, but also as a conceptual and
physical standing point for political organising. Territorialisation is thus a phenomenon
that in part responds to the deterritorialisation of communities that results from extractivist
practices and neoliberal policies of urbanisation (Zibechi, 2012). And finally, more recently
Maristella Svampa (2019) has discussed the ecoterritorial turn of social movements in Latin
America, identifying a similar trend to that developed by Zibechi, but emphasising the
growing environmental demands of recent years, as the extractive frontier has brutally
expanded into new territories, generating new conflicts that have led to increased violence
against mostly rural, indigenous, peasant and afro communities. In parallel to this, Svampa
(2015) speaks as well of the feminisation of movements, as it has increasingly been women
who are at the frontlines of struggles over territory.
The (eco)territorialisation of movements refers to both the centrality of territory as a
matter of contention and to the territorial form of organising movements, in ways that
are situated, localised but networked, and in constant response to the various needs of
communities in those territories. Reviewing the recent history of collective action and
social movements that has marked feminist organising in Argentina, Gago makes refer-
ence, for instance, to the piqueteras, those women who, at the height of the economic
crisis in the late 1990s and early 2000s, took their cooking pans and reproductive labour
outside of the house, a kind of territorial labour of care that was central to the move-
ments of the time that were protesting in demand of employment (Gago, 2019, p. 19).
These women put their bodies in the territory and made the labour of reproduction a
political, public task.

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The notion of cuerpo-territorio is closely connected to the idea of movements as terri-

torialised, but cuerpo-territorio is also about rethinking the relationship between the indi-
vidual and the collective, and the collective and the territory. The union of the terms body
and territory tells us that “it is impossible to cut away and isolate the individual body from
the collective body, and the human body from the territory and the landscape. Cuerpo-
territorio compacted as one word ‘de-liberalises’ the notion of body as individual property
and specifies a political, productive and epistemic continuity of the body as territory”
(Gago, 2019, p. 97). In other words, the notion of body-territory puts forward another way
of thinking about possession, which is based on use and not on property, revealing in this
way a logic of the commons (Gago, 2019, p. 98).
Cuerpo-territorio puts forward an understanding of the body that is relational, meaning
that the body is understood beyond what is often seen as its physical delimitations. Instead,
the body is understood as inseparable from its territory, as they shape each other. The
collective Miradas Críticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo demonstrate this clearly when
they write: “We think the body as our first territory and we recognise the territory in our
bodies: when violence is exerted upon the places we inhabit our bodies are affected, when
our bodies are affected there is violence exerted upon the places we inhabit” (2017, p. 7, my
translation from Spanish). From a decolonial perspective concerned with deconstructing
western perceptions of body and territory, “cuerpo-territorio evolves with the central claim
that there is no ontological difference between territory and the body. Hence, what is done
to the body is done to the territory and vice versa” (Zaragocin and Caretta, 2020, p. 6).
Indigenous women have been at the forefront of struggles over the cuerpo-territorio, as
their communities are often at the frontline of territorial and environmental conflicts. As
indigenous women, they are also fighting the patriarchal behaviours in their own commu-
nities, as well as the patriarchal and colonial violence of the state, and increasingly, of
private corporate interests. From the resistance, community work and militancy of indig-
enous women across Argentina, emerges not only an understanding of the body territory
that is relational, but most importantly, one that is based on the notion of interdependence
between different elements in an ecosystem. Furthermore, ideas of ownership as brought up
by Gago in relation to the body, are completely rethought in indigenous ontologies when it
comes to understanding the body-territory, as territories do not belong to people, but rather
people belong to the territory (Del Valle Rojas & Maldonado Riveras, 2020). Lastly,
indigenous resistance also invites us to think about language and culture as territories,
territories that have been resisting conquest for centuries, and that are crucial to a people
and a land’s identity (Millán, 2020).

Feminist performance and embodied politics

Across continents and different socio-political contexts, performance is often adopted as a
form of creative protest because it brings together emotion and image through an embodied
act, and because it gives way to an embodied sense of agency among those who partake in it
(Juris, 2008).
Latin American feminism has notably birthed a broad range of collective, embodied, and
territorial protest forms. This is related to the fact that an understanding of the body as
territory is particularly conducive to forms of political action that recognise the body as the
first place of political enunciation and as an effective tool for direct, ephemeral intervention,
and that integrates the spatial characteristics of a site of protest with the use of the body in

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the public space. With this in mind, in what follows I discuss two recent examples of
feminist and antipatriarchal political action: one in Chile and one in Argentina.

Un violador en tu camino
Un violador en tu camino [A rapist in your path] is a performance action by Chilean feminist
collective Las Tesis, which denounces gender-based violence and rape culture. First per-
formed in November 2019 in the context of social upheaval in Chile, recordings of the
action quickly went viral on social media in Latin America and beyond. The performance
involves groups of women standing in lines (in the first iterations wearing blindfolds), and
following a simple choreography. The choreography is set to a beat and accompanies lyrics
sung in unison (Serafini, 2020). Un violador en tu camino revolves around the idea of rape as
a political issue, following the theoretical proposals (las tesis) of Rita Segato, whose work I
discussed earlier. A translation of the original lyrics of the performance reads as follows:

Patriarchy is our judge

That imprisons us at birth
And our punishment
Is the violence you DON’T see
Patriarchy is our judge
That imprisons us at birth
And our punishment
Is the violence you CAN see
It’s femicide.
Impunity for my killer.
It’s our disappearances.
It’s rape!
And it’s not my fault, not where I was, not how I dressed.
And it’s not my fault, not where I was, not how I dressed.
And it’s not my fault, not where I was, not how I dressed.
And it’s not my fault, not where I was, not how I dressed.
And the rapist WAS you
And the rapist IS you
It’s the cops,
It’s the judges,
It’s the system,
It’s the President,
This oppressive state is a macho rapist.
This oppressive state is a macho rapist.
And the rapist IS you
And the rapist IS you
Sleep calmly, innocent girl
Without worrying about the bandit,
Over your dreams smiling and sweet,
Watches your loving cop.
And the rapist IS you

586
 Latin American feminisms

And the rapist IS you

And the rapist IS you
And the rapist IS you.4

Un violador en tu camino is a public expression of a truth that has been silenced for too
long: gender-based violence is systemic and political. It can be understood as a per-
formance action (Serafini, 2014), a form of political action that draws from the canon and
codes of theatre, performance art, and/or other performance-based art forms, and that
follows the processes and ethos of grassroots activism. Performance actions are embo-
died, often collective and/or participatory, and navigate the blurry line between politics
and art in a way that opens up spaces of transgression and prefigurative worldmaking
(Serafini, 2018).
The combination of words and movement in this action, performed at the same time by
tens and sometimes hundreds of participants, results in a moving and aesthetically stunning
vision, despite its simplicity. Indeed, as I will argue later, the simplicity and adaptability of
the action have facilitated its reproduction in various contexts, and hence lie at the heart of
the virality of recordings of enactments of the performance as feminist media content.
Importantly, through this instance of artistic and political participation, those who take part
in the performance become emboldened as political subjects. As I have proposed elsewhere,
“[t]heir bodies in the street are simultaneously demarcating a feminist space of political
action and of collective creative expression” (Serafini, 2020, p. 294).

Basta de Terricidio
In addition to those kinds of feminist political action that have a more clearly marked
artistic and spectacular element, there are other collective, embodied expressions that are
less visually oriented, but which are also richly poetic. An example of this is the action Basta
de Terricidio [Stop Terricide], organised by Movimiento de Mujeres Indígenas por el Buen
Vivir [Indigenous Women for Good Living] (MMIBV) in Argentina in 2021. MMIBV
understand terricide as the convergence of genocide, femicide, extractivist destruction and
epistemicide (Página12, 2021); in other words, the destruction of ecosystems and of com-
munities and their cultures.
The Basta de Terricidio walk began in March and culminated in May, in time for the
patriotic celebrations of 25 May. This date marks the revolution that kickstarted Argentina’s
independence from Spain, but indigenous groups such as the Mapuche in the Patagonia
region also regard it as the beginning of the consolidation of a new oppressive power, one that
would only decades later charge a genocidal campaign to expulse them from their territories.
The walk against terricide saw indigenous women from all points of the territory that
makes up the Argentine Republic walking towards the capital to demand an end to the
extractivist violence exerted upon their territories, and an end to the gendered, racialised
violence inflicted upon them and their communities. As they walked, they stopped along the
way to meet with other communities at the frontline of territorial and extractivist conflicts,
to share their stories and their demands, and to strengthen bonds with others who are part
of the same struggle.
Upon their arrival in Buenos Aires, the women from MMIBV met with ministers and
representatives to discuss a series of proposals and demands, including a law project against
terricide. Their walk, a performative, durational action, brought the territories in conflict,

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manifested in the bodies of indigenous women, to the political centre of the country. These
women, whose political agency had for long been denied, claimed in this way their place in
the political arena. At the same time, however, this embodied form of political action is
embarked upon as a form of healing. A representative from the group told a national
newspaper: “Each centimetre of our body is marked by violence, misogyny, racism, dis-
possession, poverty. We walk in order to heal. Because only justice will bring us closer to
Buen Vivir” (Página12, 2021, my translation from Spanish).
Throughout the duration of their walk, the women from MMIBV shared videos of
themselves, images and short texts on social media, telling of the territories they were walking,
of the people they were encountering, of the challenges and barriers they were facing in their
travels, and reminding us of the reasons they had embarked upon this journey. Visually, the
videos and images act as a reminder of the territories and ecosystems threatened by the
advance of extractivism. But also, their first-person storytelling, which includes encounters
with other communities fighting extractivism, acts as a narrative thread that highlights the
interdependence of people and territory, and the strength of alliances in the resistance.

Bodies, territories, action

In their own way, both actions discussed above embody the concept of cuerpo-territorio. In
the case of the performance action by Las Tesis, we can see how the placement of bodies
into lines in strategic public spaces brings into being an embodiment of public politics in the
bodies of protesting women and disidencias. The issue of gender-based violence, often rel-
egated to the domestic space, now manifests itself physically in key sites of power,
demarcating through the collective body – which is made up of many bodies – a space for
feminist political action. Moreover, as these bodies come together in the public space, they
bring to the city, and to the institutions of power, the territories of all the participants in
that performance, who stand up against gendered violence, but also against neoliberalism,
extractivism, colonialism, and various interconnected social and political conflicts that run
through their bodies-territories in a territory in conflict as is Chile. This kind of collective,
public performance is thus a form of protest, but it is also a way of memorialising and
making history, in a world in which women’s history and their forms of transmitting it have
been cancelled and neglected (Segato, 2016, p. 26).
In the case of the MMIBV, indigenous women from all points of Argentina embarked
upon a months-long journey to bring the territories in conflict to the centre of political
power in Buenos Aires. Through a relational action, which involved conversations and
activities along the way, these women who carry their territories with them engaged with
other territories, sharing stories and sharing struggles. With them they brought to the city
the bodies-territories of thousands, to take over, as did the performance by Las Tesis, the
political centre, physically and symbolically.

Transnational feminism and the body-territory in the digital era

While the recent wave of feminism in Latin America has seen slogans and green scarfs
reproduce across the continent in an unprecedented display of regional solidarity, the body-
territory manifests differently according to the particular histories and socio-ecological
realities of each context. An example of how the notion of the body territory was activated

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in different ways is how women and disidencias from different countries participated in the
international women’s strike. Gago recalls:

the strike has multiplied: from Paraguay, the call to strike was used as a way of
protesting the poisoning of communities with agrochemicals. In Honduras and
Guatemala, the organisation of the strike was strongly affirmed in the claim for
«territorial femicides» against community leaders. A communique by the women from
the FARC also made the call to strike their own and signed #WeAreMovedByDesire
to say that they were also striking in the jungle. In Brazil, the call highlighted the
advance of the church against struggles for bodily autonomy.
(Gago, 2019, p. 26, my translation)

In the case of Un violador en tu camino, the performance went viral beyond the Chilean
context to countries across the world, from India to Italy, where lyrics were translated and
even adapted to reflect the particularities of each context, while sustaining a clear message
of transnational unity and solidarity. Part of the viral quality of the performance could be
attributed to its spectacular quality: large groups of women dancing and singing in a co-
ordinated fashion with landmark cityscapes as their backdrops (Serafini, 2020, p. 294). We
could call this an “ethical spectacle” following from Boyd and Duncombe (2004): an
appropriation of the tools of an intensely mediated society to produce something with
emancipatory goals. But also, its virality is related to its relatability (women from across
cultures could identify with the notions of institutional gendered violence and rape culture)
and its potential for reproducing and adapting it.
The process of joining this transnational feminist expression consisted therefore of
adapting, contextualising, embodying and territorialising the performance, to then record it
and share it with others, who in turn would be inspired to do the same thing in their own
corner of the world. In each local, physical iteration of the performance, a person or group(s)
took on the task of organising a time and place for the action, spreading the word and building
links with other groups. By coming together in a creative act, they strengthened the social and
affective bonds of local feminist movements, to then contribute to forming affective bonds
with feminists elsewhere through digital networks, as I have observed and experienced in the
UK. We can understand this way of doing politics as politics in a “feminine key”, as Segato
would put it: “It is definitely another way of doing politics, a politics of bonds, a management
of bonds, of closeness, and not of protocolary distances and bureaucratic abstraction”
(Segato, 2016, p.27, my translation from Spanish).
What this serves to show, is that while the notion of cuerpo-territorio is specific to the
Latin American context, emerging from indigenous and community feminisms and anti-
patriarchal struggles, and taken up by other feminists who have worked with this concept
practically and theoretically to understand the political conjuncture and activate collective
resistance, the concept has significant relevance and potential beyond this regional context.
Feminisms in other societies might have either similar or widely different understandings of
the body-territory relationship, which means that the concept might not be productive as a
starting point for political organising in every context. Nevertheless, it is still a highly
productive concept for thinking about how feminist and ecological struggles are articulated
at a time in which we are facing interrelated crises, from ecological breakdown to a backlash
against the acquired rights of women and other minoritised groups. Not only are such crises
overlapping in ways that mean women and marginalised groups are hit the hardest by

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economic hardship and the climate crisis. But also, there are common roots to these crises,
as theorists like Rivera Cusicanqui, Segato and Gago argue. In order to confront the
advance of extractivism, neoliberalism and fascism upon bodies and territories, it is para-
mount to develop forms of political organising that can work from that interconnectedness
of violence. And, in order to build transnational bonds of solidarity, we must work from the
awareness that the body-territory manifests differently in each context, and that forms of
communication and expression that can be adapted and territorialised in each case will be
most effective in building a transnational movement.
In other words, what has fuelled the virality of Un violador en tu camino is the combination
of a universal message against gender-based violence and an image of feminist potency that
were easy to identify with and the fluidity and flexibility in the performance that allowed
women to adapt it to their own context and reality. This awareness of the need for situated
narratives and forms of political expression has always been more alive in the South, where
mobilised communities know what it is like to be studied and advocated for from a universalist
perspective that does not fit. This chapter is therefore, in this sense, a call for that sensitivity to
be further nurtured in the feminisms and environmental movements of the North, as it is an
attempt to understand the core ethos of contemporary Latin American feminisms, and the
way this is manifested in collective action. Cuerpo-territorio thus emerges as a concept that
evolves from a particular history and ways of experiencing violence, but it can also be a
productive tool for thinking about embodiment and territorialisation in other contexts.

Notes
1 The term disidencias is used by Latin American feminists to refer to those who do not conform to
the gender and sexuality norms of heteropatriarchy.
2 All direct quotes from this text are my own translation from Spanish.
3 Gago uses the term potencia [potency] rather than poder [power] as a way of differentiating the
transformative possibilities of feminist politics from the distribution of power in patriarchal systems.
4 Translation from Spanish, from the Facebook event for a performance of A rapist in your path that
took place in London on 14 February 2020 (see https://www.facebook.com/events/182969046107422/).
The ninth verse is an ironic détournement of the hymn of Chilean Carabineros (police force).

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 55
DOING FEMINIST ACTIVISM
THROUGH CREATIVE
PRACTICE RESEARCH
Eylem Atakav

In Turkey, where I originally come from, people’s names and surnames have an immediate
political resonance. This historically stems from a desire to reflect changing realities –
usually during turbulent times – and demonstrates how the personal encapsulates the
political. My name, Atıl Eylem, for example, literally means “go for action”. It has an overt
link with the leftist political activism that both my parents were involved in in the 1970s.
The story behind my name does not only refer to the name of one of the left-wing journals
(Atılım) which had to be published clandestinely, but also assigns me the role and pride of
carrying in my name the keywords of the left-wing activists who fought, and at times were
either killed or went through serious physical and mental torture, for their ideas. This ex-
traordinary responsibility attached to my identity has become pivotal in the research that I
do as an academic and, more recently, a filmmaker. It is for this reason that in this chapter
my key aim is to demonstrate the value of academic activism and the potential of generating
impact with Film and Media Studies on issues around gender and violence, thereby
inspiring feminist media studies scholars to contribute to action with their research.
In this chapter, I critically reflect on the implications of consolidating feminist research
and feminist filmmaking practice by collecting visible evidence on gendered violence. I also
revisit discussions around the impact of feminist research in the context of creative practice,
to demonstrate how and why public engagement is a useful strategy as a means for
achieving and pushing for social change, with the potential to turn academic research on
gendered violence into activism. To do so, I highlight the activist potential of documentary
film and reflect on the challenges and possibilities the two documentary films I made
present. These films are: Growing Up Married (2016), focusing on the recollections of four
women from Turkey of being forced into marriage as children, and Lifeline (2020), which
reveals the reality of working on the frontline of domestic abuse services in the UK during
the Covid-19 pandemic. With the first example, my aim is to signal the value of public and
media engagement in distributing research on and documenting gendered violence. With the
second, my intention is to tease out the complexities of capturing visible evidence and doing
feminism through creative practice research within Film Studies.
Thinking about feminist activism through making media in addition to examining media
from a theoretical position is, of course, not new. Feminist media theorists have engaged in

592 DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-64

 Doing feminist activism through creative practice research

cultural production since the 1970s. As highlighted in Karen Boyle’s (2005) observation,
feminists, throughout the world, have made significant progress in putting questions of
violence against women onto political and legislative agendas as well as in providing services
for women victims and survivors, while feminist cultural critics have examined the media’s
role in the circulation of gendered discourses about violence. As Liz Kelly, Sheila Burton
and Linda Regan argue within an academic context in which feminism is understood both
as theory and practice, feminist researchers’ position is one in which they are part of the
process of discovery and understanding at the same time as being responsible for attempting
to create change (1994, p. 28, italics my emphasis). This idea is echoed in the work of Liz
Stanley and Sue Wise (1983), in which they saw no demarcation between “doing feminism”
and “doing feminist research” (cited in Hesse-Biber, 2012, p. 15).

Growing Up Married (2016)

According to the UNICEF report Ending Child Marriage: Progress and Prospects (2013),
there are 700 million women who were married as children, and 280 million girls are at risk
of becoming child brides. According to the best available global estimate (care.org, 2016),
every day 39,000 girls become child brides. The Forced Marriage Unit of the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office and Home Office provides advice or support in around 1300 possible
cases of forced marriage each year in the UK, but many more go unreported. There still
remains a considerable amount of work to be done in Turkey, where 1 in 3 marriages
involves a child (Hurriyet, 2015), and relevant laws and their implementation are
inconsistent. In 2002, Turkey raised the legal minimum age for girls to wed to 17 from 15,
but marriages at age 16 are still possible if a court grants permission. Other laws define a
“child” as anyone under the age of 15. And though prosecutions are occasionally made
under laws prohibiting the sexual abuse of children, the Turkish Penal Code does not
address child marriage specifically.
In 2015, as I was writing up an article on “honour” killings in films from Turkey (Atakav,
2015), I came to realise that what was missing in my work were the voices of women. I was at
risk of making generalised assumptions about what womanhood entails within the context of
Turkish society. It was at that point that I decided to take on a new challenge of making a film,
rather than just critiquing films on a theoretical level. I made my first film, Growing Up
Married. It is a 27-minute, zero-budget documentary that focuses on the stories of four child
brides from Turkey, recollecting their memories as adults. I started this project with a desire to
give voice to women’s stories that were discursively silenced. I have written about the process
of making this documentary elsewhere (Atakav, 2020), and argued that women speaking out
about their experiences not only reveal the abuses of child marriage but, more significantly,
shed light on stories of ongoing domestic violence and sexual abuse as adults, bringing to the
forefront a cultural obsession with the concepts of family “honour” and women’s chastity. I
also wrote, in the same article, about the moral and ethical dilemmas and responsibilities of
the act of filming, in the context of long-standing debates within feminist work on the politics
of research with, and interviewing, women, particularly in terms of power and voice (ibid). In
this chapter, however, my focus is on the impact of this documentary on policy, society and
culture as I position it in the context of the activist potential of making films within academia.
I intend to demonstrate how, when women whose experiences are marginalised or silenced
speak, they become agents of change, directly for their own lives, and indirectly for others,
even beyond the cultures they come from.

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The film’s focus originated from a conversation I had with Avniye, one of the inter-
viewees in the film, who is also a neighbour of my parents. In a previous visit to Izmir, the
third biggest city, known for being the most “Westernised”, secular and modern in
Turkey, Avniye had asked me if I could have a chat with her 16-year-old daughter, who
was eager to drop school and get married to the man she was in love with, who was ten
years her senior. It was at that point that she started telling me about her life and her story
of forced marriage as a child, virginity tests, domestic sexual violence and abuse. Avniye’s
interview was the first I filmed, and I asked her to talk to my mother instead of looking
at me as I stood behind the camera. This created a space in which she felt comfortable.
The experience of filming made me realise how the consent forms I got the interviewees to
sign were merely pieces of paper, and the fact that they were speaking about their personal
experiences of marriage was a feminist act in itself. Women in the film spoke because they
wanted to, and by doing so, they gave access to their stories to encourage other women to
disclose their stories.
Part of the filming took place at the Women’s Support Centre in Tire, Izmir. Getting
access to the Centre would not have been as straightforward had my cousin not been in
charge of running the centre. She introduced me to the two women who were visiting the
centre on the day of the filming and they agreed to tell their stories. In fact, one of them
said: “I don’t want other girls to suffer. They should hear me talking and make sure they are
educated and they are financially independent. Listen to my story and don’t accept to be
wed without love”.1
The four women knew that this was an academic project with an ambition to contribute
to social and cultural change, and I regarded it as my responsibility to make the project as
collaborative and participatory as possible. Indeed, there is a challenge in conducting
analysis and presenting findings in a way “that sensitively captures the multiple levels of a
research encounter”, as Riach also points out in her work about participant-centred
reflexivity in the research interview (2009, p. 356). Here, I expand her discussion to chal-
lenges in the editing suite, through to the post-production process. In the editing room, from
hours of footage, one has to construct a story, and this is fraught with ethical challenges. I
felt responsible for doing justice to their stories, so tried to include them where possible in
the editing process, sharing the footage with them. One cannot escape power dynamics but
reflexivity can be seen “as embedded in the moment [filming], as well as after that moment
has passed [editing]” (Riach, 2009, p. 358, my emphasis). On an individual level, the film
played a significant role in changing the lives of the subjects of the film. It has increased the
confidence and willingness of victims, survivors and affected communities to come forward.
Avniye describes how taking part in the documentary has given her a unique opportunity to
integrate her experiences of forced marriage into her life narrative: “After talking to you, I
felt like my confidence was restored and I felt so happy to have shared it. It is comforting to
speak out. Those were things that I haven’t spoken about before, ever, and I managed to
reflect on my life while talking to you for the film. It helped me come to terms with what
happened. It made me realise how grateful I am of my life now”. For Leyla, talking for the
film acted as a form of reconciliation with the past. It was the first opportunity for Leyla to
narrate her trauma, and it gave her the consolation that voicing her experience through
documentary has the potential to affect wider change: “Sharing my story with you was
totally comforting. Years’ worth of secrets! It filled me with confidence and I am glad lots of
people will watch the film and hear about my experience. It doesn’t matter who I am, if my
story can change one person’s idea about forced marriage then I will be happy”.

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In responding to one of feminism’s central claims, that women’s perspectives have often
been silenced or ignored, my research is interested in listening to women’s experiences, and
making them not only audible but also visible. This, of course, brings up certain questions:
What does a film allow that, for example, an academic journal article does not? A research
film not only allows us to hear the voices of women but also enables us to directly capture
the nuances of gesture, emotion, facial expression and vocal intonation and emphasis. This
is particularly powerful in the context of sharing the experiences of women as it allows us to
capture not only the testimony but to situate that testimony in the women’s current contexts
as survivors. For instance, Growing Up Married starts and ends with Leyla’s singing. Leyla
tells us that she refused to sing from the age of 14, when she was forced to marry her ex-
husband, to separate the horrors of her married life from better times in her childhood when
she sang to express herself. Her singing in the film allows her to recapture those better times
from the perspective of a survivor, and demonstrates her agency in a way that, in turn,
becomes central to the activist impact of the film.
These testimonials have had a powerful impact when the film has been screened, and
have played an important part in influencing and advancing UK policy debate and police
practice. For example, the film was used as part of a consultation with regional police forces
and led to a substantial change in their training for safeguarding and responding to young
women and families affected by, or vulnerable to, forced marriage. Screenings and pre-
sentations to key UK parliamentarians including the All-Party Parliamentary Group on
Population (APPG), Development and Reproductive Health (PDRH) helped inform the
2021 Marriage and Civil Partnership (Minimum Age) Act in the UK which seeks to remove
parents’ right to consent to marriage on behalf of a minor and raises the age of consent to
18. The documentary was used as evidence in the discussion of the proposed policy changes
because it presents the voices and experiences of child brides. As Pauline Latham MP wrote
about the film’s role in the briefing she led at Westminster: “This project’s contribution
enabled members of the APPG on PDRH to better and more fully understand the long-
lasting legacy of child marriage, which would not have been possible without the stories of
the women portrayed in the film”.2
As a film, the research travelled quickly and efficiently between and beyond two national
contexts, helping to forge relationships with local, national and international institutions,
building bridges between cultures and countries. The connections with the UK Parliament
as well as a range of charities (including Girls Not Brides, Karma Nirvana, Iranian and
Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation, Independent Yemen Group) did, of course,
require time and effort to set up and nurture, but this is where engagement with main-
stream media also helped. Issuing a press release from the University led to coverage in The
New York Times, Huffington Post, Daily Mail, Al Jazeera, and many other national and
international media platforms. This media exposure helped raise awareness while in-
forming their wide international readerships about the realities of forced child marriage in
Turkey and beyond.
Yet, screening the film in Turkey has proved challenging. Despite liaising with organi-
sations like UNICEF Turkey and the Rotary Club in an attempt to screen the film at coffee
houses (spaces exclusive to unemployed or retired men), we have encountered resistance and
reluctance, meaning these screenings have not taken place. The idea here was to screen the
film to men so that they could see the implications of their decisions on women’s lives. Film
is a powerful and significant medium that travels and takes voice to spaces where they can
be heard (particularly at policy level), but this is not without limits.

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Since its nationwide premiere in the UK in 2016, Growing Up Married has achieved an
international reach, including screenings in Turkey, Cyprus, Japan, Bangladesh, and the US
to a cumulative audience of over ten thousand. This number may seem low in the context of
other documentary releases, but there is an ethically informed justification for this. To this
date, I have not shared a public link to the film, in an attempt to protect the rights of the
women in the film. This stems from my belief that, at times, consent forms and ethical
clearances only remain on paper, and even though the women in the film gave permission to
how much of their identities can be revealed in the documentary, and even though there are
no identifiable names mentioned, I still chose to protect their privacy.
As I noted elsewhere (ibid., 2019) forced marriage and child marriage are alarming
human rights issues. I chose to put a rolling number on the corner of the screen as the film
runs. Every 27 minutes (the screening time of the film) 710 more girls become child brides
somewhere in the world. These are recorded figures. At times, particularly in Turkey, there
is no paperwork involved, the marriages are often illegally conducted at local mosques by
local religious authorities; and, girls are not always given birth certificates so that families
can “sell” them into marriage as soon as they reach puberty, by faking their age. These
crimes are unseen and their perpetrators go unpunished. Stories similar to the ones depicted
in the film are everywhere in Turkey and beyond. Creative practice research, in the form of
film, offers a powerful venue to communicate messages on gender-based violence, but the
process is, indeed, fraught with ethical and political challenges.

Lifeline (2020)
The connections with a range of agencies, from parliamentarians to charities, afforded me
access to the participants of Lifeline, a short documentary I co-directed with filmmaker
Karoline Pelikan, during the period of lockdown of Covid-19 in England.
At the beginning of the pandemic, the number of news items about the rise in domestic
abuse was increasing. Yet, as Lombard also argues (this volume), evidence about women’s
experiences and patterns of reporting and help-seeking was less clear cut. In March 2020,
SafeLives, a leading charity working with organisations across the UK to transform the
response to domestic abuse, released a report assessing the impact of the pandemic on the
domestic abuse sector (2020). The report highlighted the significant challenges the sector
was facing in responding effectively to increased vulnerability while indicating a 74%
reduction in service delivery as a result of lockdown, a finding mirrored by a report for
Women’s Aid in England and Wales (Women’s Aid, 2020). In reports released slightly
later, other charities showed increased demand for services. In a survey of the specialist
BAME Domestic Abuse and Honour Based Abuse sector, Karma Nirvana reported that
caseloads had increased by 162%. Respect, Men’s Advice Line, saw a 57% increase in
contacts in 2020–21 compared to the pre-pandemic year (Respect, 2021). Lifeline came to
life at this particular moment and offered an audio-visual response to the urgent need for
research that examined the implications of the pandemic on the domestic abuse sector in
the UK, the challenges faced and strategies that were being employed by the sector in this
time of crisis. In this section, my intention is to reflect on the process of making the film
and the ethical challenges it posed while also drawing on the ways in which the project
provided an opportunity for feminist solidarity and consciousness-raising in a context
where the conditions of lockdown were making connections between service-providers all
the more difficult.

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Between June and September 2020 I recorded a total of 27 video interviews on Zoom
totalling around 30 hours of footage. Indeed, lockdown conditions certainly informed the
visual style of the film. These interviews included discussions with leaders of UK-based
charities, parliamentarians, the Police and NHS professionals whose work focuses on
domestic violence. At the heart of the film are the participant-led video diaries by Gina Pruett
(DVA Car Advocate, Aurora New Dawn) and Shelly Whitby (Senior Support Worker,
Pandora Project) representing the voices of the women who work on the frontline. The main
themes detailed in the film include the blurring of boundaries between the public and the
private spheres, experiences of vicarious trauma, the gendered nature of domestic abuse work
as a vocation and as a feminist act, and funding challenges exacerbated by Covid-19.
In public-facing academic projects, building trust takes a considerable amount of time,
particularly if the topics covered are sensitive. Previous collaborations with these charities in
other projects helped establish trust quickly. However, this certainly did not mean that
involving participant researchers in the project was not fraught with ethical challenges.
Requesting video and audio diaries from them without influencing their input demanded a
self-reflexive approach that is frequently experienced in undertaking feminist research
(Gordon, 2019; Redmon, 2019). What impact might our role in the filmmaking process have
on the knowledge produced and the experiences represented? In line with this, we avoided
asking leading questions. Instead, we asked participants to film themselves, involving them
as cinematographers in the production process and thereby “closing the distance between
filmmakers and subjects” (McIntosh, 2015, p. 9). This provided us with a relationship that is
participatory and non-hierarchical (Lesage, 1984, p. 237). We employed this approach to
mitigate the ethical challenges posed by the editing process, too, by involving the participant
filmmakers in post-production, allowing them to watch and comment on the footage before
a final draft was confirmed. As McIntosh notes, power dynamics can reinforce the subject-
object binary between filmmaker and participant, which can result in a context where the
filmmaker speaks for the subject, even if the subject speaks for herself in the documentary:
“Like reality and representation, this notion of speaking for another is constructed, con-
tested, and politicised” (2015, p. 9). In both Growing Up Married and Lifeline, I approached
the process of filmmaking as an act of feminist solidarity and the “subjects” of the film as
co-creators of the research. In line with this came a sense of responsibility towards all those
I interviewed. In the editing process, my co-director and I kept asking ourselves the same
question: how do we ensure that we do justice to everyone’s voice when we have approx-
imately 30 hours of footage? Who will feature in the film, who will not? Editing is a tough
process as you are putting together a narrative while having to take out a lot. It is an ethical
“minefield”. We focused on representing the key themes articulated by all contributors.
This brings me to one of the key themes to emerge out of the interviews: vicarious
trauma. One frontline worker exemplified this as she revealed that the reason she chose this
profession was because she was a domestic abuse survivor, who wanted to help others. But
in the context of a national lockdown, this raised new challenges:

I realised actually that I was almost ‘contaminating’ my room. I wasn’t sleeping …

The stuff you get on the calls can be really really distressing. You can’t go home and
reflect on it, because you are at home for work as well. When you’re at home and
you’re on the phone and you’re hearing stuff and taking in some of the trauma and the
abuse, it does go in more, and it’s sometimes because you’re in your home setting, you
do have to remind yourself this isn’t happening in your home, this is somewhere else.

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The blurring of boundaries of work space and home space is not unique to the sector, of
course, but the implications of it for these key workers have been major. The emotional
labour of these amazing people working on the frontline deserves recognition. For this,
services offered support for their staff, too, in addition to providing daily team calls to de-
brief, though Shonagh shared with me that “there has not been a single team meeting where
someone did not cry”.
It was highly thought-provoking that every time I asked the question “how are you?”
every single one of the interviewees answered my question by talking less about themselves
and more about the great teamwork that their colleagues have been doing during these
challenging times, articulating the pride and faith they have in them. As the Director of
Karma Nirvana, Natasha Rattu aptly put it in her interview: “the lockdown has really
enabled the sector to get together more closely”. A case in point is the bi-weekly Zoom
meetings organised by Meena Kumari (H.O.P.E Training & Consultancy) throughout the
lockdown. Dr Roxanne Khan (Director of HARM Network) describes these calls as “the
silver lining of Covid, as the light in such darkness”. Kumari explains: “During Covid, there
was a real gap for people to come together and talk about the issues that do impact black
women, black men, minority ethnic women and men but also children and families and we
really wanted a safe space where people could come together and have those discussions”.
Every online meeting focused on different themes and they offered a range of expert
speakers, creating a platform for people in the sector to get together and work together to
de-brief collectively, and to act collectively. As Yasmin Khan (Director of HALO project)
put it: “The H.O.P.E calls have given a platform for taking away all the hierarchy of
‘important’ people and allowed people who know exactly what the issues are, what the
solutions can be, to come together with a consensus of what we can do with the power of
working together”.
The film was launched at an online event that was attended by around 100 people, with
all the contributors in the film speaking to the audience after the screening of the film,
and opening with a talk from Jess Phillips MP, and closing with remarks by Virendra
Sharma MP. Including change makers in the project helped raise awareness of the
research and the documentary. The film has travelled around the world (from the UK to
the US, Canada, India and Japan) through international film festivals (when mobility
was curtailed by the pandemic) receiving global acclaim through media and public en-
gagement activities, screenings at universities, TV broadcast (at Balik Arts TV), and
within a short period of time has generated impact, as SafeLives organised Well
Being Sessions for frontline workers of domestic abuse and sexual violence services sector
in the UK, as a direct result of this research and the film (March 2021). The film was
submitted as evidence to the Women’s Health Strategy Consultation by the UK
Government (2021).
It is worth noting that these successes have at least in part depended on working
outside of a mainstream news framework which – as identified in many of the essays in
Part 1 (this volume) – remains a challenging space for reporting on the continuum of
men’s violence against women, and marginalises feminist expertise. The initial idea for
Lifeline was to rapidly collect and edit visual evidence from the frontline workers of
domestic abuse services in the UK and propose the video to media outlets as an item for
TV news. Media outlets were either not interested in the topic or they were after the
exclusive contacts we had with frontline workers rather than the documentary we were
proposing.

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Conclusion
This chapter demonstrates how documentary film – even low or no-budget film – can play
an important role in highlighting, scrutinising, and fighting against gendered violence. As
academics, we are responsible for collecting stories and experiences, and equally responsible
for creating visible evidence of the present moment to contribute to social change towards
gender equality.
The chapter also signals how feminist film research can be at the forefront of questioning
and analysing differences across borders. Growing Up Married shows the potential of feminist
scholarship to forge change and bring women together across differences. Moreover, the
documentary’s journey to date shows how stories of women in Turkey can be useful in in-
forming policy in the UK around forced marriage. It is thought-provoking to see, though
without suggesting that women’s experiences can be universalised, how the experiences of
women in Turkey can travel through film to the UK and have an impact on policy and society.
Just as the connections established through Growing Up Married led to the production of
Lifeline, Lifeline has, in turn, led to a new project focused on the shortcomings of the
Domestic Abuse Act (April 2021) for women on spousal visas. As it stands, domestic
violence victims on spousal visas can access support for three months, but women on any
other visa with a “no recourse to public funds” stipulation cannot. This is something or-
ganisations in the sector have been campaigning against for a considerable amount of time,
and I am working on a new documentary feature project, with the working title Left Behind,
which will support this work. Left Behind focuses on the implications of the no recourse to
public funds provision on migrant victims of domestic violence, it explores what is being
done and what still needs to change in relation to migration and domestic abuse, in the
context of UK-wide culture and politics.
To conclude, I invite all scholars to consider making media as a form of activism. The
strategies developed within the frame of creative practice afford us alternative ways of
promoting changes and embedding feminist goals of equality via work with academic and
non-academic partners.

Notes
1 Quote from follow on correspondence with the author, dated 13 September 2016.
2 Quote taken from testimonial letter written by Pauline Latham MP for an impact case study.

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Atakav, E. (2020) ‘Growing Up Married: Representing forced marriage on screen’, Critical Discourse
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RETHINKING THE
CURRICULUM
#MeToo and contemporary literary studies
Mary K. Holland and Heather Hewett

Feminist literary scholars have analysed texts about sexual violence and rape culture and
theorised resistance to them since feminist interventions into literary studies began (for an
overview, see Hewett and Holland, 2021). But since Tarana Burke’s 2006 “Me Too”
movement went viral and global as #MeToo in 2017, these efforts have expanded and
grown more complex. At the same time, literary studies has seen a broader and deeper
reconsideration of many of the texts taught in English studies, while welcoming into its
curricula diverse texts that are adept at addressing the topics of #MeToo. The past five
years have seen hundreds of essays and chapters published about sexual violence and its
attending issues of consent, testimonial injustice and rape culture in literature of nearly
every time period and field and from many parts of the world. While here we focus on
English literary studies, parallel discussions are occurring in the study of literatures in other
languages (e.g. Krimmer and Simpson, 2022). As one example, of the nearly 22,000 citations
of articles about sexual violence in the literature that we found in JSTOR, fully a third are
specifically framed using “#MeToo” or “me too”, signalling an enormous uptick in interest
in this topic. And those citations are independent of the anthology of essays on this topic
that we published in 2021, #MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching
about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture, which also informs our analysis. While a minority
of these recent articles about sexual violence in literature focus exclusively on pedagogy or
curricula, all of them revise literature studies — what and whom we read and how we read
them — in ways that will be felt at every level of teaching.
Current scholarship about literature and sexual violence reflects decades of developments
in this area as well as feminist thinking more broadly. In particular, this scholarship depends
on the intersectional, transnational and decolonial feminist frameworks theorised by Black
and Indigenous women and women of colour. While these approaches to the topic of sexual
violence in literature are not new (see Gunne and Thompson, 2009), they have been taken
up by more scholars and applied to a wider array of literatures than previously. Gender and
sexual violence are considered as they interact with other axes of identity (e.g. race, class,
caste, sexuality, ability, citizenship, Indigeneity) and the structures of inequality connected
to these social identities. Scholars also draw on feminist, queer and trans theorising and
activism that complicate binary understandings of gender, sexuality and victim/perpetrator.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-65 601

 Mary K. Holland and Heather Hewett

At the same time, some subfields find themselves in challenging positions related to
#MeToo, because of its provenance in the Global North and the complex racial dynamics
surrounding the movement itself, which in 2017 was dominated by the stories of white
women and celebrities. For example, conversations in South Asian Studies point to the
limits of an approach to sexual violence grounded in a survivor’s voice where such testi-
monies are still taboo (Shrivastava, 2021; Thoidingjam et al., 2021). We note that what may
appear to be an absence of “rethinking the curriculum” in some fields may, in fact, derive
from different kinds of engagements with the topic of sexual violence.
In what follows, we trace some of the major ways in which #MeToo is reshaping
curricula in English literary studies: re-readings of canonical texts, the development of
embodied pedagogies, rethinking literary genres and canons, increasing efforts to place
literature and media studies in conversation with each other, and a re-energised approach to
activism in and through literary studies.

Re-readings of canonical texts

#MeToo continues to inspire re-readings of canonical texts across fields and time periods,
with attention not simply to sexual violence but to the nuances of coercion and consent,
speech and silence, and credibility and doubt that have been explored in narratives and
studies over the last five years. Many scholars and teachers have published readings and
pedagogical approaches that reframe aspects of literary “romance” and “seduction” as
features of rape culture. While Sara Torres and Rebecca McNamara (2021) illustrate how
“courtly love” obscures the power dynamics of gender and class that problematise consent
in classic medieval texts such as Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyda and The Wife of Bath’s Tale,
Diana Henderson (2019) reads the “seduction” of Lady Anne in Shakespeare’s Richard II as
a sexual assault enabled by the culture’s cycles of war. Several classic “seduction” novels
have been reread as primers in rape culture and in silencing female victims of male coercion,
including Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (Grisham, 2020), William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair
(Richardson, 2020), and Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (Herndon, 2021).
Likewise, Douglas Murray (2021) reveals society’s key function in rape culture by drawing
attention to the relationship between social pressures and “courting” behaviour in Jane
Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Anita Patterson (2020) goes beyond identifying the sexual
violence in T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” to suggest that Eliot’s poetry should be taught in
conjunction with that of Gwendolyn Brooks, so that students can see the racist dimension
of sexual violence acknowledged by the latter but not by the former.
Some of those accused of sexual violence in the wake of #MeToo, or whose violence has
finally been taken seriously because of #MeToo, are themselves authors of canonical texts,
raising difficult questions about how and whether to teach their work. The outpouring of
writing about the trauma of experiencing, discussing, and reading about sexual violence
sparked by #MeToo on social media, mainstream media, and blogs crystallises these
questions, and also helps us consider productive responses. Mary K. Holland (2021) takes
David Foster Wallace as a case study, using the discrepancy between offended readers’
tweets and blogs about his reported abusiveness and misogynistic fiction on the one hand,
and critics’ protective silence about both on the other, to argue that scholars and teachers
must place his fiction in the context of his biography when critiquing its participation in
rape culture. Confronting her own blindness to his fiction’s misogyny in her earlier criticism,
she also demonstrates what is at stake when critics fail to recognise and critique rape

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culture, and the role of non-academic writing across media platforms in catalysing curric-
ular evolution.
Junot Díaz presents a particular challenge to instructors, having been multiply accused of
perpetrating sexual violence shortly after publicly disclosing his own experience of it. Ann
Marie Short (2021) argues that his novels’ complex and contradictory depictions of sexual
violence call for the same re-contextualising that his own complicated positionality in
relation to sexual violence requires — turning our attention to the systems of oppression
that enable abuse, rather than to particular perpetrators. In both of these cases, deciding
whether to keep these authors on a syllabus means asking what their texts can accomplish in
terms of a course’s larger goals, whether another text might accomplish the same things less
contentiously, what kinds of contextualising must be done to make their sexual violence and
misogyny clear, whether discussing the authors’ own culpability is required or productive,
and if so, how best to do that. These questions also pertain to teaching literary theorists who
have been accused of assault or, as in the case of Foucault, paedophilia. Since doing proper
foundational work in misogyny and rape culture and biographical contextualising take
significant class time, one way that #MeToo alters curricula is by pressing teachers to
consider whether such literature should be reserved for the kinds of courses that allow such
careful, in-depth treatments, like upper-level classes and seminars rather than lower-level
survey courses.

Embodied pedagogies
Reconsiderations of canonical works in the classroom can lead to new discoveries about the
relationship between gender, sex and power, and literature’s role in allowing us to evaluate
it in the real world, by both students and teachers. A powerful example of student awareness
born from literary study comes from eight undergraduate students at the University of
Delhi (Joshi et al., 2021), whose “postcolonialist feminist” reading of Ovid’s Philomela
myth and its repurposing by Chaucer, Shakespeare and Margaret Atwood led them to write
an essay in which they compare Philomela’s silencing to the recent silencing of a young girl
assaulted by soldiers in Handwara, Kashmir and of young women gang-raped in Jashpur.
The collective voice of these eight female students illustrates the power of #MeToo to re-
cognise and begin to remedy such silencing in multiple ways: the students were themselves
inspired to write by an earlier literary response to #MeToo (Waldman, 2018).
Teachers have also begun to register how students’ responses to sexual violence in
canonical literature are changing their pedagogy. Amy Hagenrater-Gooding (2021)
describes how her “progressive” students’ inability to acknowledge Blanche’s rape in
Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire led her to completely redesign her course in
modern drama. Guided by questions about consent and women’s believability as articulated
by #MeToo in 2017, Hagenrater-Gooding taught contemporary plays alongside media
stories about consent, complicity and assault in the real world to spark conversations about
the students’ own views and how literature can lead us to rethink those views. Heather
Hewett (2021) restructured her teaching of perhaps the most canonical African novel taught
in the US, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, in response to one group of students
diagnosing its central character as suffering “toxic masculinity”, a description she had not
fully considered after decades of teaching the novel. We might call this less of an “aha”
moment and more of a “this, too” moment, as a new generation of readers brings a different
sensibility to the prevalence of sexual violence in literature. Her desire to acknowledge the

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gendered violence to which the students were reacting while considering it in postcolonial
and African-masculinities contexts led her to propose pedagogical approaches that broaden
and complicate her earlier teaching about gender, violence and cultures.
Many professors have developed pedagogies that reflect the understanding that their
students include survivors, students who have witnessed violence, and students who may be
future victims, perpetrators, and what Jeremy Posadas (2021) calls “perpetrator-adjacent
students” (247). For example, Beth Walker (2021) offers practical advice for responding to
writing, suggesting how we might give more productive and thoughtful feedback on student
writing by survivors when the topic is sexual assault. She provides strategies for “first
responders” — the writing tutors and instructors who are the “first to see a draft and guide
revision” — that allow student survivors to maintain control of their story (2021, p. 236).
One of the more creative practices inspired by #MeToo that we’ve seen is Sarah Goldbort’s
(2021) use of restorative justice circles as a feature of trauma-informed pedagogy that
includes everyone in the classroom, including the instructor, in a relationship of mutual
vulnerability intended to promote open conversation about the difficult topics and personal
accounts that inevitably arise when the curriculum includes material about sexual violence.
Goldbort’s approach is particularly useful for instructors who are survivors and must
navigate the challenges of engaging and teaching difficult texts. These practices all
acknowledge that the work of the classroom is embodied — that teaching cannot focus only
on the development of students’ critical and writing skills, but must also attend to the whole
people who are reading.
Embodied pedagogies also grow out of a long tradition of feminist criticism and activism
that examines power in the institutions where learning takes place. More critics are
acknowledging that classrooms, and the practices of writing about and teaching literature,
are embedded within academic institutions that not only frequently fail to respond to or
support survivors (both students and teaching faculty) but also very often overlook inter-
personal violence (see Ahmed, 2021). As Alix Beeston (2019) observes in the introduction to
the special issue “Modernist MeToo# and the Working Woman”, the “crux” of many high-
profile cases of sexual harassment and abuse in the academy is “the power differential
between tenured professors, on the one hand, and students and contingent or untenured
faculty, on the other” (p. 306). These power differentials are also caused by differences in
race, gender expression, sexuality and ability/disability, so that faculty ranks and academic
institutions often reproduce the culture that enables perpetrators and creates survivors
(Gutiérrez y Muhs, 2012; Niemann, 2020).
Paying attention to power imbalances requires us to pay attention not only to what has
been written about sexual violence but also to what has not been said and cannot be said.
Some scholars acknowledge histories of sexual violence by urging us to learn to read its
silences, especially as they signal contexts and communities that have not been heard or
have not found a voice despite #MeToo. Carlyn Ferrari (2021) proposes a Black feminist
framework for using Gayl Jones’s Corregidora to read the silences of generations of Black
women as illustrating the ways in which twentieth-century US culture reproduces the
oppressions of slavery in which Black women were denied voice and agency over their
bodies. Similarly, Nidhi Shrivastava (2021) contrasts Deepa Mehta’s film Earth with the
novel upon which it was based, Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India, to illustrate how the film’s
deletions of the novel’s traumatic rape and abduction experiences create a sanitised version
for mainstream media that fails to bring survivors’ suffering into the cultural conversation.
Other scholars, such as Yalda Hamidi (2022), have spoken about the need for “rhetorical

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listening”, in which we learn to read apparent gaps around sexual violence in transnational
feminisms as evidence of particular oppressions within cultures that are silencing their
scholars. Solidarity in these cases requires feminists with the privilege of voice to bring these
meaningful “silences” into our curricula by teaching our students to do exactly this kind of
“rhetorical listening”.

Rethinking literary genres and literary canons

Many literary critics are also rethinking literary genres and canons. The explosion of sur-
vivor stories via hashtags such as #MeToo raises questions about the relationship between
social media narratives and more traditional “literary” genres. Some of these questions have
implications specifically for the study of life writing, the “overarching term used for a
variety of nonfictional modes of writing that claim to engage the sharing of someone’s life”
(Smith and Watson, 2001, 197). How do scholars “theorize testimony and life writing itself
in a world characterized by technology, digital storytelling, and social media?” (Hewett and
Holland, 2021, 15). The impact of social media narratives on literature — fiction, creative
nonfiction, poetry, drama — has theoretical and pedagogical dimensions. While literature
can be read as working in concert with social media campaigns, as we will examine below,
social media narratives can also provoke constructive conversations about the differences
between literature and the individual testimonies of social media campaigns such as
#MeToo. As Namrata Mitra and Katherine Conner (2021) point out, #MeToo successfully
resists the cultural “testimonial injustice” that undermines the credibility of survivors and
perpetuates structural inequities; yet literature can serve as a “productive hermeneutic
resource” to cultivate both the “necessary ambiguity” and “complexity” of desire and sexual
relationships often missing from social media conversations (p. 109).
Other critics have examined the remaking of literary genres and canons in the wake of
#MeToo. Leigh Gilmore (2019) argues that #MeToo opened the way to “a new chapter” in
how writers “expand the archive of self-representation about trauma”, which includes
“longer, specific accounts of sexual violence” (p. 162, p. 163). Some critics have coined the
term “MeToo memoir” to describe autobiographical writing of the past five years and
organise courses around it (Armbruster, 2021). While these memoirs, and survivor memoirs
more broadly, are written with the goal of individual and collective liberation, some critics
point to the “discursive constraints” of the rape memoir that both enable and restrict what
can be told, a line of inquiry that reminds us that “stories that remain untellable intersect
with lines of structural marginality” (Serisier, 2021, pp. 46, 44; see also Serisier, 2018 and
this volume). What are the limits of a genre grounded in individual empowerment when the
goal is systemic change and “collective liberation” (Serisier, 2021, p. 47)?
Finally, many critics and instructors contextualise the concerns of the #MeToo move-
ment into existing literary histories, in particular literature by African American women,
with its long history of authors writing about Black womanhood, sexual violence, consent,
and agency (Ferrari, 2021; Chavers, 2021; Saffold, 2021). Similar work is taking place in the
context of Latinx literatures (Hurtado, 2021; Madarieta, 2021) and South African litera-
tures (Nichols, 2021). Other critics identify alternative literary histories: for example, Robin
Field (2020) identifies the “rape novel,” a genre of fiction that emerged in the 1970s in
response to anti-rape activism and the publication of autobiographical accounts about
sexual assault (p. 25). Field argues that the rape novel, defined by an “explicitly feminist and
political understanding of rape”, has its own history of “narrative and thematic

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innovations” in the portrayal of sexual violence (p. 21). Her work suggests that rethinking
genre in the broader context of feminist activism can lead to alternative approaches to
literary canons, ones that foreground social movements and political commitments.

Literature and media studies

Other curricular responses to #MeToo focus on placing literary writing in the context of the
power structures and cultural conversations that both regulate its creation and dissemina-
tion and empower it as a tool for social change. Amanda Spallaci’s (2021) analysis of the
politics of publishing women’s survivor memoirs reveals the racial biases of publishers.
While their marketing strategies euphemise the rape-narrative elements of white and Black
writers, they reconstitute the memoirs of Black survivors altogether, refocusing them
around race rather than sexual violence, and thus participating in a long history of erasing
the sexual violence experienced by Black women. Spallaci notes that marketing materials
also perpetuate the white-washing of feminism, presenting white memoirists as doing
important feminist work while refusing to align Black writers with that same cultural work.
These discoveries echo the findings of Janet Badia (2021), whose structural analysis of the
reception of women’s literature finds a troubling pattern of banning memoirs about sexual
violence by women of colour. These investigations suggest the important work to be done
by curricula to reframe feminism and recenter life writing about sexual violence on the
experiences of women of colour.
Other writers have begun to use media of all kinds as tools for expanding the activist
work that literature about sexual violence can do. Kasey Jones-Matrona (2021) advocates
for using scholarship and teaching on literature about sexual violence by Indigenous au-
thors, such as Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, in concert with social media movements
such as #MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women; see Musial, this volume) and
#NotInvisible to bring attention to the “49 percent of Native women [who] report a history
of sexual violence” (p. 84, quoting a 2010 CDC report) and the thousands of Indigenous
women who go missing every year. Erdrich’s is one of several texts, including Jones’s
Corregidora, Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Jacobs’s Incidents, whose depictions of sexual
violence and testimonial injustice are so nuanced and clear that they have gained increasing
attention in teaching and scholarship in recent years, pointing to another way that #MeToo
has changed the literary curriculum by adding texts that explicitly explore sexual violence
and its repercussions to the list of “standard” texts on course syllabi (and presumably
displacing other, previously “canonical” texts).
Linda Chavers (2021) does something similar with mainstream media, teaching literature
(Corregidora), slave narrative (Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl), and
neo-slave narrative (Octavia Butler’s Kindred) alongside news and magazine opinion pieces
and articles that connect the current #MeToo movement to our long histories of Black
women and girls being sexualised, denied agency over their bodies, disbelieved and silenced.
In this way, Chavers uses a literary curriculum to correct students’ sketchy and often
inaccurate understandings of Black history in the US, centre conversation about sexual
assault on Black female bodies and educate students about the ongoing legacy of sexual
violence experienced by Black girls and women today, much as the students at the
University of Delhi used their readings of Philomela myths to connect to the sexual violence
pervading their communities in Kashmir. Such attention to this history of not just sexual
violence but its dangerous and lifelong consequences, including forced childbirth, is all the

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more important when a US Supreme Court judge can cite increasing the “domestic supply
of infants … available to be adopted” as a legitimate reason for denying women the right to
make their own reproductive decisions (see Lithwick, 2022).

Translating activism: literature, media, life

Every example above of teaching and writing about sexual violence, breaking the silences,
exposing the forms of testimonial injustice that pervade our culture and our literatures, is an
act of resistance and a kind of activism. Elif Armbruster (2021), in an essay about teaching
the first-year seminar, illustrates how translating these ideas from the literary medium to
another — whether digital (film, PowerPoint, blog, podcast, or website) or visual or material art
(painting, scrapbook, photographic essay, fabric design) — can be a powerful way for students
to connect these ideas as encountered in women’s memoirs to their embodied lives. It is this kind
of translation from media into embodied knowledge and response that current literary activism
is aiming for. In addition to books and articles, revised syllabi and creative pedagogies,
#MeToo has sparked an enormous amount of real-world activism around sexual violence on
campuses. Faculty have created a Twitter hashtag specifically to document and support each
other through sexual harassment and assault (#MeTooAcademia). And panels about teaching,
writing about and working against sexual violence on campuses have become increasingly
common at literary conferences, where faculty members also network and enact the kinds of
solidarity that can offset the silencing they may experience at their home institutions.
Perhaps the most impressive activism motivated by #MeToo, however, comes from our
students. Over the last several years, protests against sexual violence in all its forms have
become almost commonplace across the US: students are protesting abusive fraternities
(Turkewitz, 2019), faculty aligned with perpetrators (Ransom and Gold, 2019), ineffective or
opaque Title IX policies (Fink, 2019), administrative handling of and denial of sexual assault
and harassment cases (Hanna and Ballentine, 2021), and even the consequences of protesting
itself (Mudannayake, 2019). They are demanding campus engagement, transparency,
recognition, and respect. People who experienced abuse as students years earlier are beginning
to report it (Binkley, 2018). And many faculty members, often survivors themselves, are doing
what they can to support these students, even to their own detriment, as documented by Sara
Ahmed in Complaint! (2021). Together, faculty and students are using literature and media to
discover, reflect on and disseminate the lessons necessitated by #MeToo.

Acknowledgement
We thank Lizzy Sobiesk for her bibliographic assistance in preparing this essay.

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Badia, J. (2021) ‘“Dismissed, trivialized, misread”: Re-exmining the reception of women’s literature
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studies: Reading, writing, and teaching about sexual violence and rape culture. New York:
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Beeston, A. (2019) ‘Modernist #MeToo and the working woman [Special Section]’, Feminist
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 57
I WON’T LOOK
Refusing to engage with gender-based
violence in women-led screen media
Rebecca Harrison

A confession: despite my self-proclaimed interest in and vocal championing of women-led

screen media, I have not watched Michaela Coel’s critically acclaimed TV series I May
Destroy You (BBC One/HBO, 2020). I haven’t seen Emerald Fennell’s debut film Promising
Young Woman (2020), either. Although I wrote about Tarana Burke’s #MeToo movement
in the wake of revelations concerning gender-based violence in the film industry, I’ve also
failed to engage with the Ursula Macfarlane-directed documentary Untouchable: The Rise
and Fall of Harvey Weinstein (Hulu, 2019).1 And I have not so much as glanced at Adult
Material (Channel 4, 2020), despite it being written by a woman (Lucy Kirkwood) and
recommended by a friend. Given that my most widely cited academic writing to date is an
article advocating feminist curatorial practice (Harrison, 2018) whereby educators and
programmers centre work by media makers who are marginalised by gender, my not having
seen Coel and Fennell’s work, among others, might seem to some like a curious oversight.2
Of course, no one can see everything. But what business does a killjoy feminist have telling
others how to curate screen media when she isn’t bothering to watch it herself?
My second confession: it’s not that I haven’t gotten around to seeing these films or TV
shows yet. I am not facilitating discussions about them in the classroom, and I have not
encouraged others to watch them via social media. They’re not even on my “I really must see
that because I missed it the first-time round” list. For I am refusing to watch. I am refusing to
watch because as a survivor, it is often too hard and too retraumatising to engage with screen
media that focuses on gender-based violence (GBV) – even, or perhaps especially, when
women are doing the talking. It is an odd and at times troubling position in which to have
found myself. On the one hand, sharing my own experiences of sexual violence and calling for
more women-centred narratives onscreen. On the other, saying no when women’s vital and
longed-for stories are presented to me. There are tensions between demanding to show and
refusing to see. There’s a sense of self-preservation that’s entangled with ethical concerns
about power and duty of care that is hard to reconcile.
It’s a position that causes me discomfort and it’s one that I have been reluctant to
address. However, learning how to navigate the interconnected spheres of the personal and
professional, scholarly and activist, has only ever served to enrich my perspective and
improve my capacity to teach. Consequently, this essay faces the issue head on and grapples

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-66 611

 Rebecca Harrison

with what it means to reject women-led screen media projects that centre narratives about
GBV. The approach is autoethnographic and primarily explores my own experience as a
white, cis woman with a reasonably secure position in the academy and access to platforms
in national and online print media. It may read as self-indulgent to write about myself; my
experiences are not universal, after all. However, it’s precisely because of the relative power
that I wield as a film scholar and critic – it might, as So Mayer put it at the British Film
Institute’s “Women With a Movie Camera” event in London in 2018, contribute to
“blowing up the canon” – that it is imperative to reflect on my own position.
The essay’s aim, then, is to take the reader on a journey through my encounters (or lack
thereof) with women-led film and television projects that feature gender-based violence. It
maps out the boundaries through which I, as a survivor, scholar, critic, and lover of stories
told via film and TV, accept or refuse invitations to become a viewer. And it situates my
personal experience within scholarly and activist practices of refusal that are historical and
global. In writing the essay, I was also surprised to find that it presents a history of my
intellectual and emotional relationships with screen media. By way of discussions about
horror, film criticism, and disability, this work is not only about how my experience as a
survivor shapes my engagement with film and television, but also how my experiences as a
film student and scholar have informed my identity in helpful – and sometimes unhealthy –
ways. Arguing that we must continue to expand the limits of what it means to engage with
screen media, I hope that the essay might contribute to both pedagogical and broader
discussions about access, feminist community and survivor-centred justice.

On not watching
Whenever another women-led film or television project centring narratives about GBV is
announced my thought process follows a similar pattern. First, I am excited that another
woman, or group of women, has successfully fought for the opportunity to tell their story, not
least given the continuing and well-documented marginalisation of women in screen pro-
duction (e.g. Cobb, Williams and Wreyford, 2016). Second, I wonder how many similar
narratives remain untold, have not been funded, or have not made it as far as production. I
assume that cis white women will be over-represented in the US and UK’s predominantly
white and patriarchal screen sectors (the national industry contexts I’m most familiar with).
Third, I ask myself a series of questions. Will I cope with watching the film or series on release,
or will its narrative, themes, or aesthetics negatively affect my mental health? How will I feel
personally and professionally about refusing to engage with, and thereby being left out of
conversations about, women-led screen media with my peers? And who ultimately gains (me
from a mental wellness perspective; abusers who seek to disrupt survivors’ sense of self) and
loses out (me, students, marginalised creatives) if I and other survivors do not watch?
Although it is something I think about on at least a weekly basis, it is not always possible
to plan my engagement with gender-based violence onscreen. For instance, I was
unprepared for a rape scene in Maysaloun Hamoud’s 2017 In Between (a remarkable film
about women’s friendships and survival) because there was no content warning in the film
festival programme. Protagonist Kate’s constant proximity to abuse in Harry Wootliff’s
stunning second feature True Things (2021) similarly caught me unawares. It is an ethereal
and highly affecting film that I am glad to have seen. But it stayed with me for days after the
screening and had an unsettling effect. Sometimes, too, it’s the mere hint of danger – not
always related to gender-based violence – that’s enough to make my shoulders tighten and

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my fingers curl. Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen (Netflix, 2020), a documentary about
trans people’s representation in the media, and When They See Us (Netflix, 2019), a drama
about the Central Park Five, were both too much for me, and abandoned. Injustice, dis-
belief and trauma might have different causes and effects on different groups of people yet
resonate in familiar ways for me onscreen.
That is not to suggest that switching off or refusing to attend is ever easy. And both
curiosity and a desire to feel included in discussions about onscreen representations of GBV
sometimes get the better of me. I agreed, for instance, to review Melanie Laurent’s The Mad
Women’s Ball (2021), another commendable film that explores GBV conducted by men and
women in healthcare. The assignment necessitated a day-long intermission in the middle of
the film so that I could reset. For myriad reasons (a sense of duty to other survivor viewers;
optimism about the show’s handling of sensitive issues) I also took on Hulu series Pam and
Tommy (2022), which not only presented domestic abuse as spectacle but also failed to gain
Pamela Anderson’s consent in retelling her story. It is impossible, though, to second-guess
how any given media will affect me. What will be thought-provoking, uplifting, or worth it
in the end? What will cause sleepless nights and disturbed dreams? How much will I blame
myself when I make the wrong call?
There is no set of rules to adhere to, only and always that vital feeling that patriarchy has
denied us language to describe accurately and also trained us to doubt.

Bad feminist
While recognising that patriarchy is at the root of my refusal to watch and sows the seeds of
my anxiety when I do not engage, the doubt persists that avoiding women-led media of any
kind means I am a bad feminist. Writing this essay caused me to think about how and why I
have been convinced that refusing to watch women-led GBV stories is at odds with feminist
practice, and the answers surprised me. For, quite unexpectedly, I found that it’s in part
owing to my experiences as an academic (in being trained to read texts and in applying
feminist theory to screen media) that my hang-ups persist. The notion that there is power in
looking, in actively turning one’s vision toward an object because it subverts the patriarchal
power of the gaze, informs my sense of failure when I turn away. Realising the inadvertent
impact of my own and others’ scholarship on my ideas about watching was startling, and it
bears some scrutiny. Especially as conversations with media scholars and practitioners, and
with other survivors, have always tended to focus on how personal experience influences
professional identity. Thus, I want to take the opportunity to trace how professional
training, and scholarship itself, has shaped my sense of self at three points in my career.
As an undergraduate student, I am taking Mandy Merck’s brilliant third-year classes on
gender and the gothic at Royal Holloway. Building on previous courses about psycho-
analysis and cinema, the movies of Alfred Hitchcock, and a thorough (canonical) grounding
in film theory, the module encourages our small cohort to explore representation in the
horror genre. In one essay, I write about the depiction of women’s eyes and the gendered
power of the look in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper, 1974). The thesis was hardly
original, but is relevant to my later thinking about watching as it focuses on a sequence
when the final girl (or survivor) character, Sally, is taunted by the men of the monstrous
family. In this sequence, we alternate between shots from Sally’s perspective, and extreme
close-ups of her eyes, bloodshot and fearful. Her eyes are a conduit to generate fear (and
pleasure) in the audience, and do not afford her power.

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In her work on women and the gaze in genre films, Linda Williams (1984) notes that so-
called good girls – final girls – are often represented as both lacking desire and figuratively
blind, whereas the vamps with their bold kohl-rimmed eyes and fierce looks end up dead.
Indeed, Williams points out that women who look are aligned with the horrifying, mon-
strous other because they challenge men’s power. Consequently, women who look are often
“violently punished” (p. 65). On reflection, what I internalised from Williams’s analysis was
that looking is power and that if patriarchy wanted to kill off the women who looked back
onscreen – well, then it’d have to come for me, too, because I wasn’t going to give up so
easily. Unlike Sally, I wouldn’t be a good girl and ultimately close my eyes to the horrors in
front of me.
Next, I am writing about women’s material and onscreen encounters with modernity via
railways and cinema in the second year of my PhD. I cite Nicholas Mirzoeff’s (2011) work
on visuality, which he frames as authority over the right to look. It is a white, patriarchal
and colonial authority that is in opposition to oppressed people whose claims to the right to
look afford them autonomy (2011, pp. 1–2). I write about plucky railway passenger heroines
and how women are subjugated into cisheteronormative conformity through a series of
events that limit their field of vision or call into question their capacity to see. In The 39
Steps (Hitchcock, 1935), for example, Pamela’s glasses are broken when on-the-run Hannay
takes cover in her train compartment. After numerous screwball-comedy-style exchanges in
which Hannay all but kidnaps Pamela and wears her down, the pair end up romantically
involved. Similarly in The Lady Vanishes (Hitchcock, 1938), the aptly-named and free-
spirited Iris is gradually moulded into a compliant wife by Gilbert. Throughout the film, her
sight is conflated with danger as she sees things that open her up to attack. Moreover, a
knock on the head that leads to blurred vision causes Gilbert to question her powers of
observation. Having noticed so many historic injustices whereby women’s sight is limited by
men, I cannot help wondering whether my refusal to watch now is making me, albeit by
accident, a good girl and an acquiescent patriarchal subject.
Finally, I am attending film festivals and supervising student projects amid an explosion
of interest in the female gaze. The phrase “female gaze” seems ubiquitous as it is cham-
pioned by feminist practitioners, critics and scholars alike. It’s a term that centres female
filmmakers and celebrates female perspectives that challenge what Laura Mulvey (1975) so
famously called the “male gaze”. In Tania Modleski’s words, Mulvey “asserts that women
are subjected to the patriarchal ‘male gaze’ and can only identify with onscreen characters
masochistically, seeing them through the lens of women’s oppression” (2005, p. 1). I should
be thrilled that women’s work is being discussed and that public discourse is deploying
feminist film theory.
But something doesn’t feel right. I’m uncomfortable with the idea of reconfiguring dif-
ference and multitudes within a framework that’s all about the flattening, homogenising
effects of structural oppression. It’s unclear how the biological essentialism of the “female”
gaze frees gender-marginalised people from patriarchy and I worry about which women’s
visions are included and excluded from the new canon. Does Katherine Bigelow’s 2008 war
film The Hurt Locker count, or Lynne Ramsay’s violent 2017 thriller You Were Never
Really Here? After all, both films were directed by women even if they tell male-centric
stories. Or, as so often seems to be true, does the female gaze only encompass women-led
films that are determined by a particular set of gatekeepers and tastemakers to counter their
culturally specific notions of patriarchal aesthetics? Even now, when I can see the
community-building and linguistic benefits of discussing the female gaze, the answers

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trouble me. I wonder where I fit within the model, too. What about my gaze? Is the way that
I see the world “female” enough? What does it mean to avert my gaze just as women are
celebrated for looking rather than their looks? The feeling haunts me that my perspective is
redundant. By refusing to watch, by not seeing what others see, I have failed as a feminist.
But then I think about Sally again and re-watch that gruesome scene in The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre to help me write this essay, and I observe that she has power when she
closes her eyes. Refusing to look at that which is traumatic does not render Sally powerless,
and to think so was to miss the bigger picture. For, after all, Sally survives.

Refusal as a feminist act

Guilt, shame, confusion and uncertainty, then, are unwelcome feelings that nevertheless
attend to my every decision not to watch women-led media about GBV. I am reminded of
the survivor-blaming language that patriarchal cultures use to suggest that women are at
fault when their consent is violated, and the effectiveness of the endeavour. As Celia
Kitzinger and Hannah Frith’s 1994 study showed, the rhetoric of “just say no” might be
flawed but that doesn’t mean that women don’t find it difficult to state and maintain their
boundaries (p. 294). Acquiescence – to please others and, often, to survive dangerous sit-
uations – is another facet of people’s training if they are marginalised by gender – or,
indeed, by race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability and class.
Countering acquiescence, refusal is a well-established political strategy that has been
deployed by marginalised, often activist, groups to challenge the violence wielded by
oppressors via colonialism, patriarchy and capitalism, among other harmful systems. Of
course, I do not seek to align my personal, and non-dangerous, refusal to engage with GBV in
women-led media with the struggles of marginalised communities whose lives and cultures are
threatened by state (including legal and military) forces. Instead, I want to acknowledge
traditions of refusal that emerge from many Indigenous and Black women’s movements (see,
for example, Emejulu and van der Scheer, 2022) and which inform the contemporary inter-
sectional feminist ideology to which I subscribe. Refusal is not just about saying no, argues
Carole McGranahan. “[T]o refuse can be generative and strategic,” and “in dialogue with
exchange and equality,” she suggests (2016, p. 319). Reconsidering my refusal to engage with
women’s stories about GBV as being part of a dialogue and exchange, rather than a futile
endpoint, makes the act feel more positive. Other scholars, many of whom are also activists in
the academy and beyond, also imagine the act of refusal as an optimistic endeavour, which
helps me to allay my sense of guilt. In their writing about pedagogical strategies in classrooms,
for instance, Jacqueline Gibbs and Aura Lehtonen (2020) describe how refusal and resistance
can affect greater inclusion of “perspectives from the margins”. And from a queer perspective,
too, refusal is a joyous and identity-affirming act; as Bonnie Honig notes, Sara Ahmed’s
configuring of queerness as a disorientation (2006), or a veering away from heteronormative
straightness, is a “path of refusal” (2021, p. 55). Similarly for Legacy Russell, refusal takes the
shape of a “glitch” in cisheteronormative systems that is to be “celebrated” (2020, p. 8). Thus
there is hope for me and my ambivalent resistance to GBV narratives in feminist and queer
writing that confidently frames refusal as revolutionary. Not watching becomes a one-woman
act of defiance in which I assert boundaries. It is a refusal to acquiesce to the patriarchal
sensibility that my feelings and health do not matter as much as my intellectual engagement.
There is something to be learned from Audre Lorde’s much-cited (and often commer-
cially appropriated) reflections on self-care here, too. Writing about the labour of caring for

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herself while living with cancer as a Black woman in the USA, Lorde described her rea-
lisation that “[c]aring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an
act of political warfare” (1988, p. 131). She also has an experience that resonates with me
owing to its familiarity: she discusses reading a book “and finding it very difficult” owing to
her proximity to its subject matter. “At first I couldn’t grapple with it because it was just too
painful to read about a woman dying,” she explains (p. 131). Reading Lorde’s work reminds
me that refusing or struggling to engage with sensitive work that’s a little too close to home
is likely a common one, no matter how isolating it seems in the moment. There are, of
course, other survivors out there – including among our colleagues and peers, in our
classrooms, and in the readership of this book – who feel equally disenfranchised by all-too-
relatable trauma narratives onscreen, whether their experiences pertain to GBV, racism, or
otherwise. None of us is ever alone in our refusal. Indeed, as Lorde also notes, self-care is
made possible by communities that sustain political action so that no one person is
responsible for the ongoing fight. In many ways it does not matter that I refuse to watch,
and nor should it; there are many other audience members out there championing the work
and making their voices heard as they continue to blow up the canon. Refusal for self-care is
enabled by collective action. You don’t always have to do more, or say yes.

When others speak

The final section of this essay focuses not only on how community creates space for sur-
vivors like me to engage with women-led media about GBV – even if we refuse to watch –
but also on how expanding the boundaries of engagement beyond the gaze is essential to
disability and survivor justice. Of course, the idea that there are numerous ways to access
screen media beyond watching films and television will be familiar to many readers already.
Historians, for example, whose attempts to look up early films are often thwarted by poor
archiving practices have to get creative and seek out criticism, newspaper coverage, and
audience commentary to fill in the gaps. People who are blind or vision impaired also access
film via a range of sources (such as audio descriptions) that do not necessarily include visual
materials. Yet despite my own experiences of trauma and challenges with sight-related
accessibility – even corrective surgery has not enabled me to see 3D effects onscreen – it’s
apparent that my anxiety about refusing to watch is entangled with patriarchy and ableism.
While many readers will have done the work to unravel their own ableist biases already, I
reflect here on just two means of screen media access that eschew the gaze. Instead of
positioning survivors as refusing to watch, then, disability-centred curatorial and peda-
gogical practices can generate environments in which access is more broadly conceived of
than merely watching in the first place.
The first example is the written material and still images that accompany every film
and television release. For mainstream and many alternative movies and shows, there are
masses of textual sources that describe narrative, characterisation, place, aesthetics,
institutional contexts and viewer responses. There are press releases, programme notes,
transcripts, talent interviews, blog posts, fan fictions, film criticism, and listing summa-
ries. People whose identities and experiences inform wide-ranging perspectives analyse
screen media online and in print, through subtitled YouTube commentaries and TikTok
skits, and on podcasts and radio. While different platforms and points of view can be
factional, taken as a whole there is a busy collective of screen media commentators en-
suring that refusing to watch is no big deal.

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Take, as examples, a film and a series that I have not watched. Having never seen
Promising Young Woman I am nevertheless informed about its narrative and character-
isation thanks to Clarisse Loughrey’s (2021) description in the Independent. I know that
Cassie lures predatory men into a trap by dressing up and “looking drunk and vulnerable.”
I am also familiarised with the “pop dreaminess” of the film’s aesthetic, and, owing to
Loughrey’s interview with Fennell, I know that the style “‘weaponises femininity’” (2021).
Similarly, an interview with I May Destroy You director Coel by Kemi Alemoru for Gal-
dem provides valuable insights into protagonist Arabella’s world and how writing the
show enabled Coel to work out challenging aspects of personal trauma (2021). Meanwhile,
Kate Stables’ review of the series in Sight & Sound maps out the show’s sense of place
with her descriptions of “a recognisable slice of East London” (2020). Just because I do
not watch does not mean that I am not paying attention. I may not write about or teach
screen media about GBV directly, but my work is informed by an awareness of their place
in popular culture and debates about gendered authorship and representation more
broadly.
Second, there are means of describing screen media narratives and creating dis-
course about them that do not involve vision – or, indeed, other modes of transmission
such as speech. Instead, as Petra Kuppers argues, there is potential for the arts to
embrace a wider range of communication styles, including non-verbal, that challenge
deep-rooted exclusionary practices (2016, pp. 93–97). She proposes that there are “new
openings for disability aesthetics, in collaboration with others who find themselves
addressing new visual politics” (2016, p. 97). One such aesthetic is audio description
(AD), which Hannah Thompson (2018, n.p.) explains is “an assistive technology
designed to allow blind people to access visual media”. Thompson’s work invites film
practitioners and audiences alike to reconceive audio description as a creative en-
deavour that elevates the source material. Far from being an afterthought, AD “both
transforms and enhances the cinematic experience” and enables people (whether they
are blind or non-blind) to access the film in new ways (2018, n.p.). Thus, Thompson’s
discussion of AD challenges the ableist assumption that viewing is imperative to un-
derstanding and simultaneously asks us to recognise the untapped potential of non-
visual engagement with the screen.

Conclusion
My earliest memory of being disbelieved by a patriarchal institution was aged seven
when I went to the opticians complaining that I could not see properly. Fortunately, I
had parents who trusted my reports of blurred and double vision despite the (male)
optician’s diagnosis that I was making it all up. Doing it for attention, I think he said.
There’s a lesson in here somewhere about following my instincts and holding my truth
when it comes to my field of vision. However, I’m loathe to tease it out and draw too
neat a conclusion from the genealogy of my anxieties about looking. Despite the
demands of the patriarchal academy, there can be no tying up of loose ends or simple
narrative closure when it comes to the messy, chaotic, and often contradictory thoughts
and feelings that emerge from personal experience. Trauma responses just aren’t built
that way, and I’m content to allow my reflections to bubble and coalesce – or even to

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pop and disperse – in slippery tension with one another. I accept Russell’s call to “seize
‘multiple selves’” as an “inherently feminist act [through which] multiplicity is liberty”
(2020, p. 18). Some of my concerns about refusing to watch remain despite my famil-
iarity with the work by scholar-activist communities that should reassure me. As the
mapping of my academic training demonstrated, what is fruitful in theory is not always
generative in practice.
Where theory and practice usefully intersect is in calls from disability scholars to ex-
pand our notions of meaningful engagement in and about the arts. Thinking beyond
watching (and in some contexts, listening) is imperative in accessibility terms and there
are numerous examples of organisations that are working to make their exhibition
practices more inclusive. The Scottish Queer International Film Festival is one such ex-
ample, with screenings accompanied by text descriptions, captions, British Sign Language
and content notes.3 Even bastions of cinematic tradition such as Venice Film Festival
are moving toward mandatory subtitles, irrespective of the language used in the film.
There is a welcome shift, then, toward providing audiences with access to screen media by
a variety of means that accommodate people’s diverse needs. I’ve spent far too many
hours agonising over my refusals to watch GBV narratives and it didn’t need to be that
way. If we open up the means of engagement with women-led media – with all media –
then refusal becomes one among many viable modes of participation in meaning making.
That way, I hope that more people will feel that their love for and interest in screen media
can survive.

Notes
1 While ‘gender-based violence’ is an imperfect descriptor of the problem – it can imply that violence
is only committed by or against one gender – it’s preferable in this context to ‘sexual violence,’
which configures violence as something sexual for the aggressor rather than harmful to the victim-
survivor. I use ‘survivor’ in keeping with recovery and GBV support service discourse to refer to
people who have experienced GBV and/or other trauma.
2 The idea to show only women-directed films on introductory undergraduate courses was suggested
by Anna Backman-Rogers. There is an acknowledgement page accompanying the article: see
‘Citation as Feminist Practice,’ at http://www.writingonreels.uk/blog.
3 Example SQIFF programmes are available in a range of accessible formats at https://www.sqiff.
org/accessibility/.

References
Ahmed, S. (2006) ‘Orientations: Toward a queer phenomenology’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay
Studies, 12 (4), pp. 543–574.
Ahmed, S. (2017) Living a feminist life. Croydon: Duke University Press.
Alemoru, K. (2020) ‘I May Destroy You: Michaela Coel and Weruche Opia on the healing power of
Black women’s friendships’, Gal-dem, 11 June. Available at: https://gal-dem.com/i-may-destroy-
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qualifying films in production during 2015’, Calling the Shots. Available at: https://
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Emejulu, A. and van der Scheer, I. (2022) ‘Refusing politics as usual: Mapping women of colour’s
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29 (1), pp. 9–26.
Gibbs, J. and Lehtonen, A. (2020) ‘Teaching to resistance and refusal: Feminist pedagogical engagements
in the UK higher education classroom’, MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, (5). Available at: https://
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higher-education-classroom/ (Accessed: 25 July 2022).
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Lorde, A. (1988) A burst of light: Essays. Ithica, MICH: Firebrand Books.
Loughrey, C. (2021) ‘Carey Mulligan and Emerald Fennell: “the experience of so many victims is that
everyone wants you to let it go”’, Independent, 9 April. Available at: https://www.independent.
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London: Routledge.
Mulvey, L. (1975) ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen, 16 (3), pp. 6–18.
Russell, L. (2020) Glitch feminism: A manifesto. London: Verso.
Stables, K. (2020) ‘I May Destroy You review: Michaela Coel rewrites the rules of the game’, Sight &
Sound, 12 August. Available at: https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/reviews/i-may-destroy-
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Thompson, H. (2018) ‘Audio description: Turning access to film into cinema art’, Disability
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25 July 2022).
Williams, L. (1984) ‘When the woman looks’, Reprinted in Jankovich, M. (ed.) (2001) Horror, the film
reader. London: Routledge, pp. 61–66.

Mediography
The 39 Steps (1935) Directed by Alfred Hitchcock [Film] UK: Gaumont British Picture Corporation.
Adult Material (2020) [Television series] UK: Channel 4.
Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen (2020) [Documentary] USA: Netflix.
The Hurt Locker (2008) Directed by Kathryn Bigelow [Film] USA: Voltage Pictures, Grosvenor Park
Media, Film Capital Europe Funds, First Light Productions, Kingsgate Films.
I May Destroy You (2020) [Television series] UK/USA: BBC One/HBO.
In Between (2016) Directed by Maysaloun Hamoud [Film] Israel and France: En Compagnie des
Lamas; Deux Beaux Garçons Films.
The Lady Vanishes (1938) Directed by Alfred Hitchcock [Film] UK: Gainsborough Pictures.
The Mad Women’s Ball (2021) Directed by Mélanie Laurent [Film] France: Légende Films.
Pam and Tommy (2022) [Television miniseries] USA: Hulu.
Promising Young Woman (2020) Directed by Emerald Fennell [Film] USA/UK: FilmNation
Entertainment and LuckyChap Entertainment.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) Directed by Tobe Hooper [Film] USA: Vortex.

619
 Rebecca Harrison

True Things (2021) Directed by Harry Wootliff [Film] UK: BBC Films, The Bureau, Lady Lazarus,
Riff Raff.
When They See Us (2019) [Television miniseries] USA: Netflix.
Untouchable: The Rise and Fall of Harvey Weinstein (2019) [Documentary] UK: Hulu.
You Were Never Really Here (2017) Directed by Lynne Ramsay [Film] UK/France/USA: Film4
Productions, British Film Institute, Why Not Productions, Page 114.

620
 INDEX

Page numbers followed by “n” indicate notes.

4chan 352, 353, 425 familicide 67–8; racist murder 84; rape
9gag 334, 423–9 204, 206; white vigilantism 84–93

Abbott, Diane 466, 468 Backpage 405–6, 408

abolitionist feminism 51–2, 232–3 Banet-Weiser, Sarah 8, 195, 238, 253, 369
Adewunmi, Bim 236–7 Barbados 495
Adriana’s Pact 310, 311, 314–17 Barker, Martin 292
Adult Material 611 Bates, Laura 512–19
Advocate, The 407 Bauman, Zgymunt 137, 139
Agbonlahor, Gabby 443–4, 449 Beard, Mary 195
Ahmed, Sara 136–7, 138, 142, 195, 428, 512, 558, Bebout, Lee 300, 302
560, 607 Benedict, Helen 21, 128, 147
Alcoff, Linda Martín 142, 206, 211, 233 Berlant, Lauren 91
Allen v. Farrow 232, 236, 238 Bernstein, Elizabeth 232
Allen, Woody 236 Bielby, Clare 314
alt-right 349, 352 #BikiniBridge 352
Amnesty International 55, 278, 361–2, 392, Black and Missing Foundation 278
435, 466 Black feminism 48, 197, 236–7, 512
Anderson, Benedict 281–2 #BlackLivesMatter 46, 453
anti-feminism 8, 68–9, 332, 354, 432, 533 body shaming 335, 373, 466
anti-immigration 47, 50, 88, 301–8, 335, 370, 457 Bolaño, Roberto 310, 313, 317
anti-Semitism 235 Bordo, Susan 298
Argentina: activism 486–8, 531–40, 582–90; and Born Innocent 573–6, 580
violence against Indigenous peoples 583, Boyle, Karen 3–6, 196, 201, 235, 243, 292, 387,
585; and violence against women 533, 489, 533
544, 585 #BoysDontCry 496
Armstrong, Louise 206, 210 Brazil: activism 485–6, 501–9
artificial intelligence 333, 391, 396–7 Brison, Susan 210
Athlete A 232, 235, 239 Brown, Grace 512–19
At the Heart of Gold 232, 234, 235, 239 Brown, Wendy 197–8
Audible 223, 225–6 Brownmiller, Susan 205
Australia 335, 354, 361; domestic abuse cases 28; Bunce, Becca 511, 513, 515–6, 518
educational programmes 486, 496; Burke, Tarana 213, 237, 251, 253, 423, 519

621
 Index

Butler, Judith 424–6, 463 27–30; and hate crime 47–8; and media
use 370–1; and online sexual harassment
Caixin Media 167, 168 348, 381
Cambridge Analytica 362 creepshots 353, 396; see also upskirting
Cameron, David 121, 122 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 281
Canada: activism 486, 511–19; and commercial Cruising 576–7
content moderation workers 475; Cvetkovich, Ann 574
educational programmes 486, 496; murder cyberflashing 6, 333, 380–7
of Indigenous women 55–62, 278 cyberviolence/cyberharassment 335, 358, 360–1,
Capturing the Friedmans 403 380–7, 391–8, 462–9
carceral feminism 45, 232
Carney, Karen 335, 442–49 Daily Mail/ Mail on Sunday/ Mail Online (UK)
Cathy Come Home 255 110, 111, 335, 452–9
censorship 407, 472, 478, 488, 567 death threats 335, 360, 468
Chemaly, Soraya 525 Democratic Republic of Congo 285, 286
C.K., Louis 423 Deng, Fei 165–6, 167–8, 170, 171
child marriage 155–156, 158, 489, 592–6 Denhollander, Rachael 234
child sexual abuse: child abuse images 6, 401–9; de-platforming 336, 473
female perpetrators 132; grooming Digital Sexual violence Out (DSO) 487,
106–7, 111; in memes 423–9; in Nigeria 543–549
158–9; in Portugal 148; survivors’ Dines, Gail 292
experiences 206–7, 216, 219, 234, 429, Discord 353
503; see also child marriage; child sexual Dixon, Drew 237
exploitation; Nassar, Larry; Kelly, domestic abuse: coercive control 24, 337,
Robert 341–2, 349; during Covid-19 27–29, 489,
child sexual exploitation: definition 106; in 592, 596–9; definitions of 23–4, 335,
England 105–12; in the news 401; online 373–74, 563–4; economic abuse 337, 340,
334, 401–9; statistics 107, 111; in Sweden 342; experiences of 593; in magazines
139–40 283–5; male victims of 34–42, 432–9;
Chile 488; activism 583, 586–7; militarised news reporting of 23–32; prosecution of
masculinity 310–18 24, 38; in same sex relationships 35,
China: activism 485, 487, 488, 563–70; All-China 38–9, 564; statistics 1, 28, 38; support
Women’s Federation 564; censorship services 28, 34, 35, 342, 489, 596–9; in
567–70; domestic abuse 28, 563–5; true crime 223–4; technologically-
legislation 564; media regulation 164, facilitated 332, 337–44, 453; technology-
166–8; media reporting 163, 166–171; enabled responses to 343;
sexual harassment 567; see also domestic homicide
see also #RiceBunny domestic homicide 25; during Covid-19 27–9, 77;
Chronicle (Zimbabwe) 127, 129, 130, 131, 132 murder/suicide 69; statistics 38, 75;
class 105, 110, 146–7, 151, 252–7 see also femicide; familicide
Cockburn, Cynthia 7, 311 Doty, Roxanne 303
Collins, Patricia Hill 454 doxxing 349, 352, 395, 397
Connell, R.W. 4, 7, 108, 314, 424 Duffy, Brook 214
consent 146, 479, 615 Durham, Meenakshi Gigi 7
content moderation 336, 473–81
continuum thinking 3–7, 8, 192, 331, 485, 488, EARN IT (Eliminating Abusive and Rampant
469; continuum of sexual violence 3–4, 17, Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act)
331, 332, 383; continuum of violence 311, 401–9
469; continuum of violence against El Español 522
women 111, 465, 532, 539 #EndFathersDay 352
Cooper, Brittney 196 Enloe, Cynthia 311
Copeland, Stacey 223, 226 Epstein, Jeffrey 235, 237–8
Cosmopolitan (Greece) 282–288 Everyday Feminism 543
Covid-19 1–2, 6, 264, 370; and domestic abuse 34, Everyday Sexism 511–19
36, 592, 596–9; and domestic homicide Expressen (Sweden) 136, 138

622
 Index

Facebook: and activism 486, 501–9; and child Glamour (magazine) 206, 209
protection 407; and content moderation Global Media Monitoring Project 15–16, 147
475, 476, 480; and digital harms 362, Globe and Mail, The 406
391–3; and regulation of 393; and white Grabovsky, Peter 338
victimhood 264–7 Greece: portrayal of violence against women in
familicide 65–73; and “honour” 5–6 magazines 281–8
far right 349, 474, 486 Greer, Amanda 223, 226
female genital mutilation/ cutting: and anti- grievability 119, 271, 276–7
Islamic rhetoric 121–3; campaigns against Griffin, Susan 205
117, 118; as child abuse 117, 156; Growing Up Married 592–6, 599
criminalisation 119; in France 119; in Guardian, The (Nigeria) 157, 159–160
Europe 119; as gender-based violence 2; in Guardian, The (UK) 111, 121, 403, 406,
Nigeria 155, 156, 157; types of 116, 123n3; 443–4, 476
UK government responses 119, 121–2; as Global Media Campaign to End FGM 117,
violence against women 117 118, 122
femicide: in Argentina 531–40, 544, 587; in Italy
75, 76; of Asian American women 44–6; hacking 349, 352, 391
of Indigenous women in Canada 55–6; in Hague, Gill 248
Latin America 582; on screen 576; in Hall, Stuart 282
South Africa 261; Yorkshire Ripper case Hammer, Armie 239
242–8, 576; see also domestic homicide Hardy, Simon 292
femonationalism 121–3 hashtags: and campaign leadership 487, 511–9; in
Fileborn, Bianca 384 circulation 487, 501–9; hashtag activism
Finding Cleo 222, 227–9, 278 496, 543, 544–5; hashtag activism in
Finland 332, 432–9 Argentina 487, 531–40; hashtag activism
Fischer, Mia 3 in Pakistan 487, 555–6, 567, 569; hashtag
Flashing 384–85 activism in Spain 487, 523, 525–7; hashtag
Flood, Michael 71–2 activism in USA 487, 531–40; testimonial
football: commentary 442–9; and domestic abuse hashtags 189
26–7; Leeds United 442–9; and national hate speech 349, 360, 362, 395, 421, 443, 448, 454
identity 151; and rape 150–1; Hayes, Kelly 232–3
see also Ronaldo, Cristiano hegemonic masculinity 4–5, 7, 71, 108, 110, 350,
forced marriage 286, 320–3 393, 424, 429, 437, 438, 496
Foucault, Michel 428, 603 Henry, Nicola 353
Four Corners 204 Herald, The (Zimbabwe) 127, 129, 130, 132
FOSTA (Allow States and Victims to Fight Higgins, Brittany 207
Online Sex Trafficking Act) 401–9, 474, Hill, Anita 237
477–8 Hindes, Sophie 384
France 119 HIV 136–139, 140–141
Fraser, Nancy 195 homophobia 3, 334, 423–9, 488, 565, 568, 574–80
Fregoso, Rosa Linda 301–2, 305 Hong, Grace Kyungwon 51
Frost, Rebecca 243 honour-based violence 5–6, 36; see also honour
killing
Gadsby, Hannah 194, 200–1 honour killing 110, 319, 324–6; in Pakistan
Gago, Verónica 7, 488, 583–5, 589–90 319–20, 324–6, 553; see also domestic
#Gamergate 332, 351–2, 360 abuse; femicide
gang violence: boy gangs 98–101; gang rape 175, Horeck, Tanya 222, 242, 243–4
209, 398; girl gangs 98–101; grooming Horizon Worlds 358, 360, 398
gangs 110–12 House of Cards 428
Gavey, Nicola 424 House of Hammer 239
genocide 587 #HowWillIChange 496
Gill, Rosalind 195, 214, 374
Gilligan, Carol 234 IC Change 511–19
Gilmore, Leigh 207, 208, 210 Illouz, Eva 213–14
Girl in the River, A 320, 323, 325–326 image-based abuse 335, 337; and image

623
 Index

manipulation 468; and intimate partner Manada, La 522–8

violence 339–40; online 353–4, 391–8, Manne, Kate 10, 40, 133, 369
546–9; in schools 349 manosphere 332, 349–55, 369, 423–4, 433
I May Destroy You 253, 611, 617 Marie Claire (Greece) 282–8
immigration see anti-immigration; racism McCann, Bryan 235–6
incels 332, 350–1, 354, 359–60 McIntosh, Heather 243
India 335; and commercial content moderation McRobbie, Angela 370–1, 376
workers 475; gang rape 544; #MeToo 163; Megalians 546–9
news 174–82; statistics on violence against memes 334, 354, 424–429
women 174 Menchú, Rigoberta 205
Indigenous men: as perpetrators 58–60, 62n1; as men’s rights 41, 332, 350–5, 432–9, 497
victims 56, 583, 585 #MeraJismMeriMarzi 487, 555–560
Indigenous women: as victims 55–62, 227, 278, metaverses 333, 397–8
583, 585 #MeToo: Alyssa Milano tweet 190, 423, 531,
Instagram 336, 381, 395, 418, 473, 477–9 545; backlash against 196, 253, 423, 438,
Ireland 348–349, 353; femicide 66–7 527; and consciousness-raising 370, 485,
Istanbul Convention 145, 463, 511, 517 487, 423, 453, 496, 531–40, 543–4;
Italy 333, 335, 391–8; femicide statistics 75; critiques of 194, 196–7, 219, 236–7, 251;
legislation 78; see also Telegram; Vita in and documentary 232–9, 251; era 194,
Diretta, La 331; media reporting of 150, 163, 384; and
pedagogy 489, 601–7, 611–8; and re-
Jacobs, Harriet 205 evaluation of abusive production
Jane, Emma 352 practices 574; and speaking out 204, 206,
Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich 232, 235, 237, 238 213–20, 247; Tarana Burke 213, 251, 423,
Je Suis Indestructible 511–19 545, 601, 611; and television drama 251
Johnson, Boris 121, 122, 243 Mexico: and commercial content moderation
journalism: funding of 169; guidance for workers 475; US/Mexico border 300–8
reporting violence against women 20, 23, Miller, Chanel 206, 209
25–6, 176–8; journalistic doxa 174, Minallah, Samar 320–3, 326
178–80; journalism education 147–8; misogyny: internalised 333, 374–6, 554;
standards 163, 166–8 networked 332, 369, 373, 376; online 335,
348–55, 369–76, 395, 442–9, 452–59,
Kaba, Mariame 232–3 497–8
Karpf, Anne 195 misogynoir 371
Kay, Jilly Boyce 253 Missing White Woman Syndrome 45, 271–8
Kelly, Liz 3–4, 7, 17, 331, 487, 532 moral panic 18–19, 95–6, 102–3, 107–9, 117, 333
Kelly, R. (Robert) 208 Mullins, Saxon 204–7, 208, 210
Kennedy, Melanie 370, 371 #MuteRKelly 238
Khan, Sameera 175 My Favorite Murder 221
Kimmel, Michael 349
Kitzinger, Jenny 23, 25–7 Nair, Yasmin 200
Kuppers, Petra 617 Nanette 200–1
Nassar, Larry 234, 235, 240n4
Lazzara, Michael 311 Netflix 200, 201, 242, 252, 363
Le Monde 539 NewsDay (Zimbabwe) 127, 129, 131, 132
Lesage, Julia 321–2, 326 New Yorker 198
Lifeline 592, 596–9 New York Times, The 209, 404, 406
Liu, Qiangdong (Richard Liu) 163, 164, New Zealand 486, 496
168–9, 171 Nichols, Bill 234
Lorde, Audre 197, 615–16 Nigeria 155–60
Loveman, Brian 311 #NiUnaMenos [#NotOneWomenLess] 487,
531–40, 543
Noble, Safiya 371, 453
Mack, Ashley Noel 235–6 Norfolk, Andrew 111, 252
Mai, Mukhtar 206, 209 Nussbaum, Martha 196–7

624
 Index

Obaid-Chinoy, Sharmeen 320, 323–6 167–8, 208–9, 218, 250–8; culture 232,
objectification 383, 394, 397, 468, 479 244, 424, 512, 543–4, 601–2; definitions
Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria 194, 199–200, 464 205, 583; and fear 383; gang rape 48, 175,
Oliviero, Katie E. 301 209, 398, 522–8, 546, 575; legal definitions
Online Safety Bill (UK) 380 of 127, 128, 145–6; male victims of
On the Record 232, 236–7, 239 127–33, 218, 423–9; in memes 423–9, 468;
of migrant women 301; news reporting of
Paasonen, Susanna 292, 293, 297, 383 4, 127–33, 136–42, 145–52, 163, 174–83;
paedophilia 334, 425–9, 603 and prevention education programmes
Pakistan: acid throwing 323–5; activism 485–8, 491–9; prosecution of 146, 254; and race/
553–60; domestic abuse 557, 559; honour racism 235–7, 251–2, 262, 302; reporting
based violence 319–20, 324–6; Pakistani to police 216–17; on screen 574–78, 612;
men in UK 105, 109–11; rape 209, 559; testimony 187–9, 190, 196–201, 204–11,
swara 320–3; television 555 213–20, 234–5, 502–9, 511–19; threats
Pallett, Roxanne 283–5 335, 383, 468–9; in virtual worlds 358,
Parks, Rosa 209 369, 395, 398, 468; in war 285–6;
Passmore, Leith 312 see also child sexual abuse; domestic
Patel, Priti 122, 335, 452–9 abuse
Pearce, Maryanne 56–7 Rapp, Anthony 423, 426, 428–9
People (magazine, US) 274–8 Reclaim the Night 204, 206, 246, 248
Peterson, Jordan 351, 354 Reddit 423, 425, 453, 474, 476
Philippines 392, 475 religion: Christianity 502–3; Islam 4, 321, 323,
Phipps, Alison 232, 233, 237, 238, 251 488, 553–60
podcasts 222–30, 278 #RiceBunny (
) 164–71, 567
popular feminism 370, 372, 448, 511, 533 Ringrose, Jessica 349, 381
pornography 8, 331, 333, 354, 368, 393–4; Ripper, The 242–9
consumption 290–299, 479; dick pics 349, Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia 488, 583, 590
380–7, 395; nudes 473, 478; PornHub 225, Ronaldo, Cristiano 150–1
290, 294, 391; revenge porn 348, 372, Russell, Legacy 616–17
391–2, 396, 397; as violence against Russia 7, 392, 397
women 290, 292–3, 487, 546–9 Rwanda 285–6, 335
Portugal: press 147–52; rape and sexual assault
legislation 145–6 Salter, Michael 206, 544
Powell, Anastasia 353 Saving Face 323–324
#PrimeiroAssédio [#FirstHarassment] 486, Scotland 23–4, 26
501–9 Sebold, Alice 208
Project Unbreakable 511–19 Segato, Rita 488, 583, 586, 590
Promising Young Woman 611, 617 self-harm 415
Punch, The (Nigeria) 157, 158 Serial 222, 224, 227–9
Purcell, Natalie 292 Serisier, Tanya 201, 213, 218
SESTA (Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act)
race: and believability 606; and crime 107–9; and 401–9, 474, 477–8
criminalisation 44, 84; and vulnerability sextortion 396
85–91, 45–8, 262–7; see also racism; sexual abuse see child sexual abuse; child sexual
whiteness exploitation; rape and sexual assault;
racism: in criminal justice 44, 237; in immigration sexual harassment
6, 16, 48–9, 335; Islamophobia 108, 455; sexual harassment 380, 395; experiences of 504–9,
in media 19, 190, 335, 425, 452–9, 466, 511–19, 533–5; online 348; in public 216,
477; in policing 44, 245; racist murder 84; 218; in workplace 164–6, 237, 568
racist violence 1, 420, 587, 606; sexual violence see child sexual abuse; child
stereotyping 49, 55, 58–9, 61 sexual exploitation; rape and sexual
radicalisation 349, 354 assault; sexual harassment
rape and sexual assault 337, 486; acquaintance shadowbanning 336, 473, 478
rape 215–6; and activism 511–9, 543–9, shadow-profiling 362
582–90; and credibility 110, 146, 149–51, Shapira, Hazel 303

625
 Index

Silicon Valley 362, 366, 402, 475 torture 6, 7, 311–18

Simmons, Russell 237 toxic masculinity 349
Singapore 28 trafficking 49, 105, 107, 232, 286, 405, 409
Skeggs, Bev 253–4 Traister, Rebecca 197
SlutWalk 544 transphobic abuse 2, 3, 334, 412–21, 466, 473,
Snapchat 373, 395 477–9
Snuff 573–4, 576, 580 trigger warnings 9, 489
Soranet 487, 546–9 trolling 349, 352, 445, 453, 547
South Africa 261–8 true crime: podcasts 222–30; television 233–4,
Southern Metropolis Daily (China) 163, 168 238, 242–8
South Korea 487, 543–9 True Things 612
Spacey, Kevin 334, 423–9 Trump, Donald 352, 362, 474
Spain: activism 485–7; domestic abuse 28; gang Tumblr 453, 512
rape 522; judicial process 522–28; press Turkey 489; activism 592–6, 599; child marriage
77; statistics on sexual violence 525 592–6; domestic abuse 593
Spectator, The 199 #TweetLikeAPickMe 375
Spiegel 150 Twitter 10, 242, 362, 522–3, 531–40, 553–560
sport 335, 442–9; see also football
stalking 337, 340–1, 348–9, 396 UK 335; activism 486, 511–19, 595; child sexual
Stanko, Elizabeth 24 exploitation 105–12, 253–7; class 251–2,
Stark, Evan 24, 341 253–7; domestic abuse 26–30, 34–42, 489;
Stattin, Jochum 137, 141, 142 FGM/C 117–23, 317–18; football
Steedman, Carolyn 253 commentary 442–9; racism 452–9, 466;
St John, Tanya 512–19 women in politics 452–9, 463, 466, 467,
#StopAsianHate 45, 46–7 468; Yorkshire Ripper case 242–8;
#StopCultureDuViol [#StopRapeCulture] 517 see also Scotland
Strict Scrutiny 229 Ulysses Odyssey 310, 312–314, 315
Stringer, Rebecca 214 Unbelievable (TV series) 252–6
Sudan 122 Untouchable: The Rise & Fall of Harvey
suicide 71–2, 227, 391 Weinstein 232, 235, 238, 611
surveillance: capitalism 333, 359, 363; mass 362; United Nations: Declaration on the Rights of
technologies 338–41, 352, 355, 407, Indigenous Peoples 62; definition of
453, 546 gender-based violence 2; definition of
Surviving R. Kelly 208, 232, 235, 236, 237, 238 violence against women 2–3, 6; Fourth
Swara: A Bridge Over Troubled Waters 320–23 World Conference on Women 564; gender
Sweden: FGM/C 119; press 76–77, 136–43 equality rankings 213; statistics on
gender-based violence 1, 155
Talbot, Mary 195 Urban Dictionary 354, 384
Tate, Andrew 351 USA activism 51–2, 485–8, 511–19, 531–40;
Taylor, Recy 205 educational programmes 486; girl gangs
Teachers Pet, The 224, 229 97–103; Minutemen 303, 305, 306; missing
technology-facilitated gender-based violence 332, persons statistics 273; Missing White
358–66, 391–8, 412–21, 462–9, 487, 547–9; Women Syndrome 71–8; policing 46–8,
see also cyberflashing; domestic abuse; 51–2, 209; political culture 199, 335;
doxxing racism 44–52, 301–8; rape 205, 206, 209;
Telegram 333, 391–8 Tea Party Patriots 304, 306; television
Telegraph/ Sunday Telegraph, The (UK) 111 232–9, 252–7; US Customs and Border
Texas Chainsaw Massacre 613–615 Protection Agency 300, 306, 307, 308;
Think Olga 486, 503–4 whiteness 271, 301–3
Thompson, Hannah 617 upskirting 353, 396
Three Girls 252–7
TikTok 333, 369–76, 473, 477–78 Vagina Monologues 564–565
Time (magazine) 537 Vera-Gray, Fiona 380, 385
Times/ Sunday Times, The (UK) 110, 111, 403 Verduga, Patricia 310
Torchin, Leshu 235 Verma, Neil 225–226

626
 Index

victim-blaming: and class 253, 256; culture 479; #WhyWeWearBlack 538

in judicial process 487, 523, 525; in Williams, Linda 226, 614
legislation 392; in news media 16, 20, 21, Windows 573–74, 576–80
24, 26, 130–1, 159, 168; survivor women as perpetrators of violence 3, 25, 36–38,
experiences 216–217; in true crime 228–9 95–103, 315–17
vigilantism: in Australia 84–93; and “honour” Women Awakening Network 171
5–6; at US/Mexico border 300–4, 306, Wypijewski, JoAnn 197
307–8
virtual reality 333, 397–8, 493–5 #YesAllWomen 206
Vita in Diretta, La 75, 77–82 Yorkshire Ripper: documentaries about 243–8;
naming of 190, 248n1
WeChat 163, 164, 165, 170 #YoSiTeCreo 487, 523–28
Weibo 164, 165, 167, 168, 169, 171, 487, 565–9 YouTube 214–220, 264, 349, 354, 373, 413–14
Weinstein, Harvey 7, 20, 235–6, 423, 426–7, 527
West Cork 222, 224–6, 228–9 Zhu, Jun 164–5, 167–8, 169, 170, 171
WhatsApp 391, 393, 522–3, 545 Ziegenmeyer, Nancy 206
whiteness 85–6, 190, 236, 251, 261–7; white Zierling, Amy 234
nationalism 301–2, 370, 457; white Zimbabwe 127–33
supremacy 371, 465 Zuboff, Shoshana 359, 363
White Ribbon Campaign 496
#WhyICannotMarch 487, 555–6, 558–60

627