Project: Svetlana Djurdjevic Lukic Foundation07Mar2018
Young Women and Men are Exposed to Violence on the Internet Often Without Being Aware of It
Increasing use of the Internet creates an open and accessible space for communication which often leads to the expression of violence. Violence expressed through an electronic medium is called cyber violence. The specificity of this type of violence is its reach and the possibility of repeating threatening content. An important and recurrent part of cyber violence is an online distribution of sexual content without the consent of the person presented by that content. This type of violence is called revenge porn because a frequent motivation for publishing such content is revenge against a former romantic/sexual partner.
The most common victims of this phenomenon are women. The consent of a woman to create sexual content, usually in the form of a photo or a video, is generalized to the distribution of that content. The responsibility for the incident is often attributed to the victims, a phenomenon known as victim blaming and also present in the cases of sexual assaults against women.
The spreading of this content threatens personal security of women – the victims of revenge porn often change their place of residence, school, job, and face difficulties in establishing relationships of trust with people from their surroundings, including romantic partners. It has been shown that undergoing this experience can lead to serious mental health problems – depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and even suicide attempts.
Digital violence and revenge porn are present in public discourse in Serbia only in several recent campaigns.
Findings show that participants, both men and women, are not familiar with the term revenge porn. Nevertheless, 15% of participants experienced some form of digital violence. Some of them shared their experience of sexual violence which happened on the Internet. These experiences are often associated with the misuse of social networks like Facebook.
These phenomena have serious consequences and are present even in elementary schools. Having that in mind, suggestions for reducing the prevalence of such phenomena include early prevention and raising awareness about digital violence before it assumes more serious and harmful forms such as revenge porn. Also, criminal laws should create concrete measures for perpetrators of digital violence as well as revenge porn.