And the final speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society conference is Ursula Shepherd, whose focus is on negative social media discourses about sexual violence survivors seeking justice. The voices of victim-survivors are often weakened by the failures of the criminal justice system, leading them to seek informal justice through public discourse – including by naming and shaming the perpetrators online and thereby protecting others. This may happen in fully public spaces, or more controlled online environments.
But negative discourses that downplay abuse or denigrate victim-survivors may also affect other survivors; this is a significant concern. How do victim-survivors navigate this spaced, then? Ursula explored this through zine workshops and interviews with victim-survivors of sexual violence, adding elements of playfulness and flexibility in dealing with such confronting topics. Semiotic content analysis and (optional) interviews enabled her to explore the meanings behind the zines that were created.
Key findings address aspects of identity, risk, voice, and hopeless: identity can cover a range of feelings from shame to stigma, pride, and stress; risk highlights feelings of being silenced, questions of why to speak out in the face of denigration, concerns about online hate targeting female victim-survivors, and the threat of defamation proceedings against survivors who speak out publicly; voice, conversely, emphasises the need to let other survivors know that what they are going through is not unusual, and they have support; but ultimately hope also stresses that it is possible to win this war, through better education about sexual violence, accountability for perpetrators, social change in how sexual violence is perceived and discusses, and collective efforts to change society.
