Tech-facilitated violence: thinking structurally and intersectionally

Abstract

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