A Study of Reddit-User's Response to Rape

The growth of social media has created an open web where people freely share their opinion and even discuss sensitive subjects in online forums. Forums such as Reddit help support seekers by serving as a portal for open discussions for various stigmatized subjects such as rape. This paper investigates the potential roles of online forums and if such forums provide intended resources to the people who seek support. Specifically, the open nature of forums allows us to study how online users respond to seeker's queries or needs; through their response, we attempt to assess the range of topics covered by responders in regards to the issues, concerns and, obstacles faced by the victims of rape and sexual abuse, using rape-related posts from Reddit. We employ natural language processing techniques to extract topics of responses, examine how diverse these topics are to answer research questions such as whether responses are limited to emotional support; if not, what other topics are; what the diversity of topics manifests; and how online response differs from traditional response found in a physical world.