I get by with a little help from my friends: The ecological model and support for women scholars experiencing online harassment

Abstract

This article contributes to understanding the phenomenon of online abuse and harassment toward women scholars. We draw on data collected from 14 interviews with women scholars from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, and report on the types of supports they sought during and after their experience with online abuse and harassment. We found that women scholars rely on three levels of support: the first level includes personal and social support (such as encouragement from friends and family and outsourcing comment reading to others); the second includes organizational (such as university or institutional policy), technological (such as reporting tools on Twitter or Facebook), and sectoral (such as law enforcement) support; and, the third includes larger cultural and social attitudes and discourses (such as attitudes around gendered harassment and perceptions of the online/offline divide). While participants relied on social and personal support most frequently, they commonly reported relying on multiple supports across all three levels. We use an ecological model as our framework to demonstrate how different types of support are interconnected, and recommend that support for targets of online abuse must integrate aspects of all three levels.

#MeToo, #MeThree, #MeFour: Twitter as community building across academic and corporate institutions

“…Hodson et al (2018) apply a social‐ecological model to online abuse and harassment and subsequent coping mechanisms among women scholars, using three levels: micro support, meso support, and macro support. Their analysis reveals that participants utilize microlevel support, including personal or social support.…”

The hidden costs of connectivity: nature and effects of scholars’ online harassment

“…Research examining the online harassment of scholars is nascent but gaining momentum (Blizard 2016;Hodson et al 2018;Veletsianos et al 2018). Prior research in this journal noted the possibility of risks for academics who merge personal and professional identities in online spaces (Jordan 2020).…”

“Not the Real World”: Exploring Experiences of Online Abuse, Digital Dualism, and Ontological Labor

“…The term for this is "digital existence" (Lagerkvist, 2019), which captures an important new epoch in mediated experience, but which also grows increasingly redundant as distinctions between the online and offline, the virtual and physical, collapse. In the last decade, much attention has been paid to the problems that Technology-Facilitated violence and abuse (TFVA for short, but henceforth referred to as "online abuse") raises for women's digital existence (Amnesty International, 2018; Barlow & Awan, 2016;Gosse & Burkell, 2020;Citron, 2014;Duggan, 2017;Hodson, Gosse, Veletsianos, & Houlden, 2018;Mantilla, 2015;Powell & Henry, 2017;West Coast LEAF, 2014). Despite the breadth of extant literature, online abuse remains a complex issue in need of further research.…”