Analyzing cyberviolence from a gender perspective

Résumé 0

By acknowledging the greater frequency and the numerous specificities of cyberviolence (a term under which we list all kind of violence perpetrated in cyberspace) when it is carried out within the framework of gender relations, this paper proposes not only to apprehend this violence as a particular form of online violence, but also to include it in the continuum of gender-related violences and discriminations. Therefore, the notion of vulnerability, defined here as a tension between gender agency and risk, would be central in the perception of gender-related tensions in cyberspace–understood in this perspective as a media, as a public space and as a communication device. Thus, understanding gender-based cyberviolence as constituting and perpetrating a system of domination in a normed and gendered public sphere could be used to consider this public problem in all its complexity, and to manage it more effectively, and in a way more consistent with the victims' feelings.