On the Dynamics of Local to Global Campaigns for Curbing Gender-based Violence

TL;DR

This paper investigates the dynamics of social media campaigns against gender-based violence across local, national, and global levels, analyzing engagement, demographic effects, and organizational coordination.

Contribution

It is the first systematic study examining online GBV campaigns across different organizational levels and their interaction, demographic influences, and coordination patterns.

Findings

Members engage across campaign communities

Gender and regional crime statistics influence engagement

Some coordination exists among organizations with similar causes

Abstract

Gender-based violence (GBV) is a human-generated crisis, existing in various forms, including offline, via physical and sexual violence, and now online via harassment and trolling. While studying social media campaigns for different domains such as public health, natural crises, etc. has received attention in the literature, such studies for GBV are still in nascent form. The dynamics of campaigns responding to curb this crisis could benefit from systematic investigation. To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine such public campaigns involving social media by organizations operating at the local, national and global levels, with an eye to answering the following research questions: (1) How do members of one campaign community engage with other campaign communities? (2) How do demographic variables such as gender effect campaign engagement in light of given regional crime statistics? (3) Is there any coordination among organizational users for campaigns with similar underlying social causes?