Social media, pervasively used by adolescents in their loving rituals and relationships, are digital environments where teen dating violence occurs (i.e., “digital abuse”) as a continuum with offline violent behaviors (Draucker & Martsolf, 2010; King-Ries, 2011; Stonard et al., 2014). In fact, even digital abuse is gendered: girls are more likely to perpetrate and tolerate online controlling behaviors (Barter et al., 2009; Girlguiding, 2013); they are at greater risk for abusive sexual behaviors whereas boys are more likely to be the perpetrators (Temple et al., 2012; Zweig et al., 2013; Dick, et al., 2014; Stonard et al., 2015; Reed et al., 2016). Online violent behaviors and the related attitudes are often influenced by sexist (self-)stereotypes as with the offline ones: girls are depicted as the ones in charge and in need of the couple’s care, so that their attitude both to monitor the partner and tolerate his/her control are usually considered as an expression of that charge and need; on the other hand, the inclination of boys to sexually oriented behaviors is understood and normalized within a stereotyped idea of male as a sexual predator (Lucero et al., 2014).
The paper addresses the Italian teenagers’ perception of digital abuse by adopting a gender perspective. We carried out 7 focus groups in Rome with 40 high school students aged 14-16. We explored participants’ opinions about the role of social media in dating relationships and the strategic use of social media affordances in managing dating rituals; furthermore, we investigated how they perceive and assess online violent behaviors as well as how they ascribe such behaviors by gender and sexist (self-)stereotypes.
The thematic analysis of participants’ responses (Braun & Clarcke, 2006; Guest, MacQueen & Namey, 2011) revealed that emotions and social media seem to combine and influence each other, thus giving rise to specific abusive behaviors, mainly controlling ones. Nonetheless, in participants’ narration, only some of these behaviors are differentiated by gender (e.g., real-time photos or geolocation are mainly demanded by boys, while girls are more likely to control the partner’s last access), while snooping around in partners’ social media activities (e.g., checking likes and comments, or exchanging log-in credentials) is a common practice among both girls and boys. Despite participants recognize these behaviors as persecutory and harassing, they also normalize their occurrence and, hence, underestimate their seriousness. Especially girls seem to downplay the partners’ controlling behaviors: some of them conceive these latter as gestures of love or demonstrations of trust, while others distinguish a threshold of tolerance at most; however, there is no lack of girls who acknowledge the same as real forms of violence caging the victim. When typifying and evaluating digital abuses, participants do assign genders and refer to sexist (self-)stereotypes: girls are mainly labeled as strategists in online control and coupled with the idea that care and attention is a feminine trait, whereas boys tend to be depicted as “starved” for sexually suggestive behaviors and associated with the idea that sexuality is a masculine prerogative.