Abstract
As embedded systems, Internet and communications technologies not only have material footprints, they exist within and maintain historically specific societal structures and power dynamics. Despite growing awareness of the ubiquity of online harassment and bullying, there remains a disconnect between the embodied experiences of technology facilitated violence and legal and social recognition of harm. Looking at a notorious case out of Nova Scotia and the anti-cyberbullying legislation it inspired, I consider the ways such violence is made visible and invisible, looking specifically at the persistent cognitive disconnect between the virtual and the corporeal, and the language that enacts or justifies such distinctions. Formed within and against persistent ontological perceptions about technology and the nature of the virtual, I elaborate on slow violence in two different registers: the differentially experienced and embodied slow violence of persistent online threats and abuse, and the slow violence of responses to those communications.
Introduction
Three young women in the province of Nova Scotia took their own lives during the winter and early spring of 2011. Their youth and the manner of their death moved issues of bullying and cyberbullying, often confined to schools, to the forefront of public and governmental attention. The province convened an official Task Force on bullying and cyberbullying, which commenced its work in May of 2011. In all three incidents that sparked the Task Force, digital technologies played a role in amplifying and extending teasing, torment, and cruelty, and the Task Force’s report looked carefully at life for youth in a world deeply impacted by these technologies. ‘Cyberbullying,’ used in the report to describe certain behaviors conducted via digital technologies, is one term that attempts to describe the range of disturbing and harmful practices that take place online or using cellphones.
By February of 2012, the Task Force had produced an official report that forwarded 85 recommendations. These recommendations, or more specifically, the fact that very few of them had been implemented, would surface two years later in 2013 when another young woman from Nova Scotia took her own life. Unlike the stories of the young women who led to the formation of the Task Force, this case gained notoriety and publicity far beyond Nova Scotia, prompting significant provincial and national responses. In spite of the many factors that led to her death, including sexual assault, widespread distribution of a photograph of that assault, and major issues if not failures with the responses of police, prosecution, school and mental health systems, her name has come to be associated with the dangers of cyberbullying.
The four young women I have mentioned were unique individuals, with their own lives and circumstances, yet the term ‘cyberbullying’ was used to describe aspects or the entirety of what happened to each of them. It attempts to describe the incremental, long-term consequences of being the constant target of insults, abuse, harassment and casual cruelties enacted via digital technologies. The reach and constant presence of these technologies has added new dimensions to interpersonal conflict and cruelty, not to mention challenged traditional assumptions about geographic proximity and territorial jurisdiction. The daily harm each of these young women experienced did not register as harm sufficiently visible or important to merit an immediate response: only after each of their deaths, and in a way, after all of their deaths, did any official entity take meaningful action. The spectacular violence of Nova Scotia’s youthful suicides was newsworthy in a way that the harms that led to those suicides were not.
Harms and violence enacted via technology receive uneven social and legal recognition. The conceptual limits of what is considered violence combine with assumptions around the digital to produce a dangerous combination of attitudes: that such violence isn’t serious and that it can’t be regulated. According to Rob Nixon, ‘violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility’ (2011: 2). Representations and conceptions of violence often cluster around spectacular violence that is bounded, embodied and discrete. Violence that is slow or temporally complicated, enacted on landscapes rather than humans, enacted on the wrong kinds of humans, tends to go unreported or unacknowledged as violence.
As a concept, Nixon’s slow violence is immensely helpful in thinking through violence that is digital or facilitated via digital technologies. Not only does this type of violence go unseen, it is made more complex by the conflicting definitions and valuations of ‘the digital.’ Today the meaning of the digital extends far beyond its roots in the Latin digitus (finger) and digit (whole numbers less than ten), and most often refers to the practice or approach of making things separate and discrete, such as the binary systems that form the basis of most contemporary computation (McPherson, 2014). Yet as Ash et al. (2018) maintain, given its uses, forms, logics, and aesthetics, it is more generative to hold a broad notion of ‘the digital.’ In addition to certain kinds of technologies and logics, the digital is also related to changing social, cultural and economic practices, physical infrastructure and environment, and systems of belonging and exclusion. I use the digital to refer primarily to digital communications technologies that operate using binary logics, and also to the social behaviors and assumptions that are inflected with and influenced by those technologies.
In this paper, I look more closely at the last of the four tragic cases out of Nova Scotia, that of 17-year old Rehtaeh Parsons, using Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence to examine questions of harm and visibility related to digital technologies. In doing so, I am sensitive to his call to depict the ‘long emergencies of slow violence’ in order ‘to rouse public sentiment and warrant political intervention’ (Nixon, 2011: 3). A concept such as ‘slow violence’ shows how language and the act of naming can grant a degree of visibility to circumstances that are important to register but difficult to represent. Media coverage and legislative responses around the death of Rehtaeh Parsons latched onto the term cyberbullying to describe repeated verbal and textual attacks via technology and the non-consensual sharing of an intimate and non-consensually taken photograph. In her case, as in others, the term ‘cyberbullying’ works to make visible the slow violence of constant denigration via digital technologies. It provides language to describe experiences that can be harmful and disturbing as isolated incidents, and that cumulatively, wreak havoc on the wellbeing of those targeted, as well as their family and friends. Creating language around experiences that have been invisible and difficult to address is a critical step in generating forms of accountability, as well as support and resources for those targeted. At the same time, ‘cyberbullying’ is a tense act of naming, one based on problematic assumptions, enacting exclusions of its own. 1
The article unfolds in three sections, each section introduced or interwoven with part of Rehtaeh’s story. Although I focus on the violence she experienced in the last years of her life, these circumstances did not define her: she was a young woman who loved animals, her family and friends, created art and was an avid reader. Throughout the fifteen months before her death, although she faced institutional inertia and social animus, Rehtaeh coped, struggled and made gains. She was not a passive victim. She relied on friends, family, professionals, and her own strength and flexibility.
The dismissal of what happened to Rehtaeh as unfounded, not serious, or typical adolescent behavior magnified the harm she experienced and impeded her efforts to seek assistance and support. For these reasons, I think reproducing the violence, showing it to be violence, is important, though I do so with careful attention to how representation can reproduce the spectacle of violence (Hesford and Kozol, 2001: 14). First, I focus on the growing awareness of the instant and cumulative impacts of insults, harassment, stalking and abuse via digital technologies. Like Nixon’s description of incremental ecological harms, cyberbullying and online harassment take a toll on those targeted, a toll that is often dismissed or ignored. ‘Slow violence’ provides a framework for registering those harms on a personal and societal level.
The experience of abuse via digital technologies is a form of slow violence, but the idea of what is violent must also extend to the failure to recognize those experiences as violence. In Section ‘Responses – Violence of another kind’, I examine more closely the responses to abusive behaviors online. I argue these responses, or a general failure to respond are based in a set of assumptions about digital technologies as intangible and disembodied – part of a separate world that is less important than a corporeally imagined ‘real life.’ Spatial differentiation between two supposedly separate worlds hinders the association of existing laws with behaviors enacted via digital technologies.
In the final section entitled ‘Responses - Violence of another kind’, I return to Nova Scotia in order to analyze the use of the term ‘cyberbullying’ in relation to Rehtaeh’s specific experience and official responses before and after her death. Nixon uses the term ‘slow violence’ to crystalize and represent accretive and spatially complex harms. The term ‘cyberbullying’ works to make complex harms more visible, tangible and easier to depict – it names a slow violence. As it was used around Rehtaeh Parsons, ‘cyberbullying’ helped mobilize a great deal of legislative action, including new bills at provincial and federal levels, among them, the Cyber-Safety Act (CSA), Canada’s first standalone anti-cyberbullying legislation, which for a time, offered new legal options for those facing technology-facilitated harassment. These advantages evaporated in December 2015 when the CSA was deemed unconstitutional by the Nova Scotia Supreme Court for violating protections around freedom of expression. 2
While sincere legislative efforts to offer support to those targeted for abuse online and to create new consequences for those offering that abuse are laudable, digital technologies were only one dimension of Rehtaeh’s experience. I look at the tensions around and within the focus on cyberbullying to analyze its accomplishments and limitations in context. In channeling conversations about cyberbullying and online harassment through situated histories, I respond to Graham’s call for geographers to employ spatially grounded ways of envisioning how the Internet mediates human experience (Graham, 2013).
Experiencing a slow violence
On 12 November 2011, a few young people gathered to socialize at a house near Halifax, Nova Scotia. Alcohol was involved, and Rehtaeh Parsons had more to drink than the others. In a police interview five days after the party, she disclosed she had been sexually assaulted. During the interview, Rehtaeh also informed the police of the existence of an intimate photograph that had been taken of her without her knowledge or consent. The photograph was widely distributed thanks to the reach and rapid sharing powers of Internet and cell phone technology. It provided a zombie-like, re-appearing visual catalyst for abuse in person and online by acquaintances and total strangers. Rehtaeh’s mother described some of what she experienced after her assault and after the photograph was shared: ‘people texted her all the time, saying “Will you have sex with me?”…Girls texting, saying “You’re such a slut”’ (Ross, 2013). ‘She was never left alone. Her friends turned against her, people harassed her…It just never stopped’ (CBC News, 2013).
Abuse via technologies
In spite of the complex questions they raise in relation to space, jurisdiction and embodiment, cyberbullying and technology-facilitated violence remain understudied in Geography. Academic research on cyberbullying tends to cluster in the disciplines of Education and Psychology, and makes use of the insights and themes provided by scholarship on bullying (Tokunaga, 2010). Some researchers more explicitly connect cyberbullying to ‘traditional’ bullying, and cite its common characteristics of ongoing or repeated intentional infliction of harm within the context of a power imbalance (Beran and Li, 2008; Finkelhor, 2014; Li and Craig, 2015). Observing the ways cruelty has changed since the introduction of certain kinds of digital technologies and platforms, others maintain cyberbullying is distinct or cannot be usefully analyzed from within the established framework of bullying (Deschamps and McNutt, 2016; Dooley et al., 2009; Patchin and Hinduja, 2011; Slonje et al., 2013).
While actual instances of cyberbullying may be less frequent than suggested by substantial media coverage of the topic, reported rates of cyberbullying have grown steadily over the past two decades (Finkelhor, 2014). In fact, cyberbullying appears ubiquitous to the extent that many young people claim to be immune to its impacts, calling the behaviors ‘drama’ rather than bullying or harassment (Steeves, 2014). Rates also vary widely by age, location, study and methodology, ranging from 17% to 42% of those surveyed in US and Canadian studies (Hango, 2016; Li and Craig, 2015; Patchin and Hinduja, 2016; Steeves, 2014). In general, youth and young adults are more likely to have been targeted for harassing behaviors online (Duggan, 2014; Henry and Powell, 2018). Efforts to empirically record the incidence of this abuse are important as cyberbullying is often not disclosed to parents or teachers (Li, 2007), and the level of harm can be nearly invisible from the outside (Deschamps and McNutt, 2016).
While used more frequently around children, as a term cyberbullying has also been mobilized by and for adults. An incredible number of terms have sprung up to describe the array of harm, violence and incivility experienced via Internet and communications technology. Flaming (heated overt public attacks/exchanges), doxxing (revealing personally identifying information), harassment, stalking, denigration, impersonation, outing and trickery, exclusion, video recording and posting of assaults, and non-consensual dissemination of intimate images are among the many behaviors that are classified as cyberbullying or online harassment. This list reveals the textural differences that digital technologies have had on the mode and character of cruelties inflicted. The anonymity offered by some of these platforms, the ease of recruiting a large number of participants, the potentially limitless audience, the longevity of posted content and the searchability and indexing powers of online technologies have dramatically altered the impacts of interpersonal abuse, as well as enlarged the pool of potential abusers. There is a growing consensus among academic researchers and youth workers that cyberbullying can cause more long-term harm for young people than face-to-face abuse (Cartwright, 2017; Langos, 2015; Tokunaga, 2010).
When Rehtaeh made her initial report to the police in Halifax, the officer (against protocol), made editorial notes suggesting that ‘Rehtaeh and her mother were more concerned about the photo “than the possible act [of sexual assault] itself”’(Segal, 2015: 29). While this observation traffics in the all-too-common assumption that women who speak about sexual assault are lying (Randall, 2011), it also manages to convey the anxiety mother and daughter felt around the photograph. Rehtaeh’s medical records testify to the embodied impacts of that distribution: [W]hen [Rehtaeh] discovered that a picture of her was sent out to all her friends, she became very anxious, angry and upset to the point that, on November 18, she spoke about not wishing to continue to live… She is still having panic attacks where she becomes distraught, finds it hard to catch her breath and has chest pains. She described having these episodes happen to her at least 10 times a day lasting for a few minutes and then subsiding. She describes herself as being sad and has crying spells every day. At other times she is very angry and wants to punch someone or something. (Segal, 2015: 12)
Endured by whom? Uneven impacts
Academic studies as well as personal accounts also highlight disparities in how such harassment is directed and the impacts it has on those targeted. Concerning young people, there is general scholarly agreement that there is a connection between who is bullied and who bullies face-to-face and via the Internet or phone (Baldry et al., 2015). Involvement in cyberbullying in any capacity is heightened for vulnerable young people who have previous experience of violence or live in precarious circumstances (Hango, 2016; Ybarra and Mitchell, 2007). To that effect, numerous studies on cyberbullying highlight how youth who are racialized, transgender, queer or indigenous are targeted at greater rates than their cis, straight, white peers (Bailey, 2014a; Schneider et al., 2012; Shariff and Gouin, 2006).
Much, though perhaps not enough, has been made of the widespread gendered and sexualized violence that occurs via digital communication technologies, the vileness and hostility of which causes women to change their jobs or habits and to withdraw from public exchanges or political office (Buni and Chemaly, 2014; Chemaly et al., 2017; Gardiner et al., 2016; Hess, 2014; Shariff and Gouin, 2006). 3 Young women in particular (18–24), ‘experience certain severe types of harassment at disproportionately high levels,’ including sexual harassment and unsolicited explicit messages, and are more likely to be targeted because of their gender with derogatory terms that objectify their bodies and sexuality (Chaffin, 2007; Duggan, 2014: 3–4; Duggan, 2017).
One of the most common and impactful forms of violence, photographs or videos of a crime or consensual sexual encounter, or even just nude photographs – what McGlynn and Rackley call ‘image-based sexual abuse’ (2017) – is critically influenced by gender. Not only do women in Canada experience sexual violence as a persistent and devastating problem
Responses – Violence of another kind
After her disclosure to the police in November 2011, Rehtaeh gave two statements to the police, told them about the existence of the photograph and its rapid and devastating dissemination, surrendered her phone, and gave them the names of the young men at the party. As the subsequent investigation unfolded over the course of a year, Rehtaeh moved schools and communities multiple times, experienced severe psychological consequences and social isolation, and engaged in self-harm. The photograph and related communications followed her from place to place, sparking renewed abuse that went unaddressed by school officials and law enforcement. The law enforcement investigation also ‘failed to address the cyberbullying component of the case’ (Segal, 2015: v), and at the end of that year, no other phones had been examined, only one of the young men was interviewed as part of the investigation (in August of 2012). No charges were filed (Segal, 2015). In April of 2013, Rehtaeh attempted suicide and was taken off life support by her family three days later. She was 17 years old.
Spatial distinctions: Separate spheres
In August of 2013, more than two and half years after Rehtaeh made her initial report, criminal charges were filed: two young men were charged with making and distributing child pornography. In this situation, sexual assault forms the subject matter of the child pornography, and is very much an existing Criminal Code offense. Nor was it the only other Criminal Code offense that could have applied. Sexual assault (section 271), sexual exploitation of a child (section 153), criminal harassment (section 264), uttering threats and intimidation (section 423), counseling suicide (section 241), indecent or harassing communications (section 372) and voyeurism (section 162) were all conceivable possibilities (Fraser, 2017; Makin and White, 2013). Yet before public pressure led to child pornography charges, the photograph had been described by the police as ‘a community issue’ (Borden Colley, 2013).
According to Wayne MacKay, lawyer and former chair of Nova Scotia’s Task Force on Bullying and Cyberbullying, ‘in spite of the wide range of provisions in the Criminal Code of Canada that might be applied in the cyberbullying context there has been some reluctance to apply these provisions in the cyber context’ (MacKay, 2015: 19). He re-iterated this sentiment when I interviewed him in the spring of 2017: They [the police] have not necessarily been very creative at applying existing laws to the cyberworld. There’s a crime of criminal intimidation or criminal harassment. Why couldn’t that also be online? Of course it can. …The law was there in part, they just weren’t applying it to the new context of the cyber/internet world. So I think it’s a combination of not taking those kinds of offenses seriously, but also not being creative enough to apply existing laws to a new context. (MacKay, 2017) The police generally have no clue… they have virtually no imagination in thinking about how the law applies to online activities. They, I don’t know if it’s in police academy or otherwise, they have this image in their head of what harassment looks like and it’s somebody following someone from place to place and menacing them with their physical presence. (2017)
The use of the word cyber, as well as the divisiveness it suggests, is interesting given the origins of the word in the field of cybernetics. Cybernetics is above all else, a conceptual framework that looks at communication, control and information in self-regulating systems (humans, animals, and machines). As Katherine Hayles explains, cybernetics constituted all of these ‘as information-processing devices receiving and transmitting Signals to effect goal-directed behavior’ (1999: 37). In applying the same framework to different entities, cybernetics disrupted the boundaries within and between those entities, for instance, causing the limits of the human body and/or its separation from machines to come into question.
Given its roots in a tradition that broke down barriers between humans and machines, it is surprising that contemporary use of cyber frequently casts it as a modifier, something that indicates a difference or separation between online and offline. However, cybernetics was and is a socially embedded, shifting discipline. ‘One extreme of a certain construction of cybernetics is the consideration of the body as a fashion accessory, not the basis of being, where embedded materiality is not necessary for human life’ (Hayles, 1999: 5). This disembodied vision, by no means the only one promoted within the discipline, was taken up by early techno-optimists who stressed the utopic possibilities of the Internet to free users from their bodies and all the baggage and limitations seen to accompany them.
Although some of these utopic views feel outdated today, a great deal of the language and imagery related to the Internet still emphasizes ethereality and transcendence. There is also an ‘entrenched view that virtuality, that is, what goes on in cyberspace, is inferior; a lesser order of knowledge than that produced offline, in meatspace; a vernacular term for embodied, face-to-face encounters in non-computer mediated contexts’ (Franklin, 2012: 315). A hierarchical and separated vision of virtual/real is difficult to square with embodied experiences of technology-facilitated harm.
Though Rehtaeh told the police the identities of the young man in the photograph and that of the photographer, law enforcement did nothing to stem its dissemination. The observation of the interviewing officer that ‘Rehtaeh and her mother were more concerned about the photo ‘than the possible act [of sexual assault] itself’’(Segal, 2015: 29) served to trouble the veracity of Rehtaeh’s allegations of sexual assault rather than suggest an area that should merit official concern. The failure to examine the phones of the other party-goers, to interview three of the four young men, and the complete lack of response around the photograph suggests the prevalence not only of problematic myths around sexual assault, but also the view that the virtual or cyber is a separate world, one that is somehow less real. In their lack of responsiveness, these responses were themselves violent.
This lack of meaningful action around harassment via digital technologies is not unusual (Citron, 2014). A lawyer I spoke with who worked closely with Halifax law enforcement around cyberbullying also expressed her experiences bringing ‘cyber’ crimes to the police. The police didn’t take it seriously… I had them say statements to me that if it didn’t happen in real life then it wasn’t real. So a threat wasn’t a threat unless a man’s coming in with a gun at your head… they really didn’t take any kind of online cyberbullying seriously. (BB, 2017) It was so bad the stuff that we would see… A lot of kids going into pseudonyms online and then bullying. And there was a lot of provoke suicide online. That was really disgusting. It was just sick. It was sick. It was like the twilight zone… It really bothered me. There were some nights that it would bother me so much that I couldn’t sleep. (BB, 2017)
Digital dis/embodiment
Any recognition of the harms experienced by Rehtaeh Parsons involved thinking around or against a number of common assumptions about the digital as spatially distinct, and not (or less) ‘real.’ The premise that there is a ‘radical disjuncture between experiences in the physical world and those found in cyberspace’ (2004: 5), what Campbell calls the ‘online disembodiment thesis,’ relies in part on the perceived immateriality of the ‘digital’ – that what happens there is not real because there are no corporeal bodies involved.
The Canadian Criminal Code includes a range of harms – financial, reputational, damage to property – and privileges the protection of the body from physical harm and more immediately tangible violation (Fraser, 2017; MacKay, 2017). While Canadian Courts recognize psychological harm, for instance, noting that the intimidation caused by harassment is a real form of harm,
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‘the public’s priority has often been traditional crime,’ (Segal, 2015: 36–37) meaning ‘offline’ crimes, but also acts that produce marks on the body (Fraser, 2017; MacKay, 2017). Task Force Chair Wayne MacKay, echoed this, positioning the treatment of cyberbullying as an extension of the general lack of responsiveness of the law and police to non-physical, or less obviously physical harm. In his words: At the police level, I think for a long time the view was that ‘this is unfortunate that this happened, but it’s pretty minor, don’t bother us too much, we’ve got big things to do. We’ve got to go deal with thefts, and assaults and murders and so on, don’t bother us with this stuff. Act more sensibly and it wouldn’t happen to you’. (MacKay, 2017)
Many of the harms caused by digital technologies or clustered under the term cyberbullying can be invisible from the outside because of the ways they manifest or fail to manifest in the physical body (Deschamps and McNutt, 2016). Yet not only can bodily harm result from online interactions or digital communication, ‘psychological harm is also physical and social harm, embodied and “real”’ (Henry and Powell, 2015: 770). The idea that psychological harm, social exclusion, shaming, emotional distress, and depression are not located in the corporeal body, in terms of both bio-chemical changes and neuron activity and other more superficially visible impacts like stress rashes, panic attacks, self-harm, and insomnia, traffics in Western conventions that see the mind and body as separate entities. These assumptions flourish in scenarios where the corporeal is considered less obvious, such as in digital communications and online, giving rise to what Boler calls ‘new digital Cartesianism’ (2007). Unlike assumptions made by many early proponents of the Internet, often, digital interactions do not free users from the confines of their body, geography, gender, or social position. As Jessie Daniels observes in regards to race, ‘the Internet is embedded in material, corporeal lives in complex ways’ and the impacts of those technologies are ‘grounded in materiality and embodiment’ (2009: 117, 111).
Suggestions about unplugging or logging off, inevitably made by members of the public when experiences of aggression or violence are shared, but also common recommendations of law enforcement officials (Citron, 2014), construct a problematic (and inaccurate) relationship between virtual and corporeal ‘worlds.’ They imply that by severing an online connection, the Internet and the harassment experienced via the Internet will disappear. These suggestions diminish or ignore how technology facilitated violence affects actual or perceived mobility, from safety at home and navigating daily commutes, to professional, financial, and psychological wellbeing. Conceiving of the online and offline as separate spaces, two worlds that are spatially distinct, requires a denial of these embodied experiences of harm. This is a lack of recognition, not to mention denial of resources, that is itself violent.
Cyberbullying emplaced
Rehtaeh’s death prompted a vast social response in the province and beyond. Within Canada, her case has come to symbolize the dangers of cyberbullying, rather than for instance, rape culture, institutional failures, or the need for education around consent. Then Prime Minister Stephen Harper personally reacted to her death in the news media, and met with her parents and the Premier of Nova Scotia. She was a political touchstone for legislative reform at a provincial and federal level, and at least three formal provincial investigations were carried out between 2013 and 2015 to respond to widespread allegations of failures and inadequacies in the police and prosecutorial response, and the mental health and school systems.
As it was used around Rehtaeh Parsons, ‘cyberbullying’ is an important, yet tense act of naming, full of possibilities and foreclosures. It helped register harm even as it covered up other harms or failures. A number of scholars and political figures bemoan the way the media focuses on the most tragic cases – the deaths of young, sympathetic victims – arguing they represent only the smallest percentage of those experiencing cyberbullying behaviors (Bailey, 2014b; Sabella et al., 2013). More often, impacts are protracted, lingering over months, years, or for the lifespan of those targeted. Yet even as these instances of spectacular violence are empirically rare, the coverage around them has helped crystalize and publicize language around this type of violence, showing it to be in fact violent, and giving those impacted a social reference point and terminology to describe their experiences. In this way, the social visibility of spectacular cyberbullying in Nova Scotia acted as an opening to talk about the more common, slower, less spectacular harms.
This kind of naming creates what Gabriella Coleman calls epistemic objects, ‘stabilizing a set of experiences by making them available for reflection’ for self and others (Coleman, 2014: 31). It allows them to count, to be known. As Sara Ahmed writes: naming allows ‘something to acquire a social and physical density by gathering up what otherwise remain scattered experiences into a tangible thing’ (2016). The tangibility is critical. To borrow further from Ahmed, ‘to give a problem a name can change not only how we register an event but whether we register an event’ (Ahmed, 2016).
A concept such as ‘slow violence’ shows how the act of naming can grant a degree of visibility to circumstances that are important to register but difficult to represent. Nixon’s term, formulated around disastrous long-term environmental decline, has proven illuminating beyond his original usage. Violence and cruelty enacted or experienced via digital technologies are stunningly common, yet without the language to unite individual emails, comments, messages and images, this violence and its cumulative impacts are difficult to evoke. In Nova Scotia, the deaths of a number of young women prompted public engagement with the term ‘cyberbullying,’ which was used to describe bullying and shaming behaviors they experienced over their phones and the Internet. It also came to serve as the main descriptor for what Rehtaeh Parsons experienced, and was the focus of the legislation to emerge after her death.
Expanding institutional jurisdiction
A few weeks after Rehtaeh was taken off life support in April 2013, the Province of Nova Scotia unanimously passed a unique piece of legislation, the CSA, Canada’s first standalone anti-cyberbullying legislation. 6 The passage of this bill did a number of things that were directly influenced by Rehtaeh’s experience. It created a number of pathways for legal redress for those experiencing cyberbullying, including CyberSCAN, a new civil investigative unit with the power to request protection orders, subpoena information, broker deals between complainants, and confiscate electronic devices. The CyberSCAN unit and the protection and prevention orders were intended to provide tools to immediately confront and mitigate cyberbullying behavior, to prevent its spread and intensification. It was the first unit of its kind in Canada, and was based on the recognition of the immediate and devastating harm of certain kinds of communications.
The Act also widened and clarified responsibility around cyberbullying by expanding the jurisdiction of school authorities beyond school grounds, and making it possible to hold parents accountable for their children’s actions online. To the end of providing compensation for those targeted, it created a tort of cyberbullying, allowing those targeted to pursue action in civil court. Through CyberSCAN, the CSA provided a new resource for Nova Scotians experiencing harassment. Combined with the ability to seek compensation in civil court, this represented a remarkable increase in government assistance in areas government and law enforcement had largely avoided – an unusual expansion of state power in a neoliberal context, where protection strategies tend to be privatized and commercial (Katz, 2008).
Masking institutional failure
The CSA was a hastily assembled response to public outrage around Rehtaeh’s death, but it was a recognition that cyberbullying was a social problem that deserved the attention and legislative response of the state. At the same time, it served to mask other elements of her case. Even as they commissioned official reports looking into different departments, in declaring cyberbullying to be the problem, the Nova Scotia government downplayed the actions of police, public prosecutors, the school administration, mental health services, and systemic failures around consent education and investigation of sexual assault.
Part of the Province’s response to Rehtaeh’s death did involve initiatives and funding related to sexual assault, eventually resulting in the Province’s first comprehensive sexual violence strategy in 2015 (Government of Nova Scotia, n.d.). May 2013 and all future Mays were declared Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and the Province allocated $900,000 to ‘help communities to address sexual violence’ (Nova Scotia Premier’s Office, 2013). Legislative comments and reports from 2013 showcase Nova Scotia’s abysmal record in responding to high and increasing rates of sexual assault, inadequate or non-existent resources for survivors, and declining rates of sexual assault prosecutions (Nova Scotia House of Assembly, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c, 2013d, 2013f; Rubin, 2008), so this was a significant shift. Yet the degree of commitment and funding that was directed towards sexual violence primarily involved increasing awareness and support for survivors. There was no push to mandate systemic changes in training or protocol for police. The responses did not question, at any level, the ability of law enforcement and the justice system to respond to sexual violence, nor their role in sometimes extending it (Doolittle, 2017; Hunt, 2014).
A missed opportunity 7
Even though it was a direct response to the sexualized shaming and harassment of a young woman who had been sexually assaulted, the CSA contained no acknowledgment of the gendered and sexualized dimensions of cyberbullying, nor any provisions identifying differential impacts. Comments and actions in the legislature taken after April of 2013 indicate there was at least some awareness of the connections between sexual violence, gender and technology (Nova Scotia House of Assembly, 2013b). Debates around the CSA and the 2012 Task Force report on Bullying and Cyberbullying (that helped shape the law) expressed awareness around sexualized violence, and mentioned the targeting of women, girls, Aboriginal, racialized, queer, disabled, and other vulnerable people (MacKay, 2012; Nova Scotia House of Assembly, 2013a, 2013b, 2013d, 2013e). Yet the concrete responses that emerged from the legislature treated issues of sexual violence separately from those of cyberbullying.
Unfortunately, this is not uncommon. ‘Too often, analyses of the problem of “cyberbullying” erase its sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, and otherwise discriminatory nature, and ignore the context of power and marginalization in which it occurs’ (Nakamura, 2013; West Coast LEAF, 2014: 7). By refusing to recognize the power dynamics that span both the Internet and ‘real-life,’ the legislature’s treatment of cyberbullying cast it as a purely interpersonal issue between relative equals in a separate digital sphere. Despite the obvious connections between sexual assault, gender, and ‘cyberbullying,’ the Province’s responses around Rehtaeh Parsons failed to recognize their entanglement.
Languaging violence
As a term, ‘cyberbullying’ has the potential to make visible serious harms facilitated by technology, allowing the slow violence of this experience to become more tangible beyond those directly impacted. While the focus on cyberbullying sidelined other important aspects of Rehtaeh’s case, the subsequent legislation, at least for a time, created legal structures that took certain kinds of technology-facilitated violence more seriously. In the two years of its operation, CyberSCAN, the civil investigative unit created by the law, handled 823 cases, the largest percentage of which involved adults as both the complainants and the accused (Safer Communities and Neighbourhoods Project of Nova Scotia, 2016). Here, the spectacular violence of Rehtaeh’s death and discourses of protection of youth expanded the recognition of the slow violence and everyday harms of cyberbullying, and extended that legal recognition to people of all ages.
This was a complicated gain. As a description of what happened to Rehtaeh Parsons, ‘cyberbullying’ pushes back against and yet also participates in ontological assumptions about the nature of the digital and technology, as well as the nature of the mind and body, and by extension, the nature of harm. People I interviewed in Nova Scotia were developing their own language to respond to the ways they saw ‘cyberbullying’ as inadequate in capturing the full meaning and breadth of the experience of technology-facilitated abuse. When I spoke with him in Halifax, Wayne Mackay highlighted the ways language can condition responses: ‘it’s not a serious thing because it’s called bullying, if you said well this is violence, this is an assault, this is a sexual invasion, you get a different reaction’ (MacKay, 2017). BB, a lawyer who worked on cyberbullying cases in the province, stopped in the middle of answering one of my questions to rethink her own use of that term: It shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t be called cyberbullying. Cause it’s not bullying. It goes way beyond bullying… it was cyber… assault. Cyber enticement to harm, cyber stalking, cyber luring, cyber pedophilia, cyber … it’s cyber-harm, that’s what it really should be. (BB, 2017) I call it cyberviolence and I do that for a specific reason, because it’s violence… things like revenge porn, luring and trafficking, the non-consensual sharing of images, hate speech which is very often misogynistic and transphobic and homophobic and racist… I think the word cyberbullying doesn’t fully encapsulate what that means for people who experience it. (DD, 2017) We call it cyberviolence rather than cyberbullying so that we’re not minimizing what’s happening. So we’re looking at violence that is occurring across these different systems, so different forms of oppression, ableism, sexism, based on religion, race and everything else. (CC, 2017)
Concluding thoughts – Transcending a dichotomous ‘cyber’
Cybercrimes, however they are defined, often receive less notice; when noticed, they are perceived as unremarkable (Brenner, 2012). Assumptions that digital communication technologies are intangible, immaterial, disconnected and not ‘real life’ contribute to impressions that interactions connected to these technologies are less real – certainly not comparable to an offline encounter. Such ontological assumptions may explain a lack of creativity or imagination in law enforcement responses when existing laws are not associated with online situations. Assertions that the Internet is a separate world enable lackluster social and institutional treatments of violence enacted via the Internet and makes those responses easier to justify.
The modifier ‘cyber’ is routinely used to describe crimes, investigative units, communication, commuting, products, in short, almost anything with online elements. 8 More often, it does more than add clarification. It is a locator, a divider, and most of all, it carries an assumption with it – that anything listed is somehow different, separate from what it would be without the ‘cyber.’ This spatial differentiation between virtual and corporeal is remarkably persistent, yet these are not separate worlds. As much as it has been used to demarcate a separate sphere, ‘cyber’ also represents an opportunity: in its most effective instances, it is descriptive but not dichotomous.
Though a great deal of the language and imagery related to the Internet emphasizes ethereality and transcendence, as well the neutrality of technology, the growing use (and abuse) of digital technologies stymies straightforward classification. As Willson observes, at anything but a superficial level, it is incredibly awkward to try to demarcate online and offline as ‘different’ spaces (2017: 139). A ‘cyber’ that can resist compartmentalization may be a cyber worth keeping. At the same time, any recognition of the harms of technology-facilitated violence relies heavily on public awareness of the entanglement of digital technologies in many aspects of human life, and that those technologies and the people impacted by them are ‘embedded’ (Sassen, 2002). Not only are technologies deeply material, they spring from and operate in social power structures and dynamics, and themselves contain ‘assumptions about sociality, behavior, and human action’ (Jain, 2006). Access to and familiarity with the Internet, its design and regulation, as well as treatment on the Internet are deeply impacted by what Lisa Nakamura calls ‘racial, gendered and cultured histories and the identities conditioned by them’ (2013: 146; Wajcman, 2010).
Recognition of harm, furthered through the denial of a virtual/corporeal divide, requires centering a sociological perspective of digital technologies, formed within a broader framework of structural inequalities. Resilience and resources around technology-facilitated violence – not to mention impacts – vary greatly depending on how a person is positioned. This may indicate, as Henry and Powell maintain, the wisdom of a mixed approach that does not overly rely on criminal justice systems that tend to dissociate individuals from their context, also focusing on civil solutions, education, regulation, bystander behavior, platforms practices, police training and other entities and practices (Henry and Powell, 2016; Powell and Henry, 2017). Educational and regulatory campaigns are part of creating a larger universe of understanding, where ‘cyber’ can only be descriptive, never dichotomous.
What happened to Rehtaeh Parsons was an incredibly complex combination of violent acts, institutional dismissals, jurisdictional dilemmas, narrow state responses, interpretations, and narrative framings that fit into broader social patterns around sexual violence against women and girls, systemic and cultural barriers around the prosecution of sexual assault, and beliefs about technology. Digital communication technologies as immaterial, intangible, spatially distinct and disembodied, and above all else, ‘not real life,’ does not resonate with what happened to Rehtaeh Parsons, nor align with many other embodied experiences of technology. In addition to the initial violence she experienced, reactions to her case that were based on such assumptions compounded the slow violence of the everyday abuse she faced. As this case demonstrates, developing a shared awareness around digital technologies and embodied harms requires actively confronting a hierarchical vision of the virtual and corporeal as separate and unequal spheres. It also demands that social and legal responses consider the impacts of harms caused via digital technologies as they land differently for different people. Abusive interactions often take specifically racist, misogynistic, trans and homophobic, anti-Muslim and anti-Indigenous forms and target specific people or groups who already face considerable social marginalization. These social differences, discriminations and inequalities do not disappear over a wifi connection. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Rehtaeh’s situation indicates the complicated entanglements – material, theoretical, ethical – that tie together these supposedly separate worlds and trouble strict categorization of the digital and corporeal, online and offline.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This, like countless projects, is credited to an individual but was never a solitary exercise. Many thanks to the honest and caring people in Nova Scotia who shared their time and insights so generously with me. Much gratitude also to Elvin Wyly, Gerry Pratt and Juanita Sundberg, and the anonymous reviewers who helped improve this article. Finally, I wish to acknowledge Rehtaeh Parsons, a young woman with interests, plans and a compassionate heart. I honor her strength and that of her family and friends.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.