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Upcoming event: Weaving Stories of Peer Sexual Abuse 

    Insights from a youth co-created animation project

    Weaving Stories is a pilot animation project developed by County-Durham arts education company, Changing Relations, and funded via the VISION research consortium through the Small Projects Fund.

    The animation was co-produced with Secondary-aged students, survivors of peer sexual abuse, and an artistic team, to amplify young people’s voices on the theme of unwanted sexual behaviour and the culture that enables it. The students and young survivors shaped every aspect of the animation.

    An interdisciplinary Steering Group of academic researchers, creative practitioners, and child protection and sexual violence specialists from a North East school and Rape Crisis centre, were also involved in the project.

    With this animation and associated school based learning programme, Changing Relations seeks to influence knowledge, behaviour, and institutional change using the impactful animation as stimulus for reflection. Following this pilot project, VISION and Changing Relations have organised a one-hour webinar for UK policymakers and practitioners to:

    • Watch the co-created animation (20 minutes)
    • Hear young people’s perspectives on the key themes and co-production approach
    • Explore the animation’s potential impact on school cultures, disclosure, help-seeking, and victim-blaming attitudes
    • Engage in academic-informed analysis of trauma-informed safeguarding and youth-centred approaches to sexual violence prevention
    • Gain practical insights on using creative participatory approaches to engage young people in conversations about violence and abuse
    • Consider actionable recommendations for policy and practice
    • Contribute your reflections

    This webinar will be of interest to a wide range of professionals who work with adolescents and / or in violence-prevention. Educators, social workers, academics, and third sector, central and local government policy analysts and researchers in particular may be interested.

    There are two dates providing the option to choose between a more practice or policy oriented session:

    • Thursday 8th May 1-2pm for policymakers
    • Wednesday 14th May 3-4pm for practitioners

    Speakers and facilitators

    • Lisa Davis, Managing Director, Changing Relations
    • Kate Gorman, Creative Producer and Artistic Director, Changing Relations
    • Kimberly Cullen, Knowledge Exchange Manager, UKPRP VISION research consortium, City St George’s UoL

    Webinar registration

    To register for free for either the 8th or 14th of May, please visit our page on Ticket Tailor.

    The webinar will be on Microsoft Teams and you will receive the link on the day you choose to attend.

    For further information, please contact VISION_Management_Team@citystgeorges.ac.uk

    United to End Violence Against Women and Girls: An Online Animated Campaign  

      Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is a pressing issue in Iran, a Middle Eastern country marked by its patriarchal structure and systematic and pervasive gender discrimination. Educational programmes addressing this issue are scarce, and cultural barriers often hinder open discussion. The United to End Violence Against Women and Girls campaign aims to break this silence through a series of animated videos in Farsi and English and images designed to inform public discourse and to empower victims to seek support.

       The United to End Violence Against Women and Girls project was led by VISION researchers Ladan Hashemi and Sally McManus, in collaboration with colleagues from other UK universities including the University of Bristol, Goldsmiths University, Animation Research Centre at the University for the Creative Arts, and Leeds Beckett University. 

      They worked with an animation production team in Iran, a social media advisor, and two advisory groups. The advisory groups were Mehre Shams Afarid, an Iran-based non-governmental organisation (NGO), and IKWRO, a London-based charity providing services to women victims of violence from the Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) region—to incorporate culturally specific insights.

      Although the project initially focused on Iran, engaging with the UK-based NGO revealed an interest in extending its reach. As a result, English subtitles were added to make the animations accessible to a wider audience. This collaboration helped the content resonate with audiences both in Iran and within the global diaspora community, particularly those from the MENA region.

      The animations are grounded in evidence from a survey of 453 women in Iran, which explored the manifestation of various forms of VAWG in Iran and women’s perspectives on how to eliminate it. The survey was designed by Fatima Babakhani, CEO of Mehre Shams Afarid.

      Key findings from participants’ open-ended responses to the survey showed that, despite structural inequalities and deeply ingrained societal, cultural, and religious norms that perpetuate VAWG, change is possible through education and legal reforms.

      As one survey participant noted: “Unfortunately, many still don’t understand what violence truly is. Raising awareness is the solution.”

      The first four United to End Violence Against Women and Girls campaign animations focus on coercive control, economic abuse, technology-facilitated abuse, and active bystander interventions, with two more animations in development.

      With guidance from an Iranian social media advisor, a digital strategy was developed to maximise the campaign’s impact. Instagram was chosen as the primary distribution platform, as it is the most widely used social media platform in Iran, with over 47 million users. The animations are also shared on YouTube to further extend the campaign’s reach.

      Influencers and women’s rights activists with followings from thousands to millions were partnered with to amplify the campaign’s reach. The online campaign officially launched 25th November, on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and Girls.

      By leveraging evidence-based content and strategic partnerships, we hope to spark meaningful conversations and drive change across Iran and the diaspora communities from the MENA region.

      Join us in raising awareness and advocating for change. Please follow and share the campaign links on your social media to help spread the message.

      Link to Instagram page

      Link to YouTube channel

      This project was funded by City St George’s, University of London Higher Education Impact Fund (HEIF) Knowledge Exchange and by the UKPRP VISION research consortium.

      For further information, please contact Ladan at ladan.hashemi@city.ac.uk

      Cyberbullying and social media user-verification

        Social media platforms enable people to communicate in both positive and negative ways, including in ways that may be abusive and bullying. Abusive messaging can harm mental health, and has been shown to increase during periods of public crisis, such the Covid pandemic. There is a need to better identify and classify cyberbullying and online abuse, to improve the design of deterrence strategies.

        In a recently published study VISION researcher Dr Lifang Li explored how the ‘verification status’ of social media user accounts was associated with cyberbullying. Verification refers to when a social media user’s identity has been confirmed, for example by the checking of an identity card. Lifang examined data from China’s main social media platform, Weibo, to classify messages that had been posted during the pandemic about people who were diagnosed with the coronavirus. She examined the content of posts made by users who were verified and unverified, used techniques to understand how often anger-related words were used, and measured the extent to which the posts got shared.

        Posts that could be classified as critical of people diagnosed with Covid during the pandemic (for example, describing them as ‘reckless’ or ‘selfish’ for having contracted the infection) were in the minority, most social media users were understanding or neutral in their online communications. Lifang found that posts that were critical of people diagnosed with Covid were more likely to use anger-related words. Although not a focus of the paper, official verification of a social media user’s identity did not appear to be strongly related to how likely they were to post or repost critical views.

        However, male verified social media users were more likely than unverified or female users to have their posts shared. This suggests that their online activity may have a disproportionate impact on other users. Cyberbullying monitoring may need to consider such differences, especially in the context of public health crises.

        This study made novel use of machine learning techniques, which may help other researchers developing algorithms to identify abusive posts online.

        For further information, please read the publication at Frontiers | Social media users’ attitudes toward cyberbullying during the COVID-19 pandemic: associations with gender and verification status (frontiersin.org) or contact VISION researcher and study co-author Angus Roberts at angus.roberts@kcl.ac.uk.

        Photo from licensed Adobe Stock library

        Disclosing domestic violence on Reddit during the pandemic

          Domestic violence (DV) is a huge social issue and during the COVID-19 pandemic, DV and intimate partner violence (IPV) increased. Frequently imposed quarantine increased contact between perpetrators and victims, potentially leading to underlying increases in the occurrence of violence at home.

          Social media sites such as Reddit represent an alternative outlet for disclosing experiences of violence where healthcare access has been limited. This study analysed seven violence-related subreddits to investigate different violence patterns from January 2018 to February 2022, developing a new perspective and methodology for violence research. Specifically, we collected violence-related texts from Reddit using keyword searching and identified six major types of violence with supervised machine learning classifiers: DV, IPV, physical violence, sexual violence, emotional violence, and nonspecific violence or others. Among IPV-related posts, the number with COVID-related keywords was highest in the middle-pandemic phase.

          The findings highlight the importance of the role of social media as a platform for disclosing and describing experiences of violence and support the role of social media site monitoring as a means of informative surveillance for help-providing authorities and violence research groups.

          For further information please see: Characterizing the Differences in Descriptions of Violence on Reddit During the COVID-19 Pandemic – Lifang Li, Lilly Neubauer, Robert Stewart, Angus Roberts, 2023 (sagepub.com)

          Or contact Lifang at lifang.li@kcl.ac.uk or Angus at angus.roberts@kcl.ac.uk

          Photo by Philipp Katzenberger on Unsplash