Main factors of gender-based violence specific to adolescent girls in the digital environment

Abstract

The digital environment has become a space for socialisation where phenomena related to discrimination, inequality, and gender-based violence against girls and adolescents can be observed. For this reason, this work attempts to describe, on the one hand, the situation of adolescent girls and young women as users of ICTs, and on the other, it seeks to identify those factors where to foresee what situations to confront to reduce the phenomena of gender-based violence on social networks and its incidence. To this end, a qualitative and a quantitative study was carried out, which is the focus of this work, with a factor analysis of the data obtained from a survey of 1304 pre-adolescents and adolescents between 10 and 18 years of age living in Spain. The main results include: (a) the normalisation of gender stereotypes in the digital environment; (b) discrimination on social networks of teenage girls who do not comply with the socially assigned role, thus perpetuating gender violence; (c) the importance of the leadership of girls, teenage girls and young women in the digital environment for the eradication of gender violence; and (d) the safety and protection of teenage girls and young women in the digital environment is co-guaranteed through collaboration with collective actions. Finally, the contributions of this research are intended to serve as a guide to determine specific actions on the Internet at the legislative and business levels.