Towards typologies of virtual maltreatment: sport, digital cultures & dark leisure
By Emma Kavanagh, I. Jones, Lucy Sheppard-Marks. Re-thinking Leisure in a Digital Age, 2016
92 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract A changing technological context, specifically that of the growth of social media, is transforming aspects of leisure behaviour, especially in terms of negative interactions between followers of sport and athletes. There is a growing body of research into the maltreatment of adult athletes, exploring issues such as abusive acts or behaviours against the individual, including acts of physical and/or psychological violence to the person. Existing research, however, focuses upon face-to-face behaviours, and to date the nature of abuse in online spaces has been overlooked. It is becoming ever more apparent that virtual environments create optimal climates for abuse to occur due to the ability for individuals to communicate in an instantaneous, uncontrolled and often anonymous manner in virtual worlds. Using a netnographic approach, an analysis of a popular social media platform (Twitter) was conducted to examine the types of abuse present in online environments. This paper presents a conceptual typology, identifying four broad types of abuse in this setting; physical, sexual, emotional and discriminatory; examples of each form are presented. Findings highlight how online environments can pose a significant risk to individual emotional and psychological safety.
Subfields: Gender Studies, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cb25bcd7efa38fc58355d8325e8fcc36c4668638
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In Social Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- Sporting Women and Social Media: Sexualization, Misogyny, and Gender-Based Violence in Online Spaces (2019, background): “In fact, Kavanagh et al. (2016) explained that the online environment has the potential to enable abuse to occur, but lacks power to prevent it from happening.”