JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Social media provides women with varying platforms to express themselves, show their talents, communicate and expand their social relationships, and break the shackles imposed by their societies. Theoretically, social media can play a significant role in developing women’s freedom and decreasing social pressures, but practically speaking women continue to face violence during the social media era mainly in the form of sociological violence

Objective:

This research aims to conduct empirical research to deeply examine how digital space, particularly social media, provides men with new opportunities to surveil, restrict, harass, and intimidate feminists in the Arab world.

Methods:

This research conducts an empirical survey to find out what Arab women think are the causes and types of violence wielded against them and their perspectives on the impact of that violence. This study used an online questionnaire using 'Google Forms' (N= 1,312) with responses from Arab women aged 15 years and above from all Arab countries.

Results:

We found that most Arab women feared putting an actual picture of themselves on their social media account and only around third 490 (37.3%) did so. Most women said they encountered sexual harassment regardless of their age. Also, most women were not aware of the legal aspects of this crime and even those who did said that they would not take their cases to court for several reasons, including bringing dishonor upon their families, time-consuming litigation, and fear of revenge.

Conclusions:

This study found that young and less educated women are more vulnerable to abuse either from social media users or by being condemned by their families. This has several effects, including lower self-esteem and hesitancy in seeking a job, feelings of mistrust and fear, cynicism, anxiety, depression, sleep disorders, etc. These issues hold women back from using social media in positive ways and some of them consider leaving social media.