About the project
GIVRE (Gendering Internet: Violence, Resilience, and Empowerment in Digital Spaces) aims to explore practices of resistance, resilience, and empowerment in digital spaces against all forms of online gender-based violence.
The project is grounded in the understanding that digital technologies and gender are intertwined categories — mutually shaping and being shaped by social structures, practices, cultures, and identities. Its primary objective is to investigate the resistance and empowerment strategies employed by users while critically examining platform agency and the role of affordances in enabling or constraining these practices.
The project has four objectives: 1) advancing the knowledge and understanding of the mutual shaping between digital technologies and gender; 2) developing a toolkit for digital self-defense that will allow users to tackle abusive behaviors in social media spaces; 3) mapping good practices and collecting policy and design guidelines aiming at tackling online gendered violence and promoting empowerment; 4) consolidating and formalizing a national action-research network able to provide policy recommendations and guidelines for the designing safer digital platforms as well as to promote international collaborations.
These objectives will be achieved through the implementation of a mixed-methods research design. The research activities comprise: 1) qualitative interviews with users participating in online spaces covering issues broadly related to gendered online violence. The aim is to explore people’s perception of online gender-based violence, main patterns and dynamics, most cited platforms associated with violent behaviors and related tactics of resilience; 2) focus groups with “privileged witnesses” that work in the field of anti-violence (operators, lawyers, activists) and in the governance of online spaces (authority agencies, policy-makers). This phase aims to compare ideas, intervention approaches and visions about gendered online violence and the work that is currently done in Italy to tackle it; 3) participatory design workshops with anti-violence experts, artists and ordinary users for enabling collective brainstorming on empowering imaginaries surrounding digital technologies. This phase aims to design construction of digital spaces that can be safe and empowering for all citizens, and especially for vulnerable subjectivities; 4) a national survey – the first quantitative study in Italy on the phenomenon – administered to a statistically representative sample of Italian adults, aiming at investigating the presence of online gendered violence and the related experiences, including practices of resilience and empowerment.
