Abstract
This article presents and reflects upon the results of a survey involving a sample of women who have experienced gender-based violence and who have turned to an institutional centre to tackle their situation. In aiming to move beyond a descriptive treatment, we consider the plurality of user types and their remote use patterns in relation to the resources offered by virtual feminist communities designed to promote increased sociopolitical mobilisation in the fight against violence against women. We will observe the progressive emergence of protest actions organised by Spanish virtual feminist communities, which make use of new technologies to contribute productively to the debate and to political action in innovative organisations and formats. The article discusses how feminist virtual communities are using digital spaces for their work combatting violence against women, and whether this work is apparent to those who experience this violence. Finally, we tackle the implications of this work for online feminist activism in terms of a more interactive and social constructivist model of activism, as well as considering its relationship to institutional-legal discourse and public policies that require women to recognise themselves as victims.
Introduction
This article reflects on the role of new technologies and the internet as tools for fighting violence against women in Spain. In particular, it explores the use of technological resources produced by activism and online feminist practice that provide information about gender-based violence. We discuss what kind of agency such technology offers to victims of gender-based violence and how online feminist activism has responded to the challenge of activism against this violence. Moreover, in the case of Spanish online feminist practice, we enquire as to the possibility of participatory activism beyond Spain’s public policies. These policies have determined the offline dynamics of policy on gender-based violence, which is largely carried out through municipal governments and has entailed little involvement on the part of civil society.
We present the results of a survey carried out on a sample of women in the Community of Madrid who have experienced gender-based violence. The analysis centres on aspects of the surveyed women’s access to and use of new technology, in particular the webpages dedicated to fighting violence against women. We consider that these websites have boosted the visibility of and reflection upon the phenomenon of gender-based violence, and we ask to what degree they have facilitated the flow of information and debate by articulating the political use – in innovative formats and organisations – of new technologies in relation to feminist practice (Núñez Puente, 2011b; Núñez Puente et al., 2012). We examine the surveyed women’s perceptions of institutional resources and protest actions offered by feminist communities through their websites. In this article we will make reference to both regional/state institutions’ websites, including content for preventing and combatting violence against women, as well as feminist virtual communities’ webpages fighting gender-based violence in Spain. It will become clear that these websites mainly take up government debates and public policies, and propose little participation or interaction on the victims’ part. Despite successes and the intense work carried out, both institutionally and in online and offline feminist collectives, we will show that the surveyed women’s access to virtual spaces dealing with gender-based violence is still limited. Therefore, based on these women’s proposals and recommendations, we will highlight the need to define strategic actions that foster both the dissemination and the revision of contents and perspectives, in such a way as to improve the efficacy and success rate of these webpages in fighting violence against women. This will lead us to reflect on the gains of Spanish online feminist practice in terms of participatory activism, and the relationship between this activism and public policies against gender-based violence in Spain.
Violence against women is one of the most pressing structural problems in modern societies. The report of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), presenting the results of the world’s largest ever survey on violence against women, demonstrates that one in every three women between the ages of eighteen and seventy-four, that is, 62 million European women, has suffered physical or sexual violence after the age of fifteen. Moreover, in the twelve months prior to conducting the survey, around 13 million European women had experienced some form of physical violence and 3.7 million some form of sexual violence (7 per cent and 2 per cent, respectively, of women between eighteen and seventy-four years of age) and 18 per cent stated that they have been harassed at some point during their adult life (receiving threatening emails, calls or messages; being followed on the street; or having offensive comments published about them continuously on the internet [FRA, 2014]). With respect to the Spanish situation, the data shows that one in five Spanish women over the age of fifteen – that is, 22 per cent – has experienced physical or sexual violence. Of these, less than a fifth have reported the most serious attack to the police (FRA, 2014). The most recent statistical data in Spain come from data advanced from the Macrosurvey of Gender-Based Violence from 2015. Taking as a reference point the interviews carried out with more than 10,000 women, the percentage of women who have suffered gender-based violence at some point in their lives is 12.5 per cent, and 13 per cent say they feel afraid of their partners or ex-partners throughout their lives. While comparisons should be drawn with caution, given that previous surveys deployed different methodologies, the advance data from this fifth Macrosurvey reflect a progressive increase both in the percentage of women who declare that they have suffered physical or sexual violence throughout their lives, which in 2011 affected 10.8 per cent of women and now 12.5 per cent, as well as in the numbers relating to all types of violence (controlling and emotional psychological violence, physical violence and sexual violence) if we examine young women or women with any kind of disability. 1 It is certainly difficult to draw conclusions about the increase or decrease in violence against women. Far from alarmist interpretations, the numbers could be explained not only with reference to the failure of preventative measures against violence, but also in light of the greater visibility and social awareness of this phenomenon, principally due to changes in the legal and institutional framework, as well as due to the important efforts of offline and online feminist communities (de Miguel, 2003; de Miguel, 2005; Amnistía Internacional, 2007; Larrauri, 2007; Rodríguez Martínez, 2009; Red2Red Consultores, 2010). The scholarly interest in researching violence against women in Spain, and the related legal principles and political actions, date back to the 1980s (Ferrer and Bosch, 2007: 9–16). Currently, both the nature of the problem and the strategies for eradicating it are marked by the digital revolution and the emergence of new information and communication technologies. On the one hand, technological advances have involved the appearance of new ways to enact violence against women. Inequality and traditionalist sexist stereotypes are projected, reproduced and multiplied on social networks and other spaces of exchange provided by internet and mobile phone technologies (Sanz, 2006; Sagebiel and Vázquez, 2010; Bernete, 2011). Cyberharrasment and cyberstalking are amongst the manifestations of how new technologies enable acts of physical violence in the traditional sense, as well as creating new forms of violence against women. According to the latest European data, 11 per cent of women have experienced inappropriate advances on social websites or have been subjected to sexually explicit emails or SMS, and 20 per cent of young women, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine, have been victims of cyberharassment (FRA, 2014). In Spain, the data show that six in every ten girls have received insulting messages from their peers, their boyfriends, ex-partners and/or friends, and 10 per cent say they have felt afraid after receiving them. The most common ways to send and receive these messages are WhatsApp, Tuenti and mobile phone calls (Delegación del Gobierno para la Violencia de Género, 2013a). Furthermore, on becoming an adult, one in ten Spanish women states that she has suffered cyberharassment (FRA, 2014). But the tools provided by Web 2.0 also have great potential for fighting gender-based violence. In this respect, Bennett and Segerberg (2011) argue, the role of online tools for activist use is growing in contemporary societies, given that these offer the possibility of inclusion in protest action and, as such, have become a part of the resources for political and social activism. Thus, citizens can channel their political agency through alternative media forces (Keren, 2006).
Therefore, abandoning the premise that cyberspace reflects the patriarchal construction of society, some feminist theories promote political use of virtual communities to prevent traditional discourse from taking hegemonic control of technology (Kember, 2003: 51). Confronted with the vision of the internet as a medium inherently adequate for promoting feminist activism, given that it favours non-hierarchical communication of information and massive non-linear mobilisation (Drost and Jorna, 2000; Bonder, 2002; Friedman, 2003; Gurak and Logie, 2003), other theorists nonetheless warn against taking an essentialist position regarding the uses of the internet for feminist activism (Liberty, 1999; Shade, 2002; Huyer and Sikoska, 2003).
In Spain, the instrumentalisation of technological resources in fighting violence against women has arisen within both public administration and feminist practice. This situation explains, to some extent, why public policies have determined much of the Spanish online feminist practices fighting against gender-based violence. In a previous study, concerning the different ways that online collectives present themselves in the public cyber-sphere as fighting gender-based violence, we found that these online feminist collectives did so either by taking offline political action as a referent, or by constructing a particular online practice (Núñez Puente, 2011b). That study has provided an overview of some of the diverse women’s online communities in Spain that are using the internet specifically for activism on this issue. As we shall see, it also serves as a point of departure for addressing the complex relationships between how women who have suffered gender-based violence use online tools available on feminist websites, and the structure and content of these sites. Spanish online feminist practice seems to have fitted well into the so-called networked public sphere (Benkler, 2006) in an initial moment during which the debate about gender-based violence was framed, achieving the passage of the Organic Law (2004). Since 1991, activists within feminist associations had been calling for an integrated law against gender-based violence, aiming to provide assistance for sufferers, but also to try to eradicate the problem. The ‘Organic Law of Measures of Integrated Protection Against Gender-Based Violence’, one of the main electoral promises of Zapatero’s socialist government, was unanimously approved on 22 December 2004. The Law provides assistance and calls for preventive measures, with special attention to educational policies. It also establishes special jurisdiction for gender-based violence and aims to achieve a close coordination between all agents implicated in the process (forces of state security, prosecutors, forensic investigators, psychologists, magistrates, etc.), who should receive specific training so that those who experience violence are always attended to by specialists in their field. Nevertheless, from that moment on, feminist online practice’s capacity to encourage women’s agency seemed to diminish, as did the possibility that feminist websites would turn into social media channels for exchanging views, fostering debate and working as monitors to increase awareness concerning gender-based violence.
It is important at this point to contextualise the particular strains of Spanish online feminist activism that originally used the term ‘cyberfeminism’ to designate a view of the internet as a space of political agency for women. These online feminist initiatives are what Paasonen has called ‘feminism in cyberspace’ (2011: 337). Initially, as we can infer from specialised literature about cyberfeminism’s development in Spain (Núñez Puente and García, 2011c; Reverter, 2013), certain online feminist collectives, especially those linked to the utopian position of the theorist and activist Angustias Bertomeu, appeared in connection to the 1990s wave of theoretical critique which idealised the internet as a space of empowerment for women (Núñez Puente and García, 2011c). Although, as we have pointed out, scholarly literature on Spanish cyberfeminism attests to the pertinence of using this term to define Spanish digital feminist practice, in this article we will do without it, using instead the concept of ‘online feminist practice’, thereby avoiding the problems deriving from the different meanings associated with the term cyberfeminism (Paasonen, 2011: 346). Moreover, as the term was conceived in the 1990s, it has recently been reconsidered by many feminist scholars, some of whom, like Paasonen (2011: 337), contend that the fading attraction of cyberfeminism has to do with changes in the discursive environments from which it emerged. Indeed, the term cyberspace itself has increasingly been regarded as outdated. The critical revisioning of cyberfeminism has generally revolved around awareness of the politicisation of technology, thus contributing to feminist demands about the increasingly technologised practices of life (Basset, 2013: 205), and to feminist concern for the participatory aspects of social media and online resources, moving beyond 1990s cyberfeminism’s utopian visions (Thornham and Weissmann, 2013: 8). It therefore seems pertinent to review, as we have done in the following analysis, the participatory possibilities offered by technology, instead of insisting on an utilitarian and/or utopian version of the internet that, as we have observed in our previous research, undergirds most activist feminist webpages against gender-based violence (Núñez Puente, 2011b; Núñez Puente and García, 2011c). Thus, we shall see how the webpages we analyse have an eminently static character and do not promote interaction or dialogue as a form of agency for activists and those who experience gender-based violence. This, as the results of our survey will show, is exactly what the surveyed women demand.
Before discussing the gains of Spanish feminist practice online, it is necessary to review briefly the situation of Spanish activism against gender-based violence. In recent years there has been a clear governmental commitment to fighting gender-based violence. In addition to ratifying important legislative changes that have marked new pathways, such as the Organic Law, which constituted a turning point in this sense, Spain has seen advances in the prevention and eradication of the problem, as well as in the defense, assistance and protection provided to women who have experienced gender-based violence (Ministerio de Sanidad, Servicios Sociales e Igualdad, 2011). Over the course of this process, public institutions have played a fundamental role in relation to the challenges posed by digital society. One example of this is the National Strategy for the Eradication of Violence against Women 2013–2016 (Ministerio de Sanidad, Servicios Sociales e Igualdad, 2012), which incorporates a series of measures aimed at instrumentalising new technologies for the prevention and early detection of violence against women, as well as cooperation and coordination among different units working to fight gender-based violence (Ministerio de Sanidad, Servicios Sociales e Igualdad, 2012: 91–111). Another advance in this sense has been the maintenance and implementation of institutional websites that gather information and resources to prevent and fight against gender-based violence. On the webpage of the Ministry of Health, Social Politics and Equality there is a space dedicated to tackling gender-based violence and the trafficking of women, which explains what gender-based violence is, what to do about it and what institutional measures of protection and support are available. Likewise, the page shows current statistical data about gender-based violence, the institutional measures being taken to increase awareness and plans and reports being undertaken, edited and applied. Nonetheless, fighting violence against women is also one of the main working objectives of Spanish feminist practice. Online and offline feminist associations have been collaborating for more than a decade with the objective of identifying strategies and reinforcing alliances that will enable taking utmost advantage of the possibilities offered by new technologies (de Miguel and Boix, 2005; Boix, 2006). The surge of virtual feminist collectives centred on fighting gender-based violence emerges from the complex relationship between offline and online communities. On the one hand, through the offline work of collectives such as Mujeres en Red (Women in Network/Online), Fundación Mujeres (Women Foundation) and the Red Estatal de Organizaciones Feministas contra la Violencia de Género (State Network of Feminist Organisations Against Gender-Based Violence), several political actions and protest campaigns have been promoted through websites including Observatorio violencia, Mujeres en Red-Violencia and Red Feminista. At the same time, offline feminist practice has tried to instrumentalise cyberspace and virtual activism in fighting violence against women (Núñez Puente, 2011b: 336). Undoubtedly, feminist activism has played a key role in increasing the visibility of and sensitivity to the issue, beginning with the creation of the Instituto de la Mujer, culminating in the passing of the Organic Law 1/2004, and being reinforced by the founding, one year later, of the State Observatory of Violence Against Women. In fact, it could be said that one of the most emblematic achievements of cyberactivism working in conjunction with feminist practice was the campaign drawing attention to violence against women which was carried out by the collective Red Estatal de Organizaciones Feministas contra la Violencia de Género (State Network of Feminist Organisations Against Gender-Based Violence), founded in 2002 based on an agreement between nine offline feminist associations. The chief objective of this initiative was to pressure public administrations to adopt measures to fight this type of violence, an effort that culminated in legislation against gender-based violence that (despite its limitations) was relatively advanced. The achievement of online feminist collectives’ objectives appears, however, to have been somewhat limited following the passage of the Organic Law (2004). From this moment on, feminist websites have served as a space for disseminating public policies without offering a venue for debate regarding activist practices and technology’s potential to encourage agency. In this sense, the results of the survey raise some issues about what it means to be perceived as, and to acknowledge one’s own status as, a victim. As noted previously, this seems to be the positioning that the websites offer.
Hence, in order to discuss representations of gendered violence, it is important to address the concept of ‘the victim’, which we take from Trauma Studies and Gender Studies literatures. Both bodies of work concur in pointing out that the cultural representations of the gender-based victim, especially in the media, have contributed to the visibility of the problem, marking in this sense a commitment to raising awareness. Nonetheless, recent studies (Gámez and Núñez Puente, 2013) point out that such visibility has not led to a real transformation of the hegemonic framework of women as victims. On the contrary, it would appear that the discussion around gendered violence issues has reinforced, rather than dismantled, the cultural imaginary that sustains violence against women, by reducing women to the position of victims (Gámez, 2012). Indeed, in such discursive representations female victims are not articulated as ‘speaking subjects’, but rather they are shown as lacking response-ability (the ability to respond). We take as a reference for our conceptualisation of the victim Butler and Athanasiou’s work (2013), in which they conclude that the normative and normalising powers that operate in the processes of distribution of vulnerability favour discourses of ‘victimhood’ over discourses of political claims and confrontations. As Butler indicates, ‘the problem arises […] when the discourse of victimhood precludes the possibility of effective political organizing and resistance to the cause of injury’ (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013: 115). Our discussion of the results of the survey of victims of gender-based violence, and the feminist websites themselves, shows how the concept of the victim, central to Spanish legal discourse and institutional support, also permeates online feminist practice. According to Butler and Athanasiou’s theoretical argument, this impedes the political claims derived from a configuration of the subject of gender-based violence who moves beyond representations of ‘victimhood’.
To contextualise our empirical work, it is necessary to present an overview of Spanish feminist activist websites. This discussion emerges primarily from an analysis we have been carrying out for some time in diverse research projects (Núñez Puente, 2011b; Núñez Puente et al., 2016). However, one of the limitations of our study is that we do not know reliably which webpages the interviewed women have consulted, given that the question regarding whether they consult websites on gender-based violence does not ask for specification about whether they use institutional or feminist activist webpages. But we can be certain that these include some of the websites analysed below, given that in Spain there are very few websites dedicated, entirely or in large part, to the issue of violence against women. Consequently, in order to frame and to interpret adequately the survey’s main findings, we think it is essential to provide a brief description of the websites dedicated to fighting violence against women in Spain.
It is important to note that the results of the survey presented here are part of a broader research project (Núñez Puente et al., 2016), which entails carrying out interviews with feminist activists responsible for webpages dealing with the fight against gender-based violence. In that study we address how online tools are used on feminist websites. More precisely, we ask whether these tools suppose the creation of new internet spaces for the fight against gender-based violence, or if they merely constitute repositories for institutional and offline practice. The insights of this study help us to understand better the structure and content of these feminist websites and, ultimately, the nature of the use that women who have experienced gender-based violence make of the resources available there.
Thus we distinguish between what we would call institutional websites that tackle gender-based violence and websites of Spanish feminist activism. With regard to institutional websites, it is important to note the Ministry of Health, Social Services and Equality webpage, which includes a specific section on gender-based violence and trafficking of women. On this site the Ministry offers information to help detect violence, as well as outlining the steps to take once it is identified. It includes measures for raising consciousness and sensitivity regarding this problem. It provides resources for professionals, statistics, studies, surveys and research, and it also tackles other forms of violence against women such as sex trafficking of women and girls and female genital mutilation.
On the other hand, the webpages of the Spanish Autonomous Communities include information about gender-based violence in a very uneven fashion. To cite one example, the Community of Madrid’s webpage features, under the area of the Office of Social and Family Policy, the ‘Madrid Strategy Against Gender-Based Violence’. It traces the institution’s lines of action for preventing and acting against violence towards women, following the legislative articulation of the Organic Law (2004) and insisting on women acknowledging themselves as victims in order for them to take advantage of state assistance.
In exploring websites of Spanish feminist activism, following the studies cited previously (Núñez Puente, 2011b; Núñez Puente et al., 2016), we can note a continuum, from the activism carried out by certain organisations functional solely online, to associations that carry out their activities offline and use the web as a kind of display window. We also find organisations that combine virtual and non-virtual resources and create feedback loops between offline and online activist campaigns. An example of the first type could be found, for example, in the Commission for Investigating Abuse, an association that has a free telephone hotline for women who are experiencing violence, and which also provides on its website guidelines for action in the wake of violence, as well as information about campaigns, statistics, legislation, protocols, documents, etc. Other examples are Informaltrato (Informabuse), which compiles and offers information from the internet for women who are suffering from abuse, and which also hosts a forum in which users can interact both with a support team and with other women who have experienced violence; Mujeres en Red, El Periódico Feminista (Women Online, The Feminist Newspaper), whose website offers several texts reflecting on feminism and gender-based violence; and Red Feminista (Feminist Network), a digital space with updated information about violence, academic texts, statistics, laws, campaigns, news, opinions, etc. Other organisations use their websites to inform, disseminate information and draw attention to their ideas and activities. This is the case, for example, with the Federation of Progressive Women, whose website includes programmes for increasing awareness, information about resources, activities and studies about gender-based violence directed above all towards professionals and people working with women suffering abuse; the Federation of Young Women, whose first working priority is preventing gender-based violence among youth; and the Rosa Chacel Association for Women’s Participation which uses its webpage to publicise protests, projects, courses and all aspects related to its offline activity, which is focused on assisting abused women. On the other hand, groups such as the Women Foundation, City of Women, the Feminist Association for Women’s Equality E-Women (E-mujeres.net) or the Association for Assisting Victims of Sexual Aggressions and Abuse (ADAVASYMT) combine offline and virtual activism and develop campaigns that have been successful in gaining support both on the streets and on the web. The Women Foundation’s objective is to prevent and raise consciousness about violence through education, and to provide useful materials for professionals who work with women experiencing violence. This organisation turns to the internet to disseminate reports of actions and to foster the exchange of accounts of experiences and of the training of educators. The City of Women’s website aims to provide resources and tools that help abused women emerge from isolation and approach people, centres and associations that might help them. The organisation considers that much of its campaign’s success comes from the feedback loop between offline and online work. The activism of E-Women, whose original website was the first in Spain with its own feminist software, consists primarily in making visible, via the internet, women’s roles in society, and disseminating a wide range of freely-accessible audiovisual material. This virtual activism is combined with street-level practice, with the support of campaigns promoted by other organisations. Hence, this highlights the interdependent character of offline activism. Finally, ADAVASYMT uses its webpage to publicise demonstrations, projects, courses and other aspects of its offline activity.
Most of the information these websites contain revolves around institutional discourse and public policies. This is better understood in the light of the development of the Spanish institutional feminist apparatus in the 1980s, which led to the creation of official webpages financed by the state. Since then, this apparatus has encompassed state organisations, from the law and its resources, to feminist webpages. The fact that the Spanish legal system requires women to recognise themselves as victims in order to have recourse to assistance means that these pages’ information, resources, help, mechanisms, plans and projects for supporting women are all based on an implicit conception of the woman as victim. The websites do not house forums or spaces for women to meet one another, and most of the information is directed towards professionals who work with women who suffer violence. Despite the fact that in some cases associations have known how to take advantage of the feedback from and activism of civil society, overall we can conclude that Spanish online feminist practice has not been very participatory in fighting gender-based violence.
Nonetheless, in a context of change with respect to the means of political representation and mobilisation in feminist practice, new technologies constitute a strategically important tool. International research projects concur that the use of new technologies, both as tools for information and political protest, fosters empowerment of both users and managers of feminist community websites (Finn and Banach, 2000; Safety Net, 2004; Finn and Atkinson, 2009). In Spain, certain virtual communities have made use of the web to build a collective project of feminist agency and reinscribe the fight against violence against women in cyberspace (Núñez Puente, 2011b; Núñez Puente et al., 2012), especially in the period prior to the passage of the Organic Law (2004). In promoting empowerment of women who have been the target of violence and prioritising this problem in their political agendas, these feminist websites (whether exclusively or with specific sections dedicated to this topic) have attempted to generate a type of online activism that makes specific political use of technology (Núñez Puente, 2011a) that has not always been effective. For while new technologies do offer possibilities for fighting violence against women – both at an individual and a collective level – certain obstacles must be overcome. These are not just impediments to the e-inclusion of women, but also, as our analysis will show, obstacles inherent to the strategies of feminist practice itself. More concretely, they have to do with the troubled relationship between agency and the concept of the victim, as well as the possibility of developing a feminist practice orientated towards more interaction, in which citizens are conceived as active contributors towards effective social change (Gámez, 2015). 2
Methodology
This research falls within the framework of the I+D+i Project ‘Virtual Communities and Online Feminist Practice: The Political Use of the Internet in Activism Against Violence Against Women’. In this article, we highlight the results of a survey carried out on a sample of women who have suffered or continue to suffer gender-based violence and who are potential users of the websites in Spain dedicated to fighting this problem. The objective of the survey was to understand the use and consumption of new technologies by women who have experienced or continue to experience violence – in particular, their use of websites dedicated to fighting gender-based violence. The survey enables us to gather perceptions about the usefulness of these websites, considerations of the level of trust and security they offer, as well as information on the aspects of the websites that the women surveyed deem to be inadequate. The questionnaire asked those surveyed whether the information disseminated on these webpages addresses women as victims, whether these spaces successfully put women who suffer violence in contact with one another and whether they considered the legal and medical measures offered by the websites to be sufficient. We aimed to analyse the surveyed women’s perceptions of the political and feminist activist uses of the internet in this realm, as well as their assessment of the information disseminated on these websites.
In total 293 women were interviewed, all of whom made some use of the Municipal Centres of the Regional Observatory of Gender Violence in the Community of Madrid. These Centres were established for the purpose of preventing gender-based violence, as well as providing assistance to victims in an integrated fashion, through coordination between local and regional authorities. In negotiating between these bureaucratic levels, they also aim to coordinate actions and consolidate the criteria for intervention against gender-based violence.
In December 2015, there were a total of fifty-two Municipal Centres. They offer legal counsel and psychological and social assistance individually tailored to victims, and follow up on Orders of Protection 3 and judicial resolutions, among other services. The Centres offer information and guidance to victims of gender-based violence; they provide individualised psychosocial attention for female victims of gender-based violence and their children and dependents. They also promote actions aimed at prevention and raising awareness of the problem.
The fact that the surveyed women are users of these Municipal Centres implies that they have all suffered or continue to suffer gender-based violence at the hands of their partners or ex-partners, and that they have turned to an institution to address their situation. Likewise, almost all the women (96.8 per cent) have reported their abuser on one or more occasions, given that institutional contact favours this response. 83.2 per cent have separated from the aggressor, 92.3 per cent have ceased to live with the aggressor and 74.5 per cent have an active order of protection. The profiles of the women run a broad gamut in age from fifteen to seventy-six years, but the majority of those surveyed are between twenty-seven and forty-two years old. A high percentage of these women (73.1 per cent) have between one and three children. Almost all of them (82.3 per cent) live in an urban environment, while 17.7 per cent live in rural areas in the Community of Madrid. With respect to their highest level of education, we should note that 22 per cent have finished elementary/middle school, 19.6 per cent high school, 21.3 per cent advanced high school, 15.6 per cent college, 14.8 per cent a vocational degree and 3.1 per cent had no formal studies. The majority (43.7 per cent) work outside the home, and 23.8 per cent are currently unemployed.
The survey was carried out on an individual basis, by professionals who work in the Municipal Centres directly assisting women who have experienced gender-based violence. These professionals – psychologists and social workers – who are mostly women, were in charge of distributing the questionnaires to users and collecting them in person. The particular difficulty in accessing the population of women studied here made it necessary to carry out the survey in this way, given that women recognise (or begin the process of recognising) that they suffer from abuse by making recourse to these centres. The social stigma associated with admitting that one suffers from domestic violence means that these women often do not accept this fact privately, and even less so publically. This pattern contrasts sharply with the reinforcement of punitive actions resulting from the passage of Spain’s Organic Law 1/2004 (28 December) of Integrated Measures of Protection Against Gender-Based Violence. This law urges women who suffer from violence to bring their complaints to a criminal trial, for which they must have previously recognised themselves as victims and made a formal complaint, another indispensable requirement for access to institutional assistance and resources. This prior recognition of the women as victims can be productively discussed in terms of Butler and Athanasiou’s concept of the victim (2013), which suggests that possible resistance is foreclosed by the preeminent discourse of victimhood. Indeed, in the case of our analysis, we propose that the Organic Law’s (2004) effects contribute to normative and normalising powers favouring discourses of ‘victimhood’ over discourses of political claims. That is, women must necessarily identify themselves in the category of victims in order to have access to the Spanish legal and welfare system. Awareness of this situation led us to search for a way of contacting possible interview subjects through employees who work directly with these women, and who control access to them. The responses were therefore conditioned by the psychosocial attention the women were receiving in the centres, and by their relationship with the professionals treating them. This inevitably affected their construction of discourses about abuse and their perception of institutional assistance, as well as medical and legal attention.
It is also important to note that going to these centres indicated that some of these women had already received digital literacy training, and that therefore their connection to the internet and webpages about violence was different from their situation prior to contacting the institutions. This alerts us to the fact that Spanish virtual feminist communities are not taking full advantage of the spaces of power and activism online, the principal achievements of which could be bringing technology closer to women and helping to shatter the glass ceiling. Likewise, it leads us to understand that the digital tools for combatting gender-based violence that the interviewed women are able to use are fundamentally institutional ones. Another limitation of the study has to do with the low percentage of responses to certain questions, especially those dealing with the use of websites dealing with gender-based violence. This also indicates that such pages are barely consulted, and that those who do access them have hazy memories of the characteristics or usefulness of the sites.
The complex profile of the surveyed women affected the open-ended questions, which sometimes were not answered, and at other times only answered in a cursory fashion. We perceive that some women might have felt that certain questions, such as for example whether they were still living with their partner, constituted an attack on their privacy. So, in some cases, these were not answered. Several women expressly stated that they did not want to answer these questions.
It is essential, therefore, to take into account that the results of the study are conditioned by the circumstances in which the survey was carried out, by mediators and not directly by the research team. The results were also shaped by the existing legal framework, which entails an excessive judicialisation of the process and therefore a pre-determined perception of institutional assistance and steps to be followed. The women’s control over their autonomy that emerges from these judicial practices also extends to non-institutional online feminist practice, which replicates the necessity of legal sanctions as an indispensable step to access assistance resources. The results are also conditioned by the women who participated in the survey: women who have made recourse to these institutions to tackle their situation, who are being attended to by professionals and who find themselves in the challenging situation of recognising and coming to terms with abuse. These are women who have difficulty answering certain questions because of the intrusion they may pose to their private life.
Results
Consultation and use of websites dedicated to fighting violence against women.
We can analyse their limited access in terms of the women’s own perceptions about the safety and confidentiality offered by webpages about gender-based violence: 75.3 per cent of the women who consult webpages about violence understand that these are spaces offering security and confidentiality, as opposed to 24.7 per cent who perceive them as unsafe media. Concerning those who perceive the webpages on violence as unsafe media, it would be interesting to research whether they have had experiences that confirm this perception or if, in general, they consider the web to be unsafe. Yet the survey does not have an open question on this topic, and, as a result, the study does not have sufficient data to know why women do or do not trust these websites. In any case, these results appear to indicate that civil society’s participation in activism against gender-based violence is minimal, and that the online tools offered by the sites orientated towards feminist activism are merely a repository of information about public policies. In short, these results have to do with the social prevalence of institutional-legal discourse, which casts it as the only one offering safety, as well as with the fact that feminist online practice may have had a limited role in producing an alternative discourse.
In an open-ended question, the women were asked about which webpages on gender-based violence they remembered, in the event that they had consulted them. The recall of what pages they have consulted is generally low. The surveyed women noted that they have primarily visited institutional webpages – such as those of the Ministry of Equality, the Community of Madrid and the City of Madrid – the City Counselor for Women’s Equality of their municipal area or the page for a free hotline for information about abuse (016). To a lesser extent they refer to websites of associations, lawyers or social networks. Although they were not specifically asked about these, most arrived at these websites by way of search engines (especially Google) but also through their municipal Social Services, associations, the abuse hotline, friends, television advertising, the Police and Civil Guard and social networks. These data throw into sharp relief a central finding of the survey: women who use websites to gain information do so mainly through state agencies. The fact that the women who use assistance pages principally opt for information of an institutional character might be related to their accessing these pages from the physical spaces of institutions. But this result also points to the need for reflection about the reach of the work carried out by online feminist communities. In this sense we consider that, although feminist activism has been crucial in the process of raising awareness and the visibility of the problem of gender-based violence in Spain, feminist web spaces – echoing public policy discourse – have perhaps made instrumental use of new technologies without creating spaces for a more participatory type of activism.
Issues insufficiently dealt with on the websites.
This data suggest the importance of emphasising that one of the objectives of online feminist practice is to reflect on technology, its uses and its usefulness. From this perspective, while (predominantly institutional) digital tools against gender-based violence were useful for the women interviewed, they also identified these tools’ limitations. For example, the lack of interactivity is surprising in spaces that supposedly attempt to help women who suffer from violence. Even if we attribute this to the fact that most of the sites offer information orientated predominantly towards professionals working in this area, rather than towards the women they seek to support, these women’s participation and interactivity should be analysed in relation to online feminist practice. From an online feminist practice standpoint, both hypertext and interactivity, that is, the receptors’ participation and communication, are key elements. However, inasmuch as there appears to be a gap between practice and discourse, these web spaces could be limiting these women’s capacity for agency.
While it was noted previously that most of the women consulted had reported their abuser, the study makes clear that this was not due to their looking at webpages about gender-based violence. Thus, only 4.9 per cent of women declared that they decided to report after visiting a website with information about gender-based violence, and 4 per cent indicated that they had doubts after doing so. But 91 per cent responded that their decision was in no way connected to consulting the websites analysed here. This suggests that, in effect, the information offered does not so much guide abused women towards action, but rather that it provides guidelines for the social workers and other professionals working with these women. It would therefore be desirable for the website designers to make efforts to disseminate and to improve information about the period prior to the reports, as well as offering assistance and counselling afterward. But technology is not solely useful as an informational resource, nor is activism solely welfare-based. Hence, Spanish online feminist activism should also involve reflection, with the aim of going back to participatory activism beyond public policy, and engaging feminist virtual communities.
With respect to the vision of abused women that these websites offer, we find that when faced with the question of whether these pages address women as victims, 61.5 per cent responded that they do not while 37.7 per cent considered that they do. This was not seen negatively by the women. Rather, many of the women surveyed valued this orientation as demonstrating empathy with women who suffer from violence, and as a means of alerting such women to what is happening to them, as a way of raising awareness of the problem. This finding also calls attention to the fact that only a minority considers that being designated a victim entails an incapacity for agency (amongst the affected women or their supporters). We consider that the response to this question reflected the fact that the question did not specify a concept of the ‘victim’ as an overprotected woman lacking the capacity for decision-making or agency. According to specialised critical literature, this concept of the victim derives from the high-profile nature of established hegemonic narratives on women’s victimisation, in which women experiencing violence are not presented as ‘speaking subjects’ (Gámez, 2013). Although on many of the websites, both institutional and from online feminist activism, there is no explicit recourse to the term ‘victim’, the positioning of women who suffer violence does suggest that these women recognise themselves as victims in order to secure legal and psychosocial support. These sites presuppose that women must lodge complaints, and declare that they have suffered violence perpetrated by their partners, in order to gain access to resources and support. This is primarily a consequence of the Spanish state’s welfare perspective on gender-based violence. Hence, this is an institutionalised problem. In Spain, a formal complaint is required for women to access state legal support and, unlike in other European countries, the women must identify themselves as victims. This coercive context therefore does not enable the training or empowerment of women who suffer violence as a prioritised objective so that they might decide freely and autonomously what measures to take beyond a trial or criminal sanction. The concept of the victim embedded in the initiatives of online feminist practice is thus articulated through the restrictive vision of legal discourse and institutional welfare in Spain.
We can see, following Butler and Athanasiou (2013), how this regime impedes political claims that move beyond the idea of ‘victimhood’. In short, in addition to not offering these women agency, feminist websites appear to reinforce the predetermined conception of the victim originating in legal discourse and institutional policies against gender-based violence. Hence, we conclude that women are not represented on these webpages as active political subjects (Núñez Puente et al., 2012), but rather that the conception of the victim as a subject without agency has become entrenched and naturalised. Hence, in the fight against gender-based violence in Spain, online feminist activism has taken up the conception of the victim favoured by legal discourse and public policy without any critical analysis.
Perhaps as a result, although there are not many women following these webpages, 64.6 per cent believe that they are useful tools in fighting the violence women face, in contrast to 7.3 per cent who do not. It is also worth noting that 28 per cent are uncertain in this respect. The webpages’ utility is connected to several factors: the support they offer, the possibility of getting information about resources and procedures, raising awareness, identifying and preventing abuse. The fact that these sites foster anonymity and are an effective way of putting women who suffer violence in contact with one another was also valued by the majority of respondents, despite the fact that, as mentioned previously, they considered it unfortunate that there were few forums for chats or discussion on the sites. However, there were also women who reported that they were not familiar with these pages, and indeed that they had never consulted them. In addition, some of the women surveyed regretted that the webpages are not translated into all languages (although they did not specify into which languages they would have liked to see them translated), that they do not offer sufficient and clear information and that in some cases they are cold, impersonal media, not very useful or concrete.
The survey was designed to gather information about the perceptions of women who suffer or have suffered violence regarding the legal and medical measures the state has at its disposal to curb this violence. Based on their experiences, 55.6 per cent of women claimed that justice is swift, that they have felt protected and supported by institutions, by state security forces, in an immediate and efficient way. Others, however, indicated that they considered these services insufficient, given that many women die at the hands of their partners and ex-partners, and many minors go unprotected. A number of respondents condemned the length and cost of judicial processes, and the fact that abused women do not always have an easy time showing the violence (especially psychological violence) they have suffered. Several called for more specialists and greater efficacy in protection and more coordination of services.
Conclusion
New technologies have enabled the construction and development of a great diversity of spaces that, in addition to transforming the nature of relationships, provide new ways to approach social issues. In fact, the phenomenon of violence against women in Spain has gone from being a private issue, tackled behind closed doors, to becoming a social problem that demands strategic actions and interventions aimed at the use of technology in violence prevention. Feminist practice has instrumentalised new technologies and, more concretely, made political use of the internet in fighting violence against women, achieving notable success such as the passing of the Organic Law of 2004. But what are the perceptions of the women of Spain with experience of gender-based violence with respect to the resources and interventions offered by feminist communities through their websites? And what do the results of the survey presented in this article tell us about the achievements of online feminist practice in Spain? Have the technological initiatives of online feminist practice managed to facilitate agency amongst women who have suffered gender-based violence, or have they merely replicated public policy discourse about violence against women?
In this respect, the survey discussed here shows us how help is provided in a legal context in Spain that excessively judicialises the processes of male violence towards women. This undoubtedly conditions the perceptions of the surveyed women regarding institutional resources and the steps they have to follow in order to escape violence. The fact that the women turn to these centres also implies that their use of webpages increases once the institutions invest effort in their getting to know resources at their disposal online. This situation also shows how women who experience partner-based violence in Spain are categorised as victims by legal discourse and, as shown above, it is only through assuming this label that they can access the assistance and protective mechanisms put into place by public policies, foreclosing possibilities for political resistance.
If online feminist practice is articulated, among other aspects, in terms of the possibility of offering women agency through the use of technology, then what do we take away from the survey’s demonstration of the limited use of the webpages? In terms of the survey results, analysing the use of telematics resources containing information on gender-based violence allows us to conclude that most of the women surveyed connect habitually, but visits to websites with content related to violence against women does not feature in their frequent usage. The fact that these websites are barely consulted indicates to us that currently available digital tools addressing gender-based violence, principally the institutional webpages but also those created by online feminist communities, may not be significant instruments of political resistance or even conceptualise these women’s political agency in ways that allow them to move beyond the paradigm of victimhood. This seems to indicate the limitations of online feminist practice which confines itself to replicating institutional public framings and policies pertaining to gender-based violence, without offering more participatory types of activism. Hence, there should be some review of why a high percentage of the women surveyed, mostly young and employed by others, do not access these websites. This suggests the need to review and revise the content of the websites, making them more activism-orientated and ensuring that they are more effective and affective (Paasonen, 2011: 349).
These webpages are also understood to be spaces that help abused women feel that there is someone who can provide them with support. This is especially significant given that, once the women access them, the websites were generally found useful. Thus, the key would be to foster access, paying special attention to the profile of potential users. It may also be important to ask why it was institutional websites that were most consulted and valued. We would contend that this may be due to the fact that the women surveyed were in the midst of a process of institutional assistance, which they had accessed through formal complaints, and thus that their digital literacy was in many cases related to institutional psychosocial support. Moreover, as demonstrated previously, Spanish online feminist activism has not yet produced an alternative discourse on gendered violence, and thus its websites replicate public policy discourses and do not offer space for participation and exchange.
To conclude, we would contend that, while new technologies can offer women new spaces through which to inform and express themselves, or share or report information, both the persistence of the digital gap as well as limited or inappropriate forms of technology use can limit the potential of these tools in fighting violence against women. This makes it necessary to reevaluate through feminist practice how new technologies are instrumentalised, so as to make them more useful and efficacious in addressing this social problem. In this study, we have proposed that Spanish online feminist activism must distance itself from institutional-legal discourse that forces women to recognise themselves as victims in order to access legal assistance and to implement public policies. We also suggest that such activism should offer something more than these state policies do, engaging more substantially with civil society and working more distinctively with digital tools. This would encourage women who suffer from gendered violence to realise more fully their agency and autonomy, enabling them to decide for themselves what steps to take in order to tackle their situations. Moving beyond punitive measures and also beyond the hegemonic frameworks of recognition would encourage the interpellation of Spanish women as political subjects in the face of gender-based violence.
Footnotes
Funding
This research has been carried out, thanks to financing from the MINECO (Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness).