Online disclosure,a mechanism for seeking informal justice?

Participants and recruitment

Six Turkish-speaking women who disclosed their experiences of gender-based violence on social media (Twitter and/or Facebook) were interviewed. For the recruitment purposes, the authors identified and reached out to eight women through their public social media profiles. During the initial contact, an invitation letter describing the study aims and objectives as well as the conditions of participation was sent. Four out of eight women who were invited to take part in the study were recruited during this initial invitation process. Two other women were referred by a participant after her interview process was completed, and they were invited to the study through email. After potentially agreeing to participate in the study, a detailed information letter and consent form were sent to all participants via email. Upon receiving their consent and signature, the interview dates and times were scheduled. Ethical approval of this study was obtained from the Norwegian Centre for Research Data (NSD) in April 2021.

We chose not to advertise our study publicly and did not create an open call for study participation because we anticipated the risk of finding ourselves as targets of trolling and backlash attacks. Our concern was based on the increasing ‘anti-feminist resistance’ in Turkey in the recent years, especially issues around the Istanbul Convention and women’s rights (Eslen-Ziya, 2022). Although this limited our chances to reach out to more women and, thus, restricted the generalisability of our findings, due to the rich and diverse content of the interviews, we still consider our data adequate to make meaningful contributions in relation to our research goals.

Data collection

Online individual interviews were conducted via Zoom. The interviews were semi-structured with a duration of 50 minutes to 2 hours; both authors were present. At the start of the interviews, the authors explained the conditions of participation and asked for consent to start audio-recording. All the interviews were conducted in Turkish and transcribed verbatim by the authors. The participants’ personal information was removed from the data during the transcription process. After the coding and analysis of the interviews, the quotations included in this article were translated from Turkish to English, and each participant was given a pseudonym.

The interviews included open-ended questions regarding women’s reasons for choosing to reveal their experiences online, their expectations from the disclosures, and the consequences afterwards. This article specifically focuses on women’s reasoning and decision-making and seeks answers to what extent their needs and expectations have been met.

Ethical considerations

Participation in studies about gender-based violence includes certain risks for the emotional safety of participants. Our research did not focus on the participants’ experiences of violence; thus, the interviews did not include any questions regarding these potentially traumatic memories. However, we still considered that revealing their experiences of online disclosure, particularly talking about the negative consequences, would be emotionally overwhelming for them. Studies suggest that utilisation of ‘trauma- and violence- informed’ approaches in research would prevent such harm and, furthermore, would create beneficial outcomes for participants (i.e. speaking about one’s experiences without being judged or blamed, opportunity to help out others through sharing one’s experiences) (Baker et al., 2020; Lalonde et al., 2020). Based on such approaches, to minimise potential harms, we discussed such risks with the participants, explicitly stated that their emotional safety was a priority, and framed their consent as an ongoing process. We also constantly monitored and checked their distress levels during the interviews, used strength-based, non-judgemental language, and provided a non-directive conversational space to facilitate their engagement with the interviews.

Ensuring the anonymity of our participants was another critical concern. Their stories were public. This became an ethical challenge because we realised that many parts of the experiences that they shared in the interviews could easily expose their identities. Thus, we were cautious about choosing the information we would provide in this article, like deciding which quotations to use or what background information to include. Under these circumstances, we omitted many potentially informative parts from their stories. Similarly, for the same reason, we could not provide full demographic details except a partial summary.

We were aware that two authors being present during the interviews might influence the power dynamics between researchers and participants, yet we believed our different academic backgrounds would outweigh this risk. As we are academics working in related but different areas of research – specifically, one in digital sociology and feminist activism and the other in gender-based violence and women’s health, we considered that via meeting our participants together, we would complement each other. In fact, we experienced the advantages of co-interviewing as it allowed us to grasp many aspects of our participants’ stories that we would normally miss if the interviews were done individually. This experience is also in line with the previous literature on ‘collaborative co-interviewing’ (i.e. Redman-MacLaren et al., 2014; Rosenblatt, 2012; Velardo and Elliott, 2021), which shows that ‘having multiple interviewers present can maximise probing opportunities, redistribute power . . . [and] bring diverse perspectives . . . to interviews’ (Velardo and Elliott, 2021: 6).

The translation process was another critical issue that would bring ethical challenges (Clark et al., 2017). We followed a communicative, meaning-based approach rather than literal verbatim translation during the translation process. It means we focused on the ‘reconstruction of meaning, sense, context and ideas’ within the quotations (Feldermann and Hiebl, 2019: 251). We used a three-step approach to ensure that no meaning or contextual information was altered or lost during the process. First, we translated the quotes individually. Then, we compared our translations to each other and discussed any differences. After this cross-check procedure, we also re-translated the English versions of the quotes from English to Turkish and compared these re-translated quotations to the original ones. These steps enabled us to achieve semantic accuracy as well as to represent the meanings in the quotations adequately.

Data analysis

Thematic analysis, as described by Braun and Clarke (2006), was used for the data analysis. As a flexible qualitative analysis tool for identifying and interpreting the shared meanings, processes, and patterns throughout the data, with aims to produce well-defined answers to particular questions identified during the research process. Regarding the present study, we identified and explored participants’ processes of decision-making and the resulting experiences in relation to informal justice seeking.

Data coding was done through a qualitative analysis software programme, NVivo. A six-step data analysis strategy (Braun and Clarke, 2006) was followed. The first phase started through the data collection process and included developing preliminary insights and interpretations based on the ‘observational and casual’ understanding of the narratives (Braun and Clarke, 2006: 61). During this phase, we mainly explored issues around justice and empowerment and focused on the reasons for and consequences of disclosures. We generated our first tentative codes, such as ‘having voice’, ‘finding support’, or ‘experiencing secondary violence’. During the next two steps, the transcribed narratives were coded more systematically. First, semantic codes were created based on the participants’ descriptions of the events and processes. Then, we followed a more conceptual level of coding, and the initial codes were reorganised according to their frequencies and meanings. We separated the stories as ‘before disclosure-reasons and processes’ and ‘after disclosure-consequences’. Codes such as ‘inefficient justice mechanisms’, ‘demanding justice’, ‘seeking to be heard’ were generated as ‘before disclosure’ codes. Regarding processes after disclosures, we first separated the narratives into ‘positive’ (i.e. ‘digital solidarities’, ‘achieving a sense of justice’, ‘helping out others’) and ‘negative’ (i.e. ‘re-victimization’, ‘digital vulnerabilities’) consequences and developed the codes based on these broad categories. The next two steps involved the review of these codes and then the process of creating themes based on the identified conceptual understanding of the data. The boundaries and specific characteristics of the themes were determined, and it was made sure that each theme had a particular focus, was relevant to the research objectives, and conveyed a distinct essential meaning shared through the data. The writing phase was identified as the last step of analysis by Braun and Clarke (2006), through which we aimed to represent the women’s stories cohesively in their fullness.

We followed each step of analysis independently, apart from the first preliminary interpretation and the writing phases. At the end of each phase, we worked together to determine whether there was enough consistency between our analyses. We discussed these inconsistencies until a consensus between us was achieved.

‘I do not want to live with this unfair burden’: Sharing the burden with others

Injustice was experienced as an emotional burden. The participants stated that their act of disclosure was a type of informal complaint and thus a call for justice to remove this burden. Four of them reported that they made formal complaints before the online disclosure and fought for a long time for their rights during this process without receiving the outcome they wanted. For them, the online disclosures became inevitable as they felt constantly failed by the institutional processes.

Sevda stated that after going through several years of an onerous formal complaint process with no effective results, she chose online disclosure as her ‘last resort’ of seeking and ensuring justice. She defined it as a ‘refusal of an unfair burden’:

I saw that the justice did not work in sexual harassment cases. I think this is the main path that led people to online disclosures. As the processes of justice did not work, and disclosure was my only tool . . . You try a lot of things, formal investigations, third-party investigators etc., but it still does not work. In the very first formal report after my complaint, it was written “she perceived”. . . I even went to the police, they said “we cannot consider this as sexual harassment” because I did not have enough evidence. If it is the case then, you do not want to live with the burden anymore, I did not want to be crashed under this unfair burden; and it was a refusal, I refused to be under this burden.

Esra described a similar process when her expectations of justice were also not met through formal complaint mechanisms. She explained how she chose to disclose her reactions to the injustices she faced:

When you try to solve this within your institution . . . or when you go to others working with you to get advice or support, it becomes like, when women are exposed to physical violence by their husbands . . . the police says “this is a family affair, do not file a complaint, this is your husband, make peace”, it was the same thing happened to me. “Do not make a big fuss about it, let us to talk to him, he will not do this again”. It was just enough to hear these, nothing changed for years, so I started to become public about it.

In the absence of efficient formal justice processes, online disclosure is suggested as an alternative path for seeking justice (Fileborn, 2014, 2017; Powell, 2015). Correspondingly, the narratives above show how seeking justice through institutional processes and procedures created more injustices in women’s lives and that they perceived online disclosure as a way of counteracting their experiences of invalidation, disbelief, or belittlement. Relatedly, making their stories public through online disclosures is seen as a way of challenging victim-blaming public assumptions about gender-based violence, thus creating a ‘counter-cultural public sphere’ (Fileborn, 2017; 1483) to tell their stories as they wish and seek a supportive community (O’Neill, 2018; Powell, 2015; Salter, 2013).

The following narrative also exemplifies that online disclosure could be actively used to create public attention to make the judicial responses more effective and increase the chance of getting justice:

After I filed a complaint, everything was so slow, everything was kind of stopped, but I had some evidence and needed to move fast, but I think there was some barriers there, I suspected that they would cover the case up. So, in social media, when there is public pressure, things are getting faster, I wanted to do it in front of the public, I want to make my case public to make it work. (Simge)

Thus, as she was afraid that nothing good would come out of her court case, becoming public about her story of victimisation was hoped to create ‘public pressure’ on the court and facilitate her access to justice. This is also reflected in Salter’s (2013) work, illustrating how generating online support networks would positively influence court outcomes for victims – although not in all cases. Furthermore, online campaigns against gender-based injustices are shown to be effective in influencing legal and political processes in Turkey (Şener, 2021).

‘It was a scream to be heard’: Demanding voice, recognition, and solidarity

Being forced into silence and not gaining recognition or support from others were described as some of the main motivators for the online disclosures. Barriers to formal justice, and not being taken seriously by others, left them with a feeling of abandonment and as having no voice – in contrast to the voice of the offenders. Hence, the disclosures were made to break that forced silence by demanding voice and solidarity. For instance, in Irmak’s experience, the feeling of anger with a strong wish to disrupt the idealised, ‘fake’ public image of the offender was a motivation for the disclosure:

The emotional side of it. . . the trauma caused by the violence I experienced and the anger of not being able to say a word about it. It was so unfair. You know what this person did to you, but you see, when you look at your Twitter, you see this person in your timeline, socialising with other women with his fake feminist persona, you see that his writings are being promoted a lot. . . This creates a lot of anger. By disclosing, I want this person to take responsibility of what he has done to me, and others to acknowledge that.

This quotation exemplifies that ‘offender accountability’ could be a crucial ‘justice need’ for survivors (Daly, 2017; Fileborn, 2017; Loney-Howes et al., 2022). In addition, as noted by Herman (2005: 585), ‘acknowledgement of harm’ and ‘validation from the community’ is illustrated as central to the sense of justice and well-being.

Relatedly, our participants emphasised their need for having a voice and being treated with dignity by their communities became the context of their decision to disclose. Esra explained how the current political atmosphere in the country resonated with her struggle to make her voice heard:

It was the last thing consolidated my decision, Istanbul Convention, that made me very angry and brought me to a breaking point . . . I said “enough”. I had this friend who said to me, “I do not believe you. You are lying. It is all in your head”. People were silent. They were ignoring my complaints. You know, Sara Ahmed, she says “What is complaint? It is a cry and a shout”. I wanted to scream. It was a scream to be heard. I wanted people to hear and understand. (Esra)

She seems to situate her story within these negative and in most ways oppressive circumstances occurring in Turkey, where women are left alone and not believed. Thus, her act of disclosing can be interpreted as a practice through which the personal and political agency meet. Similarly, Sevda underlined that revealing her experiences online was a way of performing agency:

I am not a victim, I do not accept this identity, I experienced this, but I am a successful young person, I am much more than being a victim. I also wanted to say this, to show that I am more than what happened to me. (Sevda)

McGlynn and Westmarland (2019: 28) notes that justice is about ‘being valued as a whole person in society, not just as a victim, survivor or piece of evidence . . . belonging in society, being recognized, being treated with dignity, having a voice’. Thus, through ‘speaking out’, our participants wanted their stories to be heard, recognised, and understood, and, in this way, to reclaim their self-respect.

They also highlighted their wish to create a collective space for solidarity, to oppose the forced silence and secrecy imposed on them. They wanted their cases to be encouraging for other survivors to raise their voices and speak about their experiences of violence openly and also to find allies for their own cause and make others feel supported:

I wanted this to be known by others, I expected to find people saying, “We understand you, we are here for you”, like an online hug maybe . . . And I wanted to say, “I am experiencing this, and it is not easy, but I am not giving up, you also experience similar things and I know you are not giving up too”, I just wanted to give a message of solidarity. (Deniz)

He [the offender in another case different from hers] is a very well-known man, respected by others; when she revealed what happened, people said, “How can you say these bad things about this person?”. But she owned her story. . . I wanted to write about my experiences to support her and I hoped that some others would come out and speak about their experiences too . . . Because otherwise you shared this behind closed doors and like what this man did to me, it stays hidden. (Filiz)

Fileborn (2014: 44) argues that naming violence through online disclosures ‘transforms an individual harm to a collective one and provides the impetus for further political action’. Similarly, our findings show that disclosures are perceived as a powerful form of online activism through which survivors wish to empower and mobilise each other and create a collective identity (O’Neill, 2018).

‘How can I stop him?’: Preventing the offenders

One common underlying reason reported for the online disclosures was a desire to stop further victimisation in their lives and prevent the offenders from hurting others in the future. For our participants, in connection with their wish to create safety from violence both for themselves and for other women, this was a way of ensuring informal justice. Simge commented how her realisation that there could be other victims became her main motivation to reveal her story:

When you see that the perpetrator is so comfortable with his acts even after your complaint, it becomes easy to guess that there are other victims too. Because, for example, I was working there for 13 days, I experienced such a thing on the 13th day and the first reaction I got was to be silenced with money, he offered me money. This means that he did it before and there could be times it worked. He threatened me, so it means that he knew that he could silence women with threats. I thought he must be ‘rehabilitated’, he must be removed from the community, so this thought gave me strength and I shared it on Twitter.

Sevda similarly stated that preventing the offender from repeating the same actions and reaching out to other potential victims and warning them was one of the main reasons why she disclosed— she aimed to stop the ‘cycle’ of violence:

How can I prevent this man from repeating this pattern? Disclosure comes as an answer here. I remember that I did hear so many things about this man before, before starting to work with him, like gossip, but I did not care. And he also tried to manipulate me about this gossip, he was aware of it, he was telling me “They are trying to cancel me, defame me’ etc. I cannot believe I did not care but it is what it is. And I knew that after me there would be other women; it was a cycle. And later I thought so many women can behave like me, they can be deceived, manipulated with the same tactics. But a public disclosure . . . I thought it would be more effective than gossip. I thought I could stop him in this way.

One way of stopping the offenders was to put an end to their hypocrisy and prevent the deception they created in the minds of others:

I realised that there was a big contradiction, that is, the person I was in contact with was someone who described himself as a pro-feminist man . . . who could talk comfortably about violence, harassment, such issues. The very same person inflicts psychological violence on me . . . “You cannot do this, you cannot deceive people, women”, that’s what I had in mind. (Irmak)

Some women also reported that they chose disclosure to stop further harm to themselves coming from the perpetrators:

I received a letter, it was so disturbing, like, telling me that they were watching me, so like, I should not talk about women, I should not talk about violence, etc. My decision to share all these, it was like saying “Leave me alone!” “Do not harass me anymore!” Receiving that letter was a trigger. (Deniz)

These findings support the previous studies that highlight the prevention of further violence by the offenders as an underlying motivation of why survivors seek justice, formal or informal (Clark, 2015; Fileborn, 2014, 2017; McGlynn and Westmarland, 2019; Salter, 2013). Survivors wish to see their offenders punished for their wrongdoings, denounced, and condemned at a community level and ‘to protect the broader community and work towards the prevention of violence’ (Fileborn, 2017; 1485). In this sense, as noted by Clark (2015) and supported by our findings, for survivors to feel justice, consequences should be ‘purposeful’; it should convey a critical message to offenders that violence is not something to be accepted and tolerated.

‘It was both worth it and not’: Justice and its costs

When we asked our participants whether they felt that their expectations have been met through disclosures and justice has been ensured, their answers mostly indicated a mix of ambivalent feelings and thoughts. They said that they were able to own their stories and their voice through disclosures, and they felt empowered because of the solidarity and support they received in these online platforms. However, they also highlighted that some of their expectations were not met and that there were times that they felt that the disclosures created more harm than good in their lives. Still, in the end, despite these negative outcomes, they all highlighted that they did not regret their decision to disclose. The achievement of solidarity was described as a major gain in their lives. The following subthemes ‘justice through solidarity’ and ‘barriers to justice’ explain these opposite but simultaneous outcomes of online disclosures.