Session: Digital Support Seeking for Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence, Online Harassment, and Family Violence: Using Technology for Connection, Resources, and Healing (Society for Social Work and Research 28th Annual Conference - Recentering & Democratizing Knowledge: The Next 30 Years of Social Work Science)

The importance of technology in facilitating support for survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV), sexual assault (SA), community violence, and family violence has been highlighted in recent years. The global #MeToo movement in 2017 and other related hashtag activism campaigns (e.g., #WhyIStayed) have prompted millions of survivors to disclose online and find connection in social media spaces. Subsequently, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the rapid uptake of digital technologies (e.g., chat and text hotlines) in IPV/SA agencies as they adapted to provide supportive resources remotely to facilitate service access. Digital technologies (e.g., Smartphone apps, virtual hotlines, and social media support groups) have been proposed to meaningfully engage survivors of violence and address patterns of service under-utilization—especially among socially underrepresented and minoritized communities. These technologies afford many opportunities to support abuse survivor well-being, including facilitating connections to community resources, reducing the stigma of accessing in-person services, providing safety planning, alleviating social isolation, nurturing peer support, and easing barriers to accessing services. However, within the context of IPV and online harassment, digital technologies are often employed as powerful tools of harassment, coercive control, and surveillance. Indeed, advocates at IPV/SA agencies have expressed concerns regarding using these tools to connect with victims due to limits in data security and breaches of confidentiality. Further, social media usage amplifies previous mental health vulnerabilities among users, particularly adolescents, and exacerbates the digital divide.

This symposium aims to provide an in-depth discussion regarding how people with lived experiences of IPV, SA, family violence, and online harassment use and benefit from online platforms and how IPV/SA organizations integrate digital tools into their service delivery systems. Across these presentations, we will be bringing in the voices of woman-identified politicians who have been targeted by online misinformation campaigns, IPV survivors and services providers, and youth who have experienced family violence and maltreatment. Using various methodological approaches, presenters will recount how technologies such as chat and text hotlines and social media support groups can be critical components of coordinated community response systems and facilitate survivor well-being, social support, and community connectedness. Moreover, these presentations will describe different facets of survivors' digital engagement, from the nature of youth's disclosures of child maltreatment in social media spaces to survivors' self-reports of harm reduction strategies to promote digital resiliency and healing.

Understanding violence survivors' user experiences in digital environments is imperative for reducing harm and creating safer, more trauma-responsive, healing-centered technologies and online platforms. Technology is an underexamined component of societal infrastructure that has the potential to exacerbate inequity. Due to living in an increasingly digitally mediated world, access to safe and violence-free encounters on social media is essential for abuse survivors to thrive. Collectively, these presentations contribute to broader knowledge and theory generation on how to encourage survivor support-seeking and nurture well-being and resiliency in their digital encounters.