The Digital Empowerment Era: Social Media’s Role In De-Stigmatizing and Rehabilitating Acid Attack Survivors
Keywords:
acid attack survivors, digital empowerment, rehabilitation, cyber-victimization, digital activism.Abstract
Acid attacks are one of the most deliberately disfiguring types of gender-based violence. Survivors of these attacks have to deal with not only terrible physical injuries but also terrible psychological effects, such as stigma, social isolation, marginalization, and economic marginalization. Traditional media structures have historically rendered survivors either invisible or grotesquely hyper-visible, often lacking the resources to grant survivors the agency of self-representation. The rise of networked social media sites like Instagram, Tik Tok, YouTube, and Facebook has changed this landscape of forced invisibility. First of all, survivors have cheap, easy-to-use communication tools that let them talk directly to a global audience.
The following paper will be a qualitative multi-case study of how digital storytelling, community building, and internet advocacy have helped to socio-psychologically rehabilitate acid attack survivors in the last five years (20182023). Based on the content analysis of high profile survivor-led digital movements and thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with eighteen survivor-advocates in South Asia, East Africa, and Western Europe, this study assesses the processes by which social media operates as a virtual sanctuary, a space in which survivors circumvent the traditional media gatekeepers, develop transnational solidarity networks, and effectively transform their public identity into someone who is no longer a passive The dangers inherent in digital empowerment such as cyber-victimisation, the commodification of trauma via vulnerability porn, and how digital access is structurally blocked to lower socio-economic groups who do not have access to meaningful digital use is also critically interrogated in the paper.
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