Raising awareness and combatting digital gender based violence through service-learning

Abstract

Digital Gender Based Violence (DGBV) is a growing social problem and affects especially younger people. DGBV describes any kind of Gender Based Violence (GBV) related with new Information and Communication Technologies. To combat DGBV we designed the teaching innovation project "Digital gender-based violence: learning from feminisms" aiming to contribute to the eradication of digital sexist violence in order to promote healthy digital relationships. The project is part of the broader Service Learning project of the University of Barcelona “Sharing Ideas – University goes to High school”: In the classes at University, students will learn the curriculum specific content, to develop a workshop to be implemented in short sessions with high school students.

We implement the project at the University of Barcelona in the subjects Social Control (6 ECTS, compulsory) and Sociology of Genders (3 ECTS, optional) of the Sociology Bachelor. Beside the high schools, the project also involves the feminist third sector organization Alia complementing the university students’ training on DGBV. The different actors involved underline the inter-institutional character of the project. The project is a special Service Learning experience as it applies feminist research and teaching methodologies, emphasizing social transformation of gender inequalities.

For our project, we share our research results on DGBV with our students in order to enable them to identify and recognize what are DGBV and why they occur. Therefor we expose our own research answering the following questions: what profiles are most affected? What are the profiles of the aggressors? What are the survivors’ reactions on DGBV and how do they evaluate them? For the introductory sessions, we count with the support of the third sector association Alia. The main objective of these activities is to raise the awareness of existing DGBV between adolescents and young people. In addition, we aim to share tools to protect themselves from DGBV as well as to deal with DGBV in order to finally eradicate DGBV.

We wonder if the project achieves its goals: Do university students acquire new content at class? Are the contents we provide university students with helpful in order to prepare the workshops at school? What are the additional contents and competences acquired during the workshops at school? Do the high school students benefit from the workshop in terms of contents and competences? We also assess gender differences taking into account gender and paying specially attention to non-binary identified persons. In order to assess these research questions, we consider observation of the sessions, students’ reflections (qualitative) as well as a quantitative questionnaire.