eGirls, eCitizens

Jane Bailey, Valerie Steeves, Jane Bailey, Valerie Steeves

• Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780776622583
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Digitales Marketing

eGirls, eCitizens is a landmark work that explores the many forces that shape girls' and young women's experiences of privacy, identity, and equality in our digitally networked society. Drawing on the multi-disciplinary expertise of a remarkable team of leading Canadian and international scholars, as well as Canada's foremost digital literacy organization, MediaSmarts, this collection presents the complex realities of digitized communications for girls and young women as revealed through the findings of The eGirls Project (www.egirlsproject.ca) and other important research initiatives.

Aimed at moving dialogues on scholarship and policy around girls and technology away from established binaries of good vs bad, or risk vs opportunity, these seminal contributions explore the interplay of factors that shape online environments characterized by a gendered gaze and too often punctuated by sexualized violence.

Perhaps most importantly, this collection offers first-hand perspectives collected from girls and young women themselves, providing a unique window on what it is to be a girl in today's digitized society.

PART I

IT’S NOT THAT SIMPLE: COMPLICATING GIRLS’ EXPERIENCES ON SOCIAL MEDIA

CHAPTER I

A Perfect Storm: How the Online Environment, Social Norms, and Law Shape Girls’ Lives

Jane Bailey

Constructed as commodities and markets, trained to be nurturers and caregivers, and having their wants and voices trivialized and dismissed, Canadian girls need to have their realities recognized, and require support, resources, and programs which address their specific concerns.¹

Introduction

It is all too easy for members of dominant social groups to assume that their way of knowing the world reflects both the way the world is and the way others see and experience it. Factors like economic status, sex, race, ability, religion, sexual orientation, and gender identity centre the experiences of the privileged as objective reality, while marginalizing the experiences of non-dominant groups as if they were subjective exceptions. As Grillo and Wildman put it:

Members of dominant groups assume that their perceptions are the pertinent perceptions, that their problems are the problems that need to be addressed, and that in discourse they should be the speaker rather than the listener.²

Despite these perceptions, people’s understandings of the world are heavily influenced by their own experiences, which are dramatically affected by intersecting aspects of situation and identity.³ In a jurisdiction such as Canada (as well as in other jurisdictions subject to international human rights conventions discussed in this chapter), where those in charge of the policy agenda disproportionately represent privileged communities,⁴ there is a significant risk that policies and programs will be developed in ways that have little to do with the lived experiences of marginalized community members. At best, such policies may have little import for marginalized community members, and at worst may harm them. Recognizing and addressing knowledge gaps between policymakers and marginalized community members is therefore critical to developing meaningful policy processes and responses for all community members. This chapter focuses on the gap between Canadian federal policymakers (who are largely white, male adults with an average age of about 50) and Canadian girls, particularly when it comes to technology-related policy. I argue that demographic differences relating to age and gender, among other factors, and international instruments asserting the rights of the child, and in particular the girl child, necessitate consultation with and the participation of girls in the development of technology-related policies affecting them.

Recognition of knowledge gaps between adults and children, between women and men, between boys and girls, and between girls and women has made its way onto the international policymaking stage over the last two decades. Policy scholarship and international law recognize that policies and programs affecting children do not adequately reflect and incorporate children’s knowledge.⁵ Children⁶ bear internationally recognized human rights that entitle them both to participate on issues that affect them (according to their level of maturity),⁷ and to have their best interests and rights protected.⁸ Adults are dutybound to facilitate realization of children’s rights and to ensure that children’s best interests are protected.⁹ Scholars and those involved in community programming assert, “Children have unique bodies of knowledge about their lives, needs and concerns — together with ideas and views that derive from their direct experiences.”¹⁰ As a result, they ought to be considered experts in their everyday lives,¹¹ be understood as educators of adults about their lives,¹² and be afforded meaningful¹³ opportunities to participate in decisions, policies, and programming that affect them. At the same time, limitations in their autonomy and life experience will often mean that their participation and decision-making requires respectful adult support.¹⁴

Similarly, recognition that gender can intersect with other axes of discrimination in ways that materially impact on women’s experiences of the world has produced national and international calls for mainstreaming gender analysis at every stage of the policy process.¹⁵ Responses to gaps based on age and gender (and the intersections of each with other axes of discrimination) cannot, however, be presumed to address the needs of girls, who are marginalized by their gender among children and by their age among women.¹⁶ Among children, girls’ needs are likely to differ from boys’ needs (particularly in a sexist society),¹⁷ while in terms of age, girls’ needs may well differ from those of women (particularly in a society that prioritizes adults).¹⁸ In light of this, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child urges that States parties:

pay special attention to the right of the girl child to be heard, to receive support, if needed, to voice her view and her view be given due weight, as gender stereotypes and patriarchal values undermine and place severe limitations on girls in the enjoyment of the right [of children to be heard under Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of Children].¹⁹

Girls, then, must be consulted and engaged in developing policies and programming that affect them.²⁰ Responding to issues that impact children and youth in ways that are meaningful to girls will often require addressing systemic factors of sexism, racism, poverty, and other intersecting axes of discrimination that can structure girls’ experiences.²¹ It is essential to understand the different impacts of policy on males and females of different backgrounds, not only because generic programs are often not universally effective,²² but also because, as Jiwani notes:

gender-neutral descriptions obscure root causes of violence, and leave underlying gender-related dynamics unnamed and invisible. Instead, structured and systemic social problems appear as random, un-patterned, and individualized.²³

Meaningful inclusion of the varied realities of children, women, and girls in the policy process enhances the likelihood that policies and programming will produce positive outcomes. Equally important, incorporating their voices in the policy process creates opportunities for women and children to develop enhanced citizenship and participation skills that are central to democracy.²⁴ It can also unearth issues and responses that might otherwise be invisible to those whose life experiences are not marked by vulnerabilities based on, among other things, gender, age, race, and their complex intersections.²⁵ I suggest that fulfilling our international obligations to girls not only requires listening to them to better understand their firsthand perspectives on their everyday lives, but also requires addressing environmental factors that impede the exercise of their rights and their ability to flourish.

The interviews and focus groups with girls (aged 15 to 17) and young women (aged 18 to 22) reported in this chapter derive from concerns about a particular kind of policy: Canadian federal technology-related policy developments as they affect children (and particularly girls). Specifically, eGirls Project researchers were concerned about whether federal policy — particularly policy that is focused on amendments to criminal law as a way to address such issues as online child pornography, luring, and (more recently) “cyberbullying”²⁶ — was addressing issues and adopting approaches that reflected girls’ and young women’s experiences in their daily lives. As a result, we decided to ask girls and young women for their firsthand perspectives. We asked both about their experiences with online social media, and about the issues and responses identified as significant by policymakers during debates in the Canadian federal parliament and related committees from 1994 forward, on topics relating to children, youth, girls (where mentioned), and technology.

As reported previously,²⁷ our analysis of these debates revealed a focus on online sexual predation, online child pornography, and the age of consent, typically using gender-neutral language that effectively caused girls to disappear from the policy agenda (even in relation to sexualized violence statistically far more likely to affect girls) except when girls were used to exemplify victimhood, risky sexualized behaviour, and general irrationality. The debates we reviewed centred attention on individuals, in many ways paralleling earlier policy around violence prevention and girls previously analyzed by the Alliance of Five Research Centres on Violence (FREDA).²⁸ Areas of focus included unknown “sexual predators and naïve, negligent and irresponsible parents” and “extreme sexual abuse of babies and very young children that currently fall outside of the acceptable scope of the mainstream [corporate] agenda.”²⁹ Left largely unconsidered were underlying systemic issues such as the mainstream corporate trade in stereotypical representations of girls’ sexuality,³⁰ although these issues were occasionally raised in policy submissions on “cyberbullying.”³¹ The relatively rare instances where participants in the policy process broke from gender neutrality included specific examples of girls who had committed suicide following incidents described as “cyberbullying,”³² and more generic comments about “girls” that cast them in the “roles of criminals, naïve victims, know-it-alls in need of education and sometimes as sexual provocateurs placing men in danger of criminalization.”³³

Given the way policymakers defined the issues, reactions were, by and large, punitive, reactive, and individuated. Others have noted that related public educational responses have also responsibilized girls targeted by online harassment as authors o...