Ringrose, J., Ging, D., Mishna, F., Milne, B., Horeck, T., & Mendes, K. (2025). Postdigital bystanding: Youth experiences of sexual violence workshops in schools in England, Ireland, and Canada. Behavioral Sciences, 15(1), Article 1.
Link: https://doi.org/10.3390/bs15010081
Open access: Yes
Notes: Bystander intervention has long been considered a strategic way to address violence. However, it is yet unclear what does it mean to be a bystander when practices of violence occur in a continuum of offline and online settings. In this paper, Ringrose and colleagues examine what they term postdigital bystander to “emphasise the fact that the online and offline are now thoroughly enmeshed and that incidents of abuse and sexual- and gender-based violence are constantly traversing digital and nondigital spaces” (p. 3). Here, they note that the post in postdigital “signals not that anything is over or finished, but that we are living with the consequences of the entanglement of the digital and analogue” (p. 3). Methodologically, Ringrose et al. study a series of workshops in schools in Ireland, England, and Canada, drawing on art-based research to better understand the experiences of young people. In brief, the authors found that, while postdigital bystander interventions do have an effect, the impact is conditional to contextual factors—such as cultures of sexism, masculine defensiveness, elitism, and racism. Overall, this paper outlines key insights to understand violence in a postdigital world, taking online harms seriously as critical mechanisms through which power structures operate.
Abstract: In this paper, we report on creative- and arts-based sexual violence and bystander intervention workshops we developed and researched in England, Ireland, and Canada, through evaluation surveys, observations, and focus group interviews with nearly 1200 young people (aged 13–18). Whist the young people generally reported benefitting from the intervention, in the context of increasing use of digital technologies amongst youth, we explore the context-specific challenges they faced in learning about and being supported through bystander strategies across a wide range of diverse school spaces. We use the term postdigital bystanding to explicitly explore how teen’s digital networks are often connected to the school-based ‘real life’ peer group, in ways that complicate clear distinctions between online and offline, arguing that these postdigital dynamics have not yet been adequately considered in bystanding interventions. We analyse how the intersectional community, cultural, and identity-specific factors in particular schooling environments shape responses to bystanding in postdigital environments, including how factors of sexism, defensive masculinity, elitism, racism, and a reluctance to report digital issues played out in the responses to the workshops. Finally, following young people’s suggestions, we recommend that schools need to cultivate better safety and support strategies for youth in order to make postdigital bystander interventions more responsive and therefore effective in challenging and preventing sexual violence in society.
