I got the good news this morning that the The Crime Victim Compensation and Support Authority will fund my new project for two years. The study, Understandings of Online Victimization: A comparison of social media discussions, news reports and court proceedings, aims to identify and analyze differences in how the subject position of online victims is constructed in various domains.

This project is focused on online crimes, i.e. crimes that take place within the digital domain, or at least rely on an internet connection between victims and perpetrators in order to be carried out. Acts of, for example, paedophilia may be documented and posted online, digital tools may be used in trafficking, robberies may be coordinated through the internet, etc. But the main interest here is victims of those crimes that have their basis within the sphere of the digital media (identity theft, cyberstalking, cyberbullying/harassment, e-fraud, phishing, skimming etc.). There are of course no definite borders here since acts of, for example, “real-life” bullying may be extended into the online context and vice versa. This project, however, will put the understandings of the victimization taking place online at the center of attention, and address the extensions of these processes into other domains when needed. The goal is to gain knowledge about how online victimization is understood, in order to provide results that can be compared to how victimization in relation to other types of crimes (offline crimes) have been understood.

Every context where understandings of victims or victimhood are formed offers the opportunity to analyze stories and narratives of, as well as about, what it means to be a victim. The aim of the project is to analyze the vocabularies of victimization through which subjectivities of victims of online crimes are managed in the definitional realms of, first, participatory social media, second, news reporting, and third, court proceedings. The overarching goal of the research is to thereby assess if, how, and to what extent these discourses differ from or overlap with one another. A specific focus is on comparing social media discourse on the one hand, with the more traditional domains of news reporting and court proceedings on the other.