Attending to Difference in Indigenous People's Experiences of Cyberbullying: Toward a Research Agenda

Abstract

Abstract Broadly understood as repeated, intentional, and aggressive behaviors facilitated by digital technologies, cyberbullying has been identified as a significant public health concern in Australia. However, there have been critical debates about the theoretical and methodological assumptions of cyberbullying research. On the whole, this research has demonstrated an aversion to accounting for context, difference, and complexity. This insensitivity to difference is evident in the absence of nuanced accounts of Indigenous people's experiences of cyberbullying. In this chapter, we extend recent critiques of dominant approaches to cyberbullying research and argue for novel theoretical and methodological engagements with Indigenous people's experiences of cyberbullying. We review a range of literature that unpacks the many ways that social, cultural, and political life is different for Indigenous peoples. More specifically, we demonstrate there are good reasons to assume that online conflict is different for Indigenous peoples, due to diverse cultural practices and the broader political context of settler-colonialism. We argue that the standardization of scholarly approaches to cyberbullying is delimiting its ability to attend to social difference in online conflict, and we join calls for more theoretically rigorous, targeted, difference-sensitive studies into bullying. Keywords Indigenous Cyberbullying Social media Bullying Technology Violence Citation Carlson, B. and Frazer, R. (2021), "Attending to Difference in Indigenous People's Experiences of Cyberbullying: Toward a Research Agenda", Bailey, J., Flynn, A. and Henry, N. (Ed.) The Emerald International Handbook of Technology-Facilitated Violence and Abuse (Emerald Studies In Digital Crime, Technology and Social Harms), Emerald Publishing Limited, Bingley, pp. 145-163. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83982-848-520211008 Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited Copyright © 2021 Bronwyn Carlson and Ryan Frazer. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This chapter is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of these chapters (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode. License This chapter is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of these chapters (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode. Introduction While new social technologies bring many benefits, they also “offer powerful, yet potentially damaging ways for young people to communicate and respond” (Nilan, Burgess, Hobbs, Threadgold, & Alexander, 2015, p. 2). Broadly understood as repeated, intentional aggressive behaviors facilitated by digital technology platforms, cyberbullying has emerged as one of the most prominent forms of digitally mediated harm. While often considered an extension of “traditional” forms of schoolyard bullying, cyberbullying has attracted additional concern because of the unique affordances of digital technologies. For example, in the online context, bullying can be enacted anonymously, producing a “disinhibition effect” on perpetrators (Walker, Craven, & Tokunga, 2013); it has been described as “non-stop bullying”, in that it can pervade the previously “safe space” of the home (Mishna, Saini, & Solomon, 2009, p. 1224); and it can attract much larger audiences through connecting with extensive online networks. Cyberbullying has recently been identified as a significant public health concern in Australia. A major 2014 report for the Australian Government Department of Communications concluded that some 20% of 8–17-year-olds experienced cyberbullying in the previous year (Spears, Keeley, Bates, & Katz, 2014, p. 2). A report by youth health organization ReachOut Australia (2018) found 380,000 young Australians were victims of cyberbullying in 2018. And a recent national survey found that 39% of Australians have experienced some form of cyber-hatred and violence, and that it has cost the Australian economy an estimated $3.7 billion (Australia Institute, 2019). Cyberbullying has been linked to a range of negative health outcomes, most seriously in the forms of depression, anxiety, and suicide ideation (Shohoudi Mojdehi, Leduc, Shohoudi Mojdehi, & Talwar, 2019). There are also significant social consequences, with victims and perpetrators being more likely to truant school, take leave from employment, and experience social estrangement more generally. Accordingly, cyberbullying has attracted significant attention from researchers, who have sought to accurately measure the rates, effects, and possible preventative measures of cyberbullying. Recently, however, there have been critical debates about the theoretical and methodological assumptions of cyberbullying research. On the whole, this research has demonstrated an aversion to accounting for context, difference, and complexity. On one hand, there have been concerns that particular approaches to studying cyberbullying have become standardized and canonized, and their disciplinary histories and theoretical assumptions have become obscured in the process. A central issue has hinged on whether the concept of “cyberbullying” itself requires a clear, unambiguous, and consistently applied definition or whether it is too varied a social phenomenon to be fixed in such a way. On the other hand, cyberbullying researchers have tended to overlook important markers of social difference, generally conducting large-scale quantitative research that assumes a homogeneous, normalized, white subject; or, at best, differentiating participants only by age and binary sex. This insensitivity to difference is evident in the absence of nuanced accounts of Indigenous people's experiences of cyberbullying, both in Australia and globally (Carlson & Frazer, 2018b). Internet technologies have been taken up enthusiastically by Indigenous peoples across Australia (Carlson & Frazer, 2018b). They have brought great benefits, such as overcoming difficulties in living across geographically distant communities, sustaining informal networks of care and support, and connecting with crucial knowledge, events, and opportunities. Researchers have shown these technologies are used in highly culturally specific ways, with a clear continuity between offline and online cultures (Carlson & Frazer, 2015). However, they also present new dangers to Indigenous people's physical, emotional, and cultural safety. The rapid uptake of mobile technologies has seen, as noted by Indigenous scholar Peter Radoll (2012), “an increase in cyber-safety issues” (p. 11) in Indigenous communities – including exposure to racist violence, identity theft, and appropriation of sensitive cultural knowledge. Significantly, there is also evidence that, like many other minority groups, Indigenous peoples are disproportionately affected by cyberbullying (Kral, 2014, p. 181). Despite this, research to date has largely overlooked Indigenous people's experiences of cyberbullying. The small body of available research specifically on Indigenous cyberbullying – in Canada (Broll, Dunlop, & Crooks, 2018; Brownlee et al., 2014; Mobin, Feng, & Neudorf, 2017), the US (Samulski, 2014), and Australia (Carlson & Frazer, 2018a; Radoll, 2012; Vaarzon-Morel, 2014) – has yielded important insights, particularly in demonstrating that we cannot assume cyberbullying occurs at the same rate, for the same reasons, and with the same impacts, as for non-Indigenous peoples. In this chapter, we extend recent critiques of dominant approaches to cyberbullying research and argue for novel theoretical and methodological engagements with Indigenous people's experiences of cyberbullying. It is structured in two major sections. In the first section, we unpack some of the major trends in current cyberbullying research, before attending to the growing chorus of critiques from qualitative researchers. We argue that the standardization of scholarly approaches to cyberbullying is delimiting its capacity to attend to social difference in online conflict; and we join calls for more theoretically rigorous, targeted, difference-sensitive studies into bullying. Following this, in the second section, we review a range of literature that unpacks the many ways in which social, cultural, and political life is different for Indigenous peoples, specifically in relation to social conflict. On the one hand, we argue there are a range of cultural differences that mediate and shape interpersonal interactions, including cultures of kinship, communication, and conflict. On the other hand, we argue that Indigenous people's experiences of being online cannot be meaningfully separated from broader racial politics of settler-colonialism and its manifestation through disadvantage. To be Indigenous online, we argue, is to be already entangled within a violent, conflictual politics – for which research on online conflict has so far failed to account. Finally, we close by outlining an initial agenda for research on Indigenous people's experiences of cyberbullying. In particular, we argue there are three major blind spots in cyberbullying research: their empirical focus, theoretical framings, and methodological approaches. Understanding cyberbullying as a discursive formation always embedded within a social, cultural, and political milieu, this chapter extends critical approaches to cyberbullying research and advances a politically and culturally nuanced approach to understanding cyberbullying. Major Trends in Cyberbullying Research Context-Insensitivity in Cyberbullying Research Understanding the tensions in cyberbullying research requires an understanding of the academic field's historical and academic roots. To this end, in this first section, we offer a brief overview of the scholarly history of bullying and cyberbullying research, paying attention to its grounding in the field of developmental psychology, before moving on to recent critiques. Scholarly interest in school bullying first emerged in the 1960s when researchers in Sweden began investigating what was initially called “mobbing” (Olweus, 2013) – broadly understood as repeated schoolyard aggression toward less powerful students. The field expanded significantly over the next few decades, as state and public concern around the possible negative effects of schoolyard bullying intensified. Bullying gradually became accepted as a significant, serious, and widespread public health concern. By and large, bullying research sought to better understand its prevalence and effects and sought to develop effective interventions. Swedish scholar Dan Olweus has been a central figure in bullying research since the field's establishment. Before Olweus, researchers tended to focus on the broader contextual, group and social factors in bullying (see Canty, Stubbe, Steers, & Collings, 2016 for this academic history). Drawing on ideas from developmental psychology, however, Olweus's work shifted the focus to individual actors, analyzing their psychological traits and behaviors, and de-emphasizing any broader social and cultural context. The aim, for Olweus, was to predict and mitigate pathologically deviant bullying behavior (Canty et al., 2016). Through this work, Olweus (2013) produced the most influential definition of bullying, which is composed of three main criteria: (1) intentional aggressive behavior, (2) that involves an abuse of power, and (3) is repeated over time. Cyberbullying emerged as a scholarly interest in 2000, where the term became used to describe seemingly new forms of aggressive behavior that were playing out on then-new digital technologies, particularly mobile phones and internet-capable computers. It soon became clear that these technologies had led to an evolution in the nature of peer-to-peer aggression (Hinduja & Patchin, 2010). At that time, there had been a series of high-profile deaths among teens who had experienced severe bullying through these new social technologies, and these events centered public, media, and state attention on these technologies' capacity to facilitate and proliferate harm on youth. Researchers were quick to translate Olweus's generic conceptualization of “traditional” bullying into this new online context. Cyberbullying became understood “as a form of bullying, in line with other forms, such as verbal, physical and indirect/relational bullying” (Olweus & Limber, 2018, p. 141). While there is some disagreement around its exact definition, Kowalski, Giumetti, Schroeder, and Lattanner (2014) note that scholars generally emphasize four main elements: “(1) intentional aggressive behavior that (2) is carried out repeatedly, (3) occurs between a perpetrator and victim who are unequal in power, and (4) occurs through electronic technologies” (p. 1109). Over time, a more or less standard typology of cyberbullying forms emerged, including flaming, harassment, image-based sexual abuse, outing, exclusion, cyberstalking, and impersonation (Campbell, Cross, Spears, & Slee, 2010; Carlson & Frazer, 2018a; Henry et al., 2020). Cyberbullying researchers, predominantly with backgrounds in behavioral psychology, health and education, have largely considered a uniform definition both desirable and necessary. Bauman (2015) argues that “research requires a precise and accepted definition that all can use” (p. 23) – what Olweus and Limber (2018) refer to as “concept validity”. For these researchers, more or less universal agreement around what constitutes cyberbullying is necessary if we are to, first, measure the rates of cyberbullying perpetration and victimization; second, map rates of change across time, age, and location; and, third, identify effective interventions. By employing increasingly standardized definitions, these researchers have conducted large scale, quantitative, survey-driven studies that have sought validity, replicability, and comparability in cyberbullying research. However, as we discuss in the following sections, the fast-growing body of cyberbullying research has also attracted significant criticism. In particular, there are disagreements among scholars about what actually constitutes “cyberbullying” and how it is best conceptualized in research. The gradual standardization of cyberbullying research has left it “typically blind to the relational nuances and complexities that characterize cyberbullying” (Nilan et al., 2015, p. 3). And as we will discuss in the chapter's second major section, this blindness is particularly acute when it comes to understanding cyberbullying toward and among Indigenous peoples. Critiques of the Dominant Approach While researchers have conducted excellent work in understanding the extent and effects of cyberbullying across a range of contexts, more recently, scholars from outside these more quantitative, positivist fields have posed critical questions around the implicit epistemological and ontological assumptions this research has made about what is, in practice, an extremely complex social phenomenon. The dominant approach – grounded in and inflected by the discipline of developmental psychology – has individualized and homogenized cyberbullying and related forms of online aggression, rather than understanding it as something alive and unstable, something that plays out in overlapping social fields, involving often ontologically ambiguous and differently positioned actors. These more critical researchers, generally from the social sciences, have argued that clear, rigid, axiomatized definitions can obscure the actual lived experiences, ideas, and motivations of people implicated in online conflict. In this section, we outline four significant problems in dominant academic approaches to cyberbullying research, including (1) the problematic influence of its dominant definition, (2) its implicit assumption of cultural universalism, (3) the reproduction of a perpetrator–victim model, and (4) its implicit moral hierarchy. The Standardization of Definitions Over the last 10 years, a body of research has expressed concerns around “the power of prevailing definitions” of cyberbullying in research (Kofoed & Staksrud, 2019); a concern that popular definitions have a problematic influence on how researchers, policymakers, and young people themselves approach the issue. Definitions, as Canty et al. (2016) remind us, “are made not born” (p. 48); they have social, cultural, and academic histories that are often obscured through repeated use. Reflecting on the previous decade of research, Canty et al. (2016) argue that: … consistent a priori application of [Olweus's] definition has created an aura of authority and temporal stability that obscures its origin and development, its disciplinary paradigm and assumption, and evidence that the term “bullying” has multiple meanings and uses. (p. 48) Kofoed and Staksrud (2019, p. 1007) heed Canty et al.'s (2016) warning and document the strange side effects of “definitional overlearning” in cyberbullying research, which can occur through anti-bullying efforts to educate children about bullying by providing them with existing models and definitions of bullying. This has produced “some puzzling side effects” (Kofoed & Staksrud, 2019, p. 1011), they observe, such as when students are surveyed and respond by telling researchers their definition is “wrong” because it doesn't match what they've already learnt elsewhere; or when students explain that they aren't “cyberbullying” because they only did it a single time – meaning it doesn't fit the official criteria. Their work demonstrates the ontological and social power definitions can have beyond academic circles, where children are taught the supposedly “right” definition of what constitutes cyberbullying. In these ways, the conventional definition leads to “artificial homogeneity,” as Canty et al. (2016, p. 53) explain. Kofoed and Staksrud (2019) suggest current conceptualizations of cyberbullying are “inadequate in addressing the complexities of technologically mediated exclusionary processes” (p. 1007). Real situations, they argue, often exceed conventional understandings. Difference Blindness and Cultural Imperialism Second, by relying on a static, three-/four-pronged definition of bullying, which originated within a western social, cultural, and academic context, research has tended to be blind to important markers of social and cultural difference (Bodkin-Andrews, O'Rourke, Dillon, Craven, & Yeung, 2012; Coffin, Larson, & Cross, 2010). On the one hand, despite indications that minority populations experience higher rates of cyberbullying (Llorent, Ortega-Ruiz, & Zych, 2016), research has tended to be demographically limited (Broll et al., 2018; Mobin et al., 2017), focusing mainly on white, urban populations, differentiating research participants only by age and (binary) gender (Brownlee et al., 2014; Kowalski et al., 2014; Mobin et al., 2017). Consequently, it has largely overlooked non-majority populations, including ethnic, cultural, differently-abled, sexual, gender, and religious minorities. Likewise, demographic variables that cut along socioeconomic, geographical (urban, suburban, rural, etc.) and educational (state, private, religious, etc.) lines have also tended to be entirely overlooked. Cyberbullying research has also tended to be geographically situated within white, majority world contexts – particularly North America and Europe. As Canty et al. (2016) note, “bullying” is a thoroughly Western concept, and correlates don't necessarily exist in other contexts (Smith, del Barrio, & Tokunga, 2015). Shohoudi Mojdehi et al.’s (2019) work has shown that there are significant cultural factors and “moral mechanisms” that shape how individuals experience and make sense of various forms of social conflict – such as differences between more “individualist” and more “collectivist” societies. In this context, Schott (2014) has questioned whether a cross-cultural definition of cyberbullying is even possible. By not acknowledging the social and cultural embeddedness of cyberbullying research, there is a danger of cultural imperialism – where an idea is taken and inappropriately imposed upon other cultural contexts (Canty et al., 2016). Reified Subject Positions Third, the dominant model of cyberbullying reifies fixed, individual subject positions. Based on Olweus's influential formulation, bullying is understood as a particular subset of “aggression,” which relies on a basic perpetrator–victim binary (Kofoed & Ringrose, 2012). Kofoed and Ringrose (2012) note that in the vast majority of bullying research, then, there are a standard set of relatively fixed subjects: bully, victim, and bystander. This reification of a standard, inflexible set of subject positions has major consequences for research and practice. As boyd (2014) explains, “by focusing on the perpetrator and protecting the victim, well-intentioned adults often fail to recognize the complexity of most conflicts” (p. 136). The victim–perpetrator dyad can obscure the more ambiguous and unstable elements of the cyberbullying event, overlooking other actors, practices, ideas, and objects involved. It also assumes the involvement only of individual actors. Bodkin-Andrews, O'Rourke, Dillon, Craven, and Yeung (2012) write that “most conceptualizations of bullying occur at the level of the individual, with little sensitivity to notions of cultural identity, broader community issues, socioeconomic and historical disadvantage or oppression” (p. 7). This individualist approach precludes the possibility of understanding more collective forms of hatred and bullying; including how social forms of hate – racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and so on – can be entangled within particular cyberbullying events. Consequently, rather than assuming a simple perpetrator–victim binary, smaller, more theoretically robust qualitative studies have shown that there are often many differently-positioned and ambivalently-motivated subjects entangled in the event of online conflict (Marwick & boyd, 2014). Things are much messier and more ambiguous and complex than quantitative studies tend to acknowledge. The Moral Hierarchy Finally, as Kofoed and Ringrose (2012) note, there is an implicit moral hierarchy baked into standard bullying analysis. The legacy of developmental psychological thinking in cyberbullying research is apparent in how bullying is understood as an individual pathology. The perpetrator–victim model carries moral assumptions: “if bullying is a subset of aggressive behavior, then bullies are aggressors,” explains Schott (2014, p. 25). One set of behaviors is understood as “pathological violence,” while much other “everyday cruelty” is considered “normal violence” (Ellwood & Davies, 2010; Kofoed & Ringrose, 2012) – and, as Ringrose and Renold (2010) have shown, there are often gendered, racialized, and sexualized aspects to this. There are two key points to be made here. First, as research has repeatedly demonstrated, there is often a blurring of responsibility in online bullying. In practice, lines of fault and responsibility, the intentions of actors, the existence of violence and abuse are often ambiguous or morally ambivalent (Ellwood & Davies, 2010). In each actual case, it is often not clear who is the aggressor, who is the victim, and who wields power. Indeed, one of the defining marks of cyberbullying is its affordance of deniability – that it is often unclear who the perpetrator was, who “started” it, and what the intention of each actor was (Nilan et al., 2015). Online anonymity confuses clear culpability through plausible deniability – someone can always say it was someone else, or that they didn't “really” mean to hurt them (Mishna et al., 2009). Second, and more generally, there needs to be a recognition that interpersonal conflict is often a normal and “healthy” part of sociality (boyd, 2014). Thornberg (2011) encourages researchers to look beyond the supposedly “pathological” behaviors of individuals and to instead try to understand bullying as a complex social phenomenon, involving a range of meanings, forces, desires, and practices. The dominant cyberbullying model precludes more nuanced understandings of how power, blame, intention, and agency are embedded within online conflicts. Rather than automatically assuming “bullies” to be bad, pathological, or even criminal actors, moral assumptions about social behaviors need to be understood and carefully contextualized (Shohoudi Mojdehi et al., 2019). By and large, there appears to be an aversion to difference, complexity, and context in most cyberbullying research. By only taking into account the demographic variables of age and gender – and ignoring all other contextual factors – researchers have tended to produce relatively context-insensitive models of cyberbullying. These largely psychological and sociological studies, often drawing on standardized survey instruments, tend to individualize and homogenize participants, and in doing so, erase the social, cultural, political, and economic contexts in which cyberbullying occurs. The legacy of developmental psychology is one of a standardized, culturally-specific, and context-insensitive model of online conflict. The most critical research outlined above makes clear that there is room for research that thinks differently about cyberbullying, that draws on different understandings of “what counts” as cyberbullying, and is better equipped to attend to difference. Considering Context in Indigenous People's Experiences of Cyberbullying With a few important exceptions, Indigenous populations have not received adequate attention in cyberbullying research. This is despite a growing body of evidence that Indigenous peoples experience higher rates of cyberbullying across a diverse range of settler-colonial contexts, including Australia (Kral, 2014; Spears et al., 2014), Canada, and the US (Lemstra, Rogers, Thompson, Moraros, & Tempier, 2011; Samulski, 2014). This is a major shortcoming, as Indigenous peoples constitute a distinct social, cultural, and political population in settler nations, with wide-ranging consequences for how they engage with social media technologies. In this second major section, we extend the above critiques of cyberbullying research by engaging with work across a range of disciplines – sociology, political economy, media studies, anthropology. Here we build on a literature review we were commissioned to produce by the Aboriginal Health & Medical Research Council of New South Wales, in which we argue that cyberbullying studies have – so far – failed to adequately engage with the cultural and political contexts in which Indigenous people are embedded through online conflict (see Carlson & Frazer, 2018a). On the one hand, we argue that researchers must acknowledge the importance of different cultural, social, and communicative formations in constituting how conflict arises and what role it plays within communities. On the other, we argue that, in understanding cyberbullying, research must attend to the broader context of settler-colonialism. In short, in this section we unpack some ways researchers can engage with the cultural and political contexts in which Indigenous peoples are embedded to better understand their experiences and meanings of cyberbullying. Following this, in the chapter's final section, we suggest a number of pathways forward for cyberbullying research. We argue that research specifically on, by, and informed by, the ontological and epistemological frames of Indigenous people is needed, if we are to develop effective, relevant interventions for cyberbullying. The Cultural Context of Cyberbullying Encompassing hundreds of distinct nations and language groups across Australia, Indigenous populations hold myriad value systems, sets of norms, ontologies, and spiritual beliefs. Against western notions of the rational, discretely-bound and self-made individual, Indigenous ways of being and knowing tend to emphasize relations, connections, and collectivist notions of responsibility (Christie, 2005). These social and cultural differences are not set apart from the use of digital technologies but are entangled complexly within them – affecting both how these technologies can be used and what impact they have on Indigenous peoples and communities. While working to change social relations between people, social media technologies also have continuities with traditional communicative practices. Srinivasan (2013) notes, for instance, that mobile technologies tend to be “translated, adopted, and shaped as they move locally” – an observation that challenges the dominant “top-down” view of technology production and use (p. 207). As discussed above, however, the vast majority of cyberbullying research is insensitive to these significant cultural contexts. Instead, by assuming a homogeneous – and generally white – population, research tends to ignore, reduce, and strip away these cultural differences. In this section, we draw on our prior research to point toward two key ways in which cultural difference affects online conflict (Carlson & Frazer, 2018a). First, we argue that systems of kinship and cultures of communication shape how Indigenous peoples engage with Internet technologies, which in turn affect the cause and mitigation of cyberbullying. Second, we argue that different peo