Digital violence as an expression of gender inequality in Sonora´s educational environments

Abstract

Digital violence is a type of latent violence for any user of information and communication technologies. Various social and academic organizations report a higher incidence of violent behavior in cyberspace towards women and towards everything that is identified as feminine. Therefore, it is possible to speak of digital gender violence. The dizzying and chaotic virtualization of reality derived from the pandemic caused by COVID-19 has generated an environment conducive to ephemeral, anonymous interactions, and revealed violence that broke down barriers between the face-to-face and the virtual. In this context, we consider that digitized educational environments have been little studied spaces in terms of the dynamics and violence exerted virtually and its repercussions on gender inequality. For this reason, with the aim of contributing to making visible the forms and expressions of digital violence derived from the process of virtualization of education in Mexico, it was proposed to investigate digital gender violence in Higher Education Institutions. This paper presents the first results obtained in the two most important universities in Sonora, the University of Sonora and the State University of Sonora through a digital survey with a representative sample of 504 students. It was found that digital gender violence, manifested in various forms, occurs in a quarter of the studied population, with women being the target of most aggressions and promoting inequality that manifests itself in the appropriation of digital spaces.