Black women, gender non-conforming persons and technology-facilitated gender-based violence: A decolonial feminist exploration

Our project

Research into gender-based violence (GBV) in South Africa is extensive, and yet it remains woefully narrow in scope. The current literature predominantly paints GBV as a problem of poor Black communities in South Africa, locating it within township spaces and engaging only with its most violent, physical expressions. There is very limited research which seeks to contextualise GBV within the broader history of Apartheid and colonialism, to explore the role of whiteness and to recognise a broader concept of violence which centres the everyday experiences of women. Thus, we recognise the need to explore the ways in which GBV enters digital spaces in South Africa, given our country’s context. We propose a decolonial feminist approach to exploratory research on technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) as a means to address the issues outlined on multiple fronts. As Black, predominantly women and gender non-conforming researchers, we centre the identity of Black women in this research because we recognise the intersectional nature of GBV, and we wish to extend our research resources to our own community.

We have engaged in a multifaceted methodological project exploring the TFGBV experienced by Black women and gender non-conforming persons on dating apps and on social media. Our research involves of both archival components and individual narrative interviews. We have sought to do decolonial feminist research that centres care, emancipatory social justice and reflexivity.

The following is a reflective piece on our larger Feminist Internet Research Network-funded project, which is a collaborative project split across PhD research and an honours research project. The PhD research focuses on Black African women and gender non-conforming journalists and bloggers’ experiences of TFGBV and the honours project focused on Black women and gender non-conforming persons’ experiences of TFGBV on dating apps.

In this reflective piece we discuss our use of decolonial feminism in our contribution to feminist politics of knowledge building and centring of participants’ voices in the research and knowledge co-creation with the participants in both projects. In the next section we discuss our positionality within the research, and questions around reciprocity and power dynamics within the different projects. We further consider participants’ diverse lived realities through a decolonial feminist lens. Lastly, we discuss care and safety for research participants and how we ensure accountability in the research process.

As Black, predominantly women and gender non-conforming researchers, we centre the identity of Black women in this research because we recognise the intersectional nature of GBV, and we wish to extend our research resources to our own community.

Our contribution to feminist politics of knowledge building

By centring our participants’ knowledge of their own experiences, we have documented the knowledge of Black women and brought it into the academic space, a space that frequently only recognises some types of knowledge as legitimate. We aim to present this work to the university community, where many Black women and gender non-conforming persons who are experiencing the same or similar things may benefit from this shared knowledge and its potential outcomes. We also target spaces where many men, who may perpetrate the violence we expose, may be challenged to behave differently.

By using a decolonial feminist framework, we acknowledge ongoing forms of colonisation and apartheid, the subsequent relationship between patriarchy and coloniality and between coloniality and GBV. Thus, coloniality encompasses the colonisation of patterns of knowledge, which include its production, consumption and transmission and colonisation of the mind. To date, colonial legacies have historically and continuously maintained power over the production of knowledge. Those who are left out of knowledge production (such as Black women and gender non-conforming persons) are forced to accept, make meaning of and consume knowledge that may not serve them, doesn’t represent their experiences and may further marginalise them. Therefore, decolonial feminism aims to reassign power to the marginalised, prioritising their own knowledge about their lived experiences and working against knowledge created through the colonial gaze and its machinery.

As such, through a decolonial feminist perspective, we aim to challenge how Black women and gender non-confirming persons’ experiences are represented in the media and academia by centring their voices through the narratives they share on their experiences of violence. By doing so, we ensure that Black African women and gender non-conforming persons co-produce knowledge of their own experiences through the deployment of a narrative approach. For example, we allow the participants’ retelling of their stories to lead interviews, offering autonomy over their self-expression and description of their experiences. We also create space for critique of our interpretation of their stories through the dissemination of our transcripts and analysis. Therefore, amplifying their voices in the work is a realisation of the fact that, as researchers, we are merely acting as vehicles in the process of sharing their stories.

Positionality, reciprocity and power dynamics

As decolonial feminist psychologists, we acknowledge that the research process creates a asymmetrical power dynamic. When seeking participants’ engagement with our questions, our efforts could easily come off as invasive and exploitative, especially when working with difficult topics, such as violence, and when working with marginalised people. It was mandatory for us to practice reflexivity and positionality throughout the research process. The decolonial feminist approach requires us to take our racialised, gendered and other identities into account when working on the topic of TFGBV, as we see these as important to how participants themselves might experience the phenomenon. Therefore, practising reflexivity allows us to be aware of, anticipate and attempt to control our own social identities’ influence on the data and the research process.

Reflexivity brings out questions about our participants’ ability to relate to us and share their stories with us, as well as how best to represent participants’ stories. For example, one of the researchers is a straight-passing, cisgender man of colour who did not disclose his sexuality in the interview process. He shared with us that he felt visually representative of the group that was found to be the main perpetrators of TFGBV against Black women. As a result, there was  an initial, yet short-lived, tension or discomfort during some of the interviews. As anticipated, this tension created a subtle change in the participants’ engagement in discussions based on the gender of the researcher involved. However, the tension waned when the researcher concentrated on relating to the participants in the interview process.

The decolonial feminist approach requires us to take our racialised, gendered and other identities into account when working on the topic of TFGBV, as we see these as important to how participants themselves might experience the phenomenon.

In reflecting on her experiences during the first phase of data collection, Aphiwe recounts the mental and emotional distress of doing research in digital archives that illustrated participants' experiences of TFGBV. Aphiwe’s first phase of data collection involved digital archiving, and in this phase she collected screenshots from Black African women and gender non-conforming persons’ blogs and journalism.The digital archives showed the violence that Black women and gender non-conforming persons experience in online spaces. Some of these experiences also reflected Aphiwe’s own experiences. This reflection is evidence that research is not independent of researchers’ personal lives and experiences. In her supporting role in this project, Kajal has been moved by the ways in which the decolonial feminist lens has brought to light everyday experiences of oppression, marginalisation and violence experienced online in ways that mirror her own lived experience. These congruences represent a strength in the work for Kajal, as its value is immediately apparent to her, and her own experiences guide her critical reflection on our collaborative writing. Additionally, the process of reflexivity helped to question our assumption, shifting some the power of interpretation and allowing for more intentional centring of participants and a decolonial feminist agenda.

In reflecting on reciprocity in relation to power dynamics, we acknowledge that there are no direct benefits for the participants who took part in our study, other than a small token of appreciation. The researchers know they gain far more advantages, such as degrees, and funding for their research. The research participants offer their time and knowledge to this research project, and receive a small token of appreciation in return. This is the reality of all research practices, feminist or otherwise. Still, we believe it is imperative to attempt to maintain equivalent status between researchers and participants. The use of a decolonial feminist framework affords us the opportunity to centre the voices of research participants through the use of open-ended methods such as the narrative approach, allowing for an engagement with participants as co-constructors of knowledge. For example, we provided open-ended interview questions, allowing participants’ to lead the discussion in the directions they felt comfortable going. Participants are also afforded agency in their participation, through being offered the opportunity to provide input on data analysis and our interpretations before any work is published. In our ongoing research, we are making efforts to ensure that our work has some policy impact in the field of TFGBV, and that we collaborate with participants to shape policy at a platform level. We consider issues of reciprocity to be important in research and therefore make sure that we offer a meaningful token of appreciation for the time that people take to participate in our research. We understand that this does not offset the power relationships embedded in the research, but we offer this token in the spirit of recognising that researchers often benefit the most from research undertaken in the field. In light of the decolonial feminist framework that this work takes, we understand that a focus on questions of reciprocity, positionality and power dynamics should always be at the forefront of our thinking in relation to our research praxis. In this light, Floretta, as project lead and Co-Director of the Hub has frequently reflected on her longstanding concerns about what reciprocity can look like and how much participants actually benefit from the research. For her, sitting with the discomfort of these questions has been integral to her learning and teaching about decolonial feminist research praxis.

Consideration of participants’ diverse lived realities

Our research attempted to offer a reading of the various, diverse realities addressed in the retelling of our participants’ individual lived experiences. For example, participants shared that ill-treatment online was often based on and further aggravated by stereotypical beliefs surrounding their identities, not strictly limited to but intersected with,race and gender. One of our participants shared that their openness about their sexuality on a dating app became a further source of hyper-sexualisation. Another participant shared that their identity as a mother was also fetishised alongside their identity as a Black woman. These examples demonstrate the ways in which Black women's identities shape how they are addressed online. We therefore emphasise the intersectionality of all their social identities when considering the factors influencing our participants’ experiences. Further, we chose to work with Black women and gender non-conforming persons because they have been historically silenced. In line with decolonial feminist work, we worked with these populations because they are historically the most marginalised groups in the South African context.

The PhD aspect of this project is more geographically inclusive in that it studies the experiences of participants in different African countries within the Southern African Development Community or SADC region. This research will involve sensitivity to language by ensuring that participants can engage with us in their language of choice, through the provision of interpreters or interviewers who speak their language. We are also cognisant of the cultural differences that may arise, especially when discussing difficult experiences such as violence, and are still thinking through the ways in which we can demonstrate care and consideration of these. We aim to always retain nuance, and to preserve diversity rather than collapsing individual stories into homogenising themes, and this influences our entire process, from design, to data collection, to writing. In doing so, we seek to create a space for the most marginalised, rooting our work in inclusivity and diversity.

We aim to always retain nuance, and to preserve diversity rather than collapsing individual stories into homogenising themes, and this influences our entire process, from design, to data collection, to writing. 

Through the use of decolonial feminism, our research focused on the experiences of marginalised Black women and gender non-conforming persons. Although there may be work on violence and trauma in these groups, not much work attempts to foreground participants’ agency and participation, which we have aimed to do. Through our research methods, we centred the voices of our participants, ensuring that their narratives were amplified. Our work also aims to ensure that this research has been conducted not simply for its own sake and for our careers as researchers, but to make a meaningful difference to marginalised groups’ experiences online. This is especially because, as a group of mostly women and queer Black researchers, our lens and positionality put us in a good position to represent and advocate for our own communities.

Ensuring care and safety for research participants

All the safety measures we implemented during our research were in the best interests of the participants, especially with regard to ensuring confidentiality. For example, we asked participants to provide pseudonyms to be used on all research documentation. Ultimately, we opted to use the pseudonyms in the final report regardless of what participants preferred, to prevent breaches of privacy and consequences that both participants and researchers could not anticipate. In addition to confidentiality, stipulating and asking for consent was of great importance, therefore multiple checks were made, with consent being considered an ongoing process rather than a one-off agreement. We specifically highlighted the right of participants to refuse to share or let us use certain information that they had already provided. In terms of care, participants received resource lists containing the names of psychosocial services they could access should the conversations on their experiences of violence and trauma be overwhelming. We did have a potential participant request to withdraw as they were not in a state that allowed them to readily discuss their experience. Additionally, we have connected with a psychologist to support participants who need emergency psychosocial assistance due to conversations had during the study. We also recently decided to conduct post-research check-ins with our participants, so as not to convey the impression that participants’ involvement and engagement was no longer needed. We consider these post-research check-ins as a way of holding us accountable to do research in the interest of care and justice as it aligns with our decolonial feminist framework

Another way we attempted to show care was to provide vouchers as a token of appreciation for participating in the study. We initially offered vouchers for a popular South African online shop. However, due to the cost of item delivery, we also offered vouchers for a local supermarket. Participants preferred the latter, being able to use the voucher for daily needs or wants. This way we ensured that the care we extended to participants could be felt despite any differences in socioeconomic conditions.

For us, security also entailed the cautious storage of data. All of the interview recordings will be saved in a password-secure online folder. This is currently deemed to be the most secure means of storage. All of the interviews, and information related to them, are anonymised. Once the project has been completed, the recordings and all information pertaining to them will be kept for five years and destroyed thereafter.

Reflection on the ethics of the study, the safety of participants and the storage of participants’ stories occurred throughout the research process. A change in strategy occurred when we decided against focus groups, as this activity would breach the privacy and confidentiality we had initially vowed to uphold. This change in strategy is an example of placing the participants’ safety over the researchers’ desire to gain additional data.

We have, over the past few years, understood that alongside the protection of participants, we also require care for ourselves as researchers.

As indicated earlier, we work as a collective, with different and varied experiences of our work on violence and trauma. At the Hub for Decolonial Feminist Psychologies in Africa, we have been careful about how we engage the topic of violence – this care when approaching research on violence is important for the communities we work with, but also for ourselves as researchers. We have engaged and deeply reflected on the question of what it means for us to research violence and trauma, given that we ourselves may have experienced it and come from the very communities we are researching. We have also written on this topic. We consider that it is as important to care for ourselves as it is  to offer appropriate care for participants. In the Hub, we offer various forms of support to each other, both individual and communal. We do this through writing retreats, group debriefings and regular check-ins with supervisors to redistribute emotional and academic workloads and ensure well-being. We have, over the past few years, understood that alongside the protection of participants, we also require care for ourselves as researchers. In our meetings and retreats, we constantly reflect on how our research has impacted us, and we work with a clinical psychologist who offers us support and debriefing sessions when we require them.

We work as a community of decolonial feminist scholars in psychology, aiming to not only shape our discipline in ways that serve us and our communities best, but also to work towards using research to advance social justice, especially for the most marginalised.

Accountability in research

In the first instance, accountability for us means fulfilling the promises we make to our research participants. It also involves ensuring that participants’ information and stories are protected and are used for the purposes expressed to the participants. We will also be sharing the interview transcripts from the PhD component of this project with the participants themselves, to allow them to have the final say over how much of what they shared they want included in the final analysis and report. Additionally, we intend to share the final reports to see whether participants agree with all aspects of the project prior to publication. All these measures work towards holding the researchers accountable for their interpretation and use of data. We consider ourselves additionally accountable to the research area as a whole – in advancing a feminist decolonial investigation of TFGBV, we offer a reading of the issue that counters some of the harmful stereotyping that might be at play in the field and we explicitly work towards advancing issues of social justice through our research. This means being accountable to how we engage with participants: respecting their perspectives, honouring their stories and trying to do justice to them in the ways we engage with their words, not just treating them as “data”. Accountability will similarly be practised in the dissemination of the work, as we are planning on writing for the popular media to broadly educate the general public about TFGBV, as well as putting together a policy brief for application developers, for social media and dating apps specifically.

Final thoughts

As we engage the emerging practice of decolonial feminism, we are challenged to take meaningful responsibility for the impact of our work. We find ourselves iteratively questioning the impact of our actions, from interview to knowledge production, constantly interrogating the ways in which we live up to our decolonial feminist ideals. While this research is ongoing, we remain enmeshed in questions with limited answers, but we believe it is this ongoing reflexive and responsive engagement which sits at the heart of the decolonial feminist endeavour.