• Rape Myths in Digital Spaces: An Analysis of High-Profile Sexual Assault Cases On Twitter

As demonstrated through the #metoo and Time’s up Movements, sexual assault has proven to be an inescapable facet of everyday life. While sexual assault literature has expanded to explore the digitization of sexual violence and rape culture, there has been less attention to how rape myths permeate digital spaces such as Twitter. To explore rape myths in online spaces, this paper analyzes over 10,000 tweets related to high-profile sexual assault cases in order to understand what Twitter users are saying about high-profile cases of sexual violence. Furthermore, these tweets are analyzed to understand their meaning in the context of rape culture. Through a qualitative thematic analysis, I examine the composition of tweets from two separate sexual assault cases: (1) the Steubenville High School rape case (2012) and (2) the Stanford Rape case against Brock Turner (2015). My analysis details how Twitter users discuss sexual violence and highlights how these users mitigate and resist rape culture in a digital world. Specifically, I explore how these tweets reveal both a resistance towards rape myths relevant to the Steubenville and Stanford rape cases and a critique of pertinent institutions that perpetuate rape culture. I argue the patterned nature of users’ tweets demonstrate a shared-consciousness amongst digital feminist users that allows for a communitive response in challenging sexual violence. The interlinked nature of these tweets highlight the potential of social networks as a source of feminist solidarity and as a tool to facilitate conversations regarding digital feminist activism. This research aims to advance feminist work on sexual violence by highlighting how beliefs regarding sexual assault are maintained and distributed online. 

Keywords: Sexual Violence, Digital Feminist Activism, Rape Myths, Social Media