THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN RAISING AWARENESS AND ADVOCACY AGAINST DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN: POWER AND LIMITATIONS

Abstract

This paper discusses the use of social media in creating awareness, and advocating against domestic violence against women as well as its strength and weakness in the Pakistani backdrop. The quantitative, cross-sectional survey design, in which the survey data was gathered among 100 social media users (mainly students of universities and young adults in Multan) using a structured questionnaire, was utilized. The theory, which forms the basis of the study, is the Agenda-Setting Theory, backed by the ideas of affective publics and networked empowerment, to comprehend the influence of being exposed to the contents related to domestic violence on the development of awareness, perception of the issue, and advocacy of interventions.The results, informed by descriptive statistical analysis, suggest that respondents who were more exposed to the content of domestic violence had increased chances of reporting more awareness of the problem and viewing it as a social issue as opposed to an individual one. On the same note, the more the exposure, the more the support was given to the legal, preventive as well as social interventions. The respondents also appreciated the power of the social media as a channel of awareness and advocacy, but they also outlined its weaknesses, such as misinformation, narratives of victim-blame, and the inability to translate the online action into the real world. The research is valuable to the emerging body of literature in the area of digital media and social issues, as it offers context-specific information on the relationship between social media and domestic violence awareness and advocacy in Pakistan. The results are however associative and not causal, as the descriptive analysis has been used and the sample size is small. The paper identifies the necessity of incorporating digital advocacy with institutional and policy-level issues to make it more effective in solving domestic violence.