"A Little Bit of Light Dispels a Lot of Darkness": Online Disclosure of Child Sexual Abuse by Authority Figures in the Ultraorthodox Jewish Community in Israel

Old crimes reported in new bottles: the disclosure of child sexual abuse on Twitter through the case #MeTooInceste

Movements such as #MeToo have shown how an online trend can become the vehicle for collectively sharing personal experiences of sexual victimisation that often remains unreported to the criminal justice system. These social media trends offer new opportunities to social scientists who investigate complex phenomena that, despite existing since time immemorial, are still taboo and difficult to access. They also bring technical difficulties, as the challenge to identify reports of victimisation, and new questions about the characteristic of the events, the role that victimisation testimonies play and the capacity to detect them by analysing their characteristics. To address these issues, we collected 91,501 tweets under the hashtag #MeTooInceste, posted from the 20 to 27 January 2021. A model was fitted using Latent Dirichlet Allocation that detected 1688 tweets disclosing experiences of child sexual abuse, with an accuracy of 91.3% [± 3%] and a recall of 93.1% [± 5%]. We performed Conjunctive Analysis of Case Configurations on the tweets identified as disclosures of victimisation and found that long tweets posted by users with small accounts, without URL or picture, were more likely to be related to disclosure of child sexual abuse. We discuss the possibilities of these trends and techniques offer for research and practice.

Everyone’s Accountable? Peer Sexual Abuse in Religious Schools, Digital Revelations, and Denominational Contests over Protection

Since the emergence of the #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements, online tracts have been employed to publicly reveal experiences of sexual abuse and assault among women and men in religious institutions and to shame abusers, which tend to be examined as an issue of women’s rights or child protection from adult predators. Drawing on the use of digital reporting platforms to testify against peer offences within religious schools, this paper asks how do such testimonies reveal adolescent agency and provoke policy re/actions about the accountability of religious institutions? Digital revelations submitted anonymously to Everyone’s Invited are analysed alongside interviews conducted with educators, parents, and youths in Jewish schools in Britain. Findings indicate how adolescent digital revelations of peer sexual abuse call for accountability by implicating the faith schools in question, which in turn triggers pedagogical and policy debates from educators. Public responses reflect diverging denominational positions on how to balance the protection of young people and safeguard religious self-protectionism. The paper spotlights the agency of youth in shaming peer abusers as much as faith schools and structures of religious authority, and in turn, how online shaming reveals frictions over accountability.