“Watch me pretend to punch my girlfriend”: exploring youth responses to viral dating violence

ABSTRACT

Dating violence among adolescents is a severe public health issue that has escalated rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic. This article explores young people’s responses to social media trends normalizing dating violence. Through analysis of the “pretend to punch your girlfriend” trend on the social media platform TikTok, this study asks: how do youth make sense of dating violence on social media? And what do their emotional responses reveal about emerging attitudes towards dating violence and relationship equity? This study explores the “feeling rules” constructed by youth in response to dating violence online through a mixed-method analysis of user comments. This article concludes with platform design solutions to regulate the rise of dating violence on social networks.

KEYWORDS:

• Dating violence
• misogyny
• race
• social media
• feeling rules

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Barbie Zelizer, Sarah J. Jackson, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Julia Ticona, Rachel K. Myers, Emily Falk, Michael X. Delli Carpini, Asia A. Eaton, and Kathryn Claire Higgins. We are particularly grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their incredibly encouraging and supportive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

Our code and data are publicly available at: https://github.com/researchergenz/IPV-Data

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2023.2185564

Notes

1. Users’ ages are estimated based on their appearance in videos, and information shared in their profile bios and comments. The terms “youth,” “young people,” “girls,” “young women,” and “young men” refer broadly to children and young adults.

2. Most videos, and the most popular videos, display what appear to be heterosexual relationships, so we use the terms “girlfriend” and “boyfriend” throughout.

3. The terms “White,” “Black” and “Asian” are included because they were frequently used by commenters in our sample, however there is immense diversity within and across these groups. Given significant debate surrounding the terms “Latiné/x/a/o” (Richard. T. Rodríguez 2017; Idalis Villanueva Alarcón et al. 2022), the term “Latiné” - a gender-neutral identifier that doesn’t anglicize Spanish—is used here to refer to youth in the U.S. with Latin American ancestry. Many commenters did not state their race or ethnicity or preferred to identify themselves by nationality.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sophie Maddocks

Sophie Maddocks is a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on cyber-sexual violence, including image-based abuse, deep fakes, and trolling.

Fallon Parfaite

Fallon Parfaite is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests span race, digital identity, and the social impact of algorithms.