Cyberstalking practices: asymmetrical power relationships at the University of Dar es Salaam

ABSTRACT

Cyberstalking, especially among university students, has become a critical social concern. While a growing body of research associates cyberstalking with abuse of technology, psychological instability and the perceived porosity of the legal systems, power inequality has not been foregrounded as a major driver. With a focus on establishing power relationships between victims and perpetrators, the study explored structural and social environments surrounding female students at the University of Dar es Salaam. The quantitative and qualitative data were collected with an online survey questionnaire distributed to 424 female students. Together with the questionnaire, deeper insights for the qualitative information were obtained from online interviews held with 30 female students and 15 key informants as well as from online Focused Group Discussion held with another cluster of 30 female students who had experiences of cybertalking. Interpreted from a feminist theoretical perspective and ‘gender digital divide’ stances, the results indicate multiple forms of unequal power relations surrounding third-world women internet users in universities. The study recommends strategies against gender inequality to be extended to cyberspace, while women’s empowerment in online spaces should be spearheaded in gender equality discourse.

KEYWORDS:

• Cyberstalking
• internet
• power relation
• gender issue

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Which is 44.9% of all students’ population which is 21,413.

Additional information

Funding

The authors received no financial support for this article’s research, authorship, or publication.

Notes on contributors

Angela Mathias Kavishe

Angela Mathias Kavishe holds an MPhil in Gender and Developement from Bergen University and a PhD in Sociology from KwaZulu Natal University in South Africa. This work is partly an extraction from her PhD thesis. Her area of interest include women vulnerability to global gender-based crimes such as human trafficking and online harassment.

Maheshvari Naidu

Maheshvari Naidu is Full Professor and an NRF Rated Scientist who has received both institutional and national recognition for her numerous research across multiples disciplines. As a feminist anthropologist, she teaches from a critical feminist perspective and is currently supervising a large cohort of Post-Doctoral Fellows, Doctoral and Masters Students. She is committed to enhancing and nurturing strong academic scholarship among the pool of young Black African female scholars in the social sciences.