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Paper short abstract:

Access to digital technology has the tendency to mould the rigid and rather sticky normative and cultural beliefs commonly prevalent in patriarchal social structure embedding violence justifying attitudes of men towards women, by empowering women to report victimization.

Paper long abstract:

The cobweb of interaction among social beliefs of battering and victimizing women in a male dominant society, victim’s access to digital technology and reporting of violence by victims to law-enforcement reflect that technology has the ability to alter the normative beliefs underpinning the less or inelastic and unequal social-power structures ensuing justified violence against women by men.

Evidence from Punjab Pakistan has been collected using MICS through employing logistics model of regression on a sample of 873 victimized-women.

Results further reveal that access to technology turns out as a source of empowerment for victimized-women and yields positive psychology among affected women who live and experience powerlessness and learned-helplessness through repeated trauma and victimization by enabling them reverse the inner state and disregard prevalent VAW justifying socio-cultural norms and thus decide about their life safety and honor through reporting the incident.

This psycho-social impact of technology is angled not only as a transgression from patriarchal induction of violence against women but is also transformative in terms of women’s own ideology of accepting violence against her self, which then reflects in her ability to report violence to police. In male-centric societies, coupled with prevalence of discriminatory practices, not only patriarchy perpetuates violence but induces helplessness among women at various individual, household and community levels. Results show that digitalization enables a woman to turn away the sticky social odds from violence inducement as a subset of existent belief structure toward taking the very decision to safeguard her life, hence increased likelihood to abjure victimization through reporting to law-enforcement.