Decisions about social media difficult in wake of abusive relationships, research shows

Women who leave abusive relationships are hypervigilant when it comes to social media use, and worried about privacy in the wake of intimate partner violence, new research suggests. 

"Women who left their partners seven or eight years ago, they used their social media uninhibitedly, but folks who left one month to two years ago, their social media use was very different," said Kimberly Jackson, a professor at Western University's nursing school. 

Jackson's most recent research looks at the decisions that mothers who have left abusive relationships make about their own social media use and how they communicate with their kids about posting online. 

"Some women have completely shut down their social media usage, others have placed restrictions on usage," Jackson told CBC News. "For those who have teenagers, where you can't just shut down social media, there were a lot of mechanisms used to keep their children safe and their lives private and confidential." 

Moms surveilled their kids' usage, asking to see what teens were going to post before it went live, and made sure that their kids' faces were not online, Jackson said. 

Social media part of safety planning

"There's also a transition that happens, from surveillance when the children are younger to more open communication where there's lots of talking about risks and how to share safely, how to interact online safely," she said. 

Women who leave abusive relationships are hypervigilant about social media use, said Jennifer Dunn, who heads the London Abused Women's Centre. 

"There's an issue around privacy, that a perpetrator of abuse shouldn't know where they are or what they're doing, or what their children are doing," Dunn said. "When we do safety planning with women we go through their access to social media and what it could look like in the future." 

Survivors of violence are often very careful about what they post, she added. "Oftentimes you post something and your own privacy settings could be set very high, but depending on who you know and who is connected to your account, it might still cause a problem, so it's really important for proper knowledge to be shared about the risks." 

Jackson's research was published in October in the Journal of Child and Family Studies.