Love correspondence or cyberviolence?
"If you love me, send me your naked pictures
“Don’t You trust me; we are mature people; what’s wrong with that? We’re not illiberal; I can send you my naked pictures too. How can we get to know each other if you don’t trust me in those small things?” — Have you heard or read such expressions? In fact, this is not just manipulation but violence on the digital platform. Such non-obvious and at first glance innocent expressions can have very complex consequences and leave deeper wounds than during physical violence.
If we go centuries ago, people used to get to know each other, become friends, relatives, and spouses by meeting in different places: in the church, at the house of acquaintances or at a party, in restaurants, in educational institutions, while traveling, and just during a walk. Now they get to know each other like this, but less. Dating sites, apps, and social networks have become leading platforms for finding each other.
It’s easier in the digital domain. You can be brave, not shy about questions and answers; it takes less time to make friends in digital life; hearts and smiley emojis fill emotional gaps; a few days and you already have a new relative who understands you from one word or one picture. And daily stories create an illusion of presence, explaining something with the story’s footnotes and music becomes a part of everyday life.
You can often hear how people found each other, became friends, and formed a happy family through this or that application or social network. However, every positive thing has also negative sides, depending on who is looking for what: one is looking for romantic correspondence and marriage, the other one is looking for money, the next two are satisfaction of various desires, and the one who still wears rose-colored glasses and does not follow the rules in the virtual world, the result is not a happy marriage but a difficult psychological state, lost sleep and rest, large sums of money, and thoughts of saying goodbye to life.
What is cyberviolence, and how does it manifest itself?
Over time, along with the development of technologies, the types of cyberviolence as well as the definitions are changing. The Council of Europe defines cyberviolence as
The use of computer systems to cause, facilitate, or threaten violence against individuals, that results in (or is likely to result in) physical, sexual, psychological or economic harm or suffering and may include the exploitation of the individual’s circumstance, characteristics or vulnerabilities.” 
Trying to combine different definitions, cyberviolence can be described more simply as follows:
“Cyberviolence is when one person tries to threaten, intimidate, control, or harm another person through phone and computer applications and social networks.”
Such violence can be encountered in a variety of situations: at work, at school or university, on dating apps. Abusers can be strangers or acquaintances and even intimates: relatives, partners, or colleagues.
“Everyone is targeted: women, men, the elderly, and the young, who use the Internet and are not aware of the basic rules of safety in the cybersphere. In Armenia, they become victims of various types of digital violence, too: cyberbullying, cybershorting, etc.”-, says lawyer Davit Tumasyan. He helped many to recognize this type of violence and find solutions in the legal field.
“People often leave traces and information so that criminals easily find and use them. Criminals know human psychology; if they decide to target someone, they study the pages of social networks to find the vulnerable aspects of the person.
Statistics show that women and teenagers are targeted, mostly among teenagers, female ones. By studying their pictures, statuses, and comments, they see that the person has a psychological problem: he is lonely, broke up, and makes some romantic posts. This is the green light for the criminal to start corresponding. When a trustful relationship is formed, for example, by sending naked photos and various conversations related to it, meetings start. The criminal has a lot of information about the victim.
They wrote to each other as girlfriends for months... it turned out to be an adult man writing.
“Teenagers have different interests. They try to find people who share the same preferences. However, the one who shares the interests of a teenager is not always his peers. The criminal studies the range of interests of teenagers so that he can make the conversation continuous and gain trust”,- says psychologist Marieta Khurshudyan.
In this way, a stranger wrote to the sister of Lilith /name was changed/ and shared not only the interests and musical taste of her 16-year-old sister, but also prepared the lessons together. They wrote to each other for months as two friends, helping each other in difficult times. The pictures were exchanged; the girlish photos were followed by the exchange of pictures with the newly bought underwear.
…And the new round of correspondence and calls begins. It turns out that the writer is not a teenage girl, but an adult man, and the pictures are taken from another girl’s page, whose page was hacked and all the photos were taken over.
The threats follow each other, in addition to the photo in underwear, the man also managed to gain so much trust that the teenager gave her social network passwords.
How did the sister help her, who was the criminal, did the parents know about this or not — the recording will answer these questions.
Cyberviolence and forms of manipulation
Cyberviolence is difficult to detect, the partner can pressurize with pity, guilt, using the same manipulative expressions as; “In a serious relationship, people do not hide anything from each other”, “If you trusted me, you would give me your password”.
There are many forms of hidden violence, for example, stalking. We talked about this with cyber security specialist Anahit Parzyan.
”Online stalking is often mistaken for a display of “caring” or “masculinity,” especially in rural and small towns. Without the person’s awareness, a program is downloaded into the phone, monitoring calls, messages, and activity in the digital domain, locating movement with GPS systems. The free life of that person is in danger. A woman feels fear, anxiety, insecurity, which leads to isolation. This is considered violence, but few people are familiar with these mechanisms, so it is difficult for the victim to identify, detect the program, delete it, and disable the settings.
Psychologist Siranush Davtyan talks about another type of digital control, when they monitor the activity of pages.
“We have an interesting generational situation.There are people in the new generation who share the idea that controlling, chasing, or interfering is a manifestation of love, and if he is interested, then he loves a lot or has serious intentions. And we have the other side, who clearly know that it is violence and do not allow someone to monitor them or their social platform and phone without their consent.
The main purpose of violence is to subjugate the partner and establish himself in the role of “leader.” Of course, this is not love; love is more care and attention than isolation and control of the loved one.
Typical types of violence and control are when your partner
Let my writing be a secret ...
In various groups of social networks, one can find anonymous posts about how there are various demands with the threat of publishing intimate photos, videos, messages.
”Basically, they demand money, even if they demand sexual relations, after satisfying that demand, they demand money again”, — argues Manuk Karapetyan,who is an investigator of particularly important cases of the cybercrime department of the RA Investigative Committee. Thank you for accepting the invitation.
Lina Antonyan, a social worker of the Sexual Violence Crisis Center, has been working in the organization for several years, she assures that the calls to the hotline have not decreased, but increased, every time she is surprised by what mechanisms are used and how dangerous everything has become and what problems a little trust can prevent.
“We had a case when there was rape, the rapist filmed it all, cybercrime was added to this, he threatened the girl that he would spread the video if she did not pay or continue the sexual relationship. And if there is only a request for money, they initially ask for a small amount, for example 10,000 drams, and they think, well, what amount is 10,000 drams, I will transfer it, everything will pass, but in fact, nothing is bought with those 10,000 drams, but it starts, then they want more, they will continue this blackmail endlessly.
We advise to block, not to contact in any way, keep the letters and turn to the police with evidence.”
However, contacting the police in Armenia is quite difficult, overcoming various stereotypes is more difficult than finding and paying a large amount of money. There have even been cases where women have taken loans from different banks to pay the criminal, so they wouldn’t go to the police.
Shame, public shame, criticism, attitude of parents, targeted speech and gossip of relatives create a hopeless situation for women and girls. Unable to overcome these barriers, one wrong step after another follows one another.
Cyberviolence is a crime that affects all levels of a person’s mental health, causing feelings of shame and guilt, depression, panic attacks, post-traumatic stress disorder, concentration problems, and feelings of helplessness.
” Teenage girls start to fear that suddenly their parents and relatives will find something out. Fears, anxiety, guilt, shame and various emotional manifestations begin. They may not tell anyone and try to solve the problem on their own, and the result will be sexual violence against the teenager, which is a great trauma with its serious consequences,”,- psychologist Siranush Davtyan shares her analysis of cases during her 13 years of work.
The past years of psychological work have shown that such problems existed 13 years ago, only now the number of victims has increased, and the attitude of the society has not changed: they blame the victim more than the criminal.
“Because of our society’s critical habit of targeting the victim instead of protecting them, people start to isolate themselves, there may be suicide attempts, they may be left out of education. A teenager or a student prefers not to go to school, to stay at home for days, not to communicate with anyone.
Our parents are not aware of prevention methods. They don’t talk about the dangers, they only prohibit it, and it is not a working tool. We have had cases, especially mothers, who have been very supportive, have been with their teenager from the beginning to the end, unfortunately, we have also had the opposite picture, where the parents blamed their child. We have cases where the parent himself can physically abuse, beat the teenager, the daughter can be adult and the parent abuses her, forces her to marry the person who abused her. Or, for example, isolate the child from the community. Parents vary in their parenting practices, but it is very important for the parent to know that being supportive is important in this situation.”
Pedagogical psychologist Zhenya Aydinyan adds that there are cases when teenagers ask for psychological help anonymously in different groups, but their parents don’t know.
“I recommend involving the parents as well. In this case, the parent’s support is very great. The activity of a psychologist in schools is also important, so that he can see various problems during adolescence and ensure the parent-child relationship. Parents do not talk about sex education, thinking that it is not yet time.”
Call the police or...?
Mediaspecialist Samvel Martirosyan does not see an alternative in this matter.
” -You should definitely contact the police, because the volumes are increasing and quite large sums of money are being circulated. We definitely don’t have any other way than turning to the law enforcement agencies for help. If we had several alternative bodies, for example, if we personally contact Facebook or Telegram and those programs provide information on who the criminal is, we would find him on our own, I would say that we can provide an alternative solution. In some cases we can only report that it’s a fake page and in case of complaints they can block the page, but in cases of other crimes, this mechanism doesn’t work.
It’s another matter that they don’t believe or trust the law enforcement agencies. In this case, I will mention about human resources. If we have a very small number of specialized police officers, it is very likely that these cases will take quite a long time, which will cause dissatisfaction among the applicant. Then there are also uncooperative programs or states, let’s say the criminal is from Pakistan or Turkey, what should we do? In this case, it is necessary to develop prevention mechanisms.
Manuk Karapetyan, an investigator for special important cases of the Cyber Crimes and High Technologies Department of the RA Investigative Committee, also states that they apply when the situation is very complicated, they could have applied and solved the problem at the initial stage.
“They turn to us when they are in a bind. If someone has decided that he should give money, he has already given it, he gave it and then they demand it again. In this way, they pay money 3-4 times piece by piece. We do not have such a case when someone gave money and his issue was resolved, his information was not shared, he was no longer bothered by it. Therefore, the only viable option is to collect the evidence, not delete anything, keep the digital traces, if possible change the passwords and contact the law enforcement agencies.
Only a small part of the committed cybercrimes turn to law enforcement agencies. The reasons are different; the low level of trust in the police, the lack of specialists in the police stations and the approach, which can disappoint the victims. The other problem is that very few parts of the cases are revealed, this is due to the lack of specialists in law enforcement agencies, therefore the investigation takes a long time, some programs or countries do not cooperate with Armenia, there are no specialized lawyers and judges, and in this chain, the feeling of impunity arises at victims and also criminals.
In order to eliminate the impression of impunity and the detection of cases of cyberviolence, it is important to contact law enforcement and be consistent. As long as they don’t apply too much, the appetite of criminals in the digital domain increases.
Anahit Harutyunyan
Թվային բռնության բառարան