Women and Refugees in Twitter: Rethorics of Abuse, Vulnerability and Violence from a Gender Perspective

Abstract

In this unprecedented humanitarian crisis, women refugees are experiencing extreme vulnerability and violence, both during their journey and in the camps. Our objectives through this article are to analyze how women are being treated in the Social Media (images, discourses, social representations, or narratives). Data for this article were extracted from Twitter (with the help of Nodel XL Pro), from which we collected 1,807,901 tweets about “refugees”, using this word as search strings in six different languages. One complete year was covered (starting at mid-2015). Our final dataset was composed of 862,999 tweets. Results suggest that women refugees are targeted just because of their gender. Women are constantly victimized and mistreated due to the perpetuation of a patriarchal outlook that justifies abusing women. We also found many discourses disseminated through Twitter that reject refugees based on disproportionate generalizations and stereotypes, and unfounded and radicalised arguments., using gender difference to feed racism and xenophobia.