Digital Knowledge Divides: Sexual Violence and Collective Emotional Responses to the Jian Ghomeshi Verdict on Twitter

Abstract

While social media platforms like Twitter can be divisive, this research explores how they contribute to progressive reforms in cases dealing with sexual assault. We found that the Twitter content following the not-guilty Jian Ghomeshi verdict fell into two porous camps — verdict protesters versus verdict supporters — and mapped out the emotional and affective epistemologies embedded in the two
sides. On the one side, verdict supporters supported the problematic dichotomies of guilty/innocent, victim/perpetrator, and credible/unreliable testimonies. On the other side, verdict protestors were generally critical of the inherently masculine notions of due process, judicial truth, and victim blaming. We argue that criminologists should take seriously how emotions both structure and merge from legal practices and outcomes, and in doing so, can promote a more conciliatory and effective criminal justice system. These implications suggest that the Canadian criminal justice system needs to integrate an intersectional consideration of emotions if it will be successful in promoting healing rather than punitive forms of punishment that offer little to the survivors of sexual violence.