Navigating Individual Justice: Deconstructing Neoliberalism, Trauma and Revenge

This chapter examines how victim-survivors’ digital practices can amount to a form of justice-seeking in digital society. I aim to establish the multiplicity of informal and online modes of justice, highlighting in this chapter that these can be deeply individualised. In Chap. 7, I expand that this does not preclude them from being part of a bigger community and collective process. Here, I explore individual elements of informal justice by examining the impacts and effects of neoliberal, trauma, and revenge discourses. These discourses each bear implications not only for how individuals engage in digital practices to pursue justice online but also how ‘justice’ in and of itself might be conceptualised. To an extent, these discourses can also feed a broader rape culture which dictates broader community responses (and sometimes backlash) to public disclosures of sexual violence. To examine the impacts of these discourses in thinking through digital justice-seeking practices, this chapter draws on qualitative interviews with victim-survivors who had disclosed their experiences online.