Conclusion: ‘Hope Endures’

This chapter concludes the book by tying together the substantive themes emerging from the analysis of an online community and interviews with victim-survivors who had disclosed their experiences online. It also looks to the future and aims to harness the hope felt by some participants when reflecting on their online disclosure experiences. This book was concerned with two core aims: to understand why and how victim-survivors disclose their experiences in digital society and to understand the extent to which such digital practices may constitute informal justice. By centring the experiences and voices of victim-survivors, I have sought to expand notions of informal justice to include digital practices that align with and meet both therapeutic and justice needs, noting that needs are blurred and shaped by broader discourses. Although there is a ‘gap’ between how scholars understand justice and how it is understood in mainstream discourse, this book has argued for an expansive understanding of informal justice, highlighting that individual experiences of ‘justice’ have collective, societal and discursive effects.