Traumatized by proxy: The link between women’s secondary traumatic stress and exposure to other women’s stranger harassment experiences via twitter

Date

2026-8-26

Author

Şahin Sevinç, Merve Nur

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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With the growing use of social media, women increasingly disclose their experiences of stranger harassment online. Although these disclosures provide many benefits, repeated exposure to them may have unintended negative effects on other women. The current dissertation examined whether exposure to other women's stranger harassment experiences via Twitter is associated with women's secondary traumatic stress (STS) and investigated the underlying mechanisms of this relationship using a mixed-methods design. In Study 1, semi-structured interviews explored women's exposure to stranger harassment posts, their responses, the role of feminism, their perceptions of stranger harassment in Türkiye, and their direct experiences. Findings suggested that women are frequently exposed to such posts on Twitter and that this exposure is associated with heightened safety concerns, precautionary behaviors, fear of men, distress, empathy toward victims, and responses consistent with STS symptoms. Study 2A adapted the study measures into Turkish. Study 2B showed that more frequent exposure predicted higher STS beyond women's direct experiences of stranger harassment. Fear of men, safety concerns, and distress mediated this relationship. Indirect exposure was also associated with stronger feminist identification, greater engagement in feminist collective action, and greater intention to engage in feminist collective action through fear of men and precautionary behaviors. Overall, the findings contribute to the STS, stranger harassment, and social media literatures by demonstrating that repeated exposure to other women's stranger harassment experiences via Twitter is associated with STS and by identifying the psychological mechanisms underlying this relationship.

Subject Keywords

Secondary traumatic stress, Stranger harassment, Social media, Fear of rape, Feminism

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/120574

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis