Building a Social Media Platform for Surveillance and Support of Intimate Partner Violence and its Victims during COVID-19 and Beyond

Intimate partner violence (IPV)— physical violence, sexual violence, stalking, or psychological harm by a current or former partner or spouse—is a global public health problem, and about 1 in 4 women and 1 in 10 men in the US reported experiencing IPV. During the current COVID-19 crisis, IPV has been on the rise. The pandemic response measures, such as social distancing, shelter-in-place, school and business closures, and travel restrictions increased IPV victims' susceptibility to violence because of social isolation, longer time spent with their perpetrator at home, stress from economic instability, health, and security, relationship strain, and the limited access to resources (e.g., shelter, legal aid). Thus, it is imperative to monitor population-level patterns of IPV incidents and provide contact-free interventions to IPV victims. One major challenge to do so, however, is the difficulty of collecting more reliable and actionable IPV-related data, particularly from conventional sources (e.g., survey or medical/police report) during the pandemic.

As an alternative, this research team proposes to use social media (SM) as a non-conventional data source/means. With advanced analytic technologies, including natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, SM holds tremendous potential to assess the population level characteristics of IPV and IPV victims during the pandemic and proactively reach out to IPV victims to provide necessary support in a time-sensitive manner. The volume of IPV-related discussions on SM (e.g., Reddit) has rapidly increased over the last two years and more so during the pandemic. With the restricted in-person interactions and communications, SM can be a key channel to collect IPV-related live streaming data accurately, unobtrusively, at scale, and anonymously. However, the SM's role in monitoring IPV and helping IPV victims has been underexplored, although recent feasibility studies have produced promising outcomes. The research team's long-term goal is to establish a framework for IPV surveillance and support of IPV victims during the pandemic and onward by utilizing SM.

1. To determine the characteristics of IPV and IPV victims in the US during COVID-19 on Twitter and Reddit via social media data analytics and expert annotation.
2. To develop an automated, SM-based system to detect, categorize, and store streaming IPV-related big data during COVID-19 on Twitter and Reddit via NLP and machine learning.
3. To develop a lexicon of IPV’s typologies, risk/protective factors, and IPV victims’ needs during COVID-19 by content analysis of the collected SM data on IPV.