"Minding My Business"

Understanding Black HBCU Undergraduate Women’s Responses to Online Harassment Scenarios

Authors

Keywords:

HBCU, Historically Black Colleges & Universities, Black women, online harassment, racial trauma, trauma

Abstract

While research exists exploring college students' witnessing and reporting online harassment experiences, this work has primarily been situated at predominantly white institutions among majority-white college students, thus limiting our understanding of the role of race. Particularly, little is known about the experiences of Black college women. This mixed methods study integrated survey and focus group data of 29 Black undergraduate women enrolled at a Historically Black College or University (HBCU). This paper answers the question, How do Black HBCU undergraduate women respond to instances of witnessing online harassment? Findings reveal that these women would contact friends and family, but expressed concern about engaging with authorities (e.g., law enforcement/university administration), police/authority violence, or re-traumatization. We conceptualize this study using a racial trauma framework. Findings can inform higher education professionals to consider how Black Women view online harassment, intervene, and prefer support.

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Author Biography

Juana Hollingsworth, Morgan State University

Juana(yah-na) Hollingsworth (she/her) is a native of Waterloo, IA and received her bachelor and master degrees in Social Work with a specialization in Trauma Informed Care(TIC) from the University of Northern. She is currently a third-year doctoral student in the Higher Education Administration program at Morgan State University. Juana is the Graduate Assistant for Co-Curricular Education for the Center for Diversity & Inclusion(CDI) at Johns Hopkins University where she oversees the first-year mandatory Identity and Inclusion workshop. She also advises the Identity and Inclusion Educators (formerly SEED) which is a small group of Hopkins students that co-lead diversity education initiatives for CDI. Juana also currently serves as a Research Assistant at Morgan State University studying the prevalence of online harassment in higher education curricular and co-curricular spaces. Widely, her research agenda merges her expertise in both education and trauma by exploring the impact of trauma on student persistence and success while also pushing the system of education to be more trauma-informed. Juana has worked in various areas of higher education including academic advising, admissions, student success and retention, financial aid, and orientation programs. 

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Published

10/31/2022

How to Cite

Hollingsworth, J., & Byrne, V. (2022). "Minding My Business": Understanding Black HBCU Undergraduate Women’s Responses to Online Harassment Scenarios. Journal of Trauma Studies in Education, 1(2), 4–24. Retrieved from https://journals.library.appstate.edu/index.php/JTSE/article/view/243

Issue

Vol. 1 No. 2 (2022): Special Issue on Critical Perspectives on Online Trauma

Section

Research Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2024 Journal of Trauma Studies in Education

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Upon publication articles are immediately and freely available to anyone, anywhere, at any time. All published articles are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 Unported License. All articles are permanently available online. The final version of articles may be posted to an institutional repository or to the author's own website as long as the article includes a link back to the original article posted on JTSE.

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