Quelles représentations sociales de la délinquance sexuelle chez les utilisateurs de réseaux sociaux numériques? : une étude exploratoire
The phenomenon of sexual offending has generated strong emotions and reactions among the population. Long lasting interest, curiosity, but especially social reactions, keep the subject popular on the social, political and media scenes. The legal and political measures adopted to manage this phenomenon have evolved according to these reactions, or rather, according to the social representations inspiring these reactions. Indeed, it has been shown that the public and activist movements had a great influence in the adoption of these measures. In addition, the rise in popularity of digital social networks (DSN) has offered a new environment in which these groups can exchange, debate, recruit and mobilize. Thereby, given the influence of the discourse of those groups on the adoption of measures to manage the phenomenon and given the growing popularity of DSN as a place of exchange on common interests, we found it relevant to look at the social representations carried by their users. Thus, the main objective of this master’s thesis is to describe the social representations of sexual offending carried by the users of a specific Facebook page. To do this, we performed a thematic content analysis of the comments and interactions between users, according to Moscovici’s social representation theory and its three components : information, representational field and attitudes. Overall, 821 comments, coming from 14 publications, were analyzed. The results show that sexual offending is a phenomenon that generates a lot of reactions and negative attitudes. The representations of the latter would also be organized under three dimensions : its cause and durability factors, its manifestations (acts, perpetrators and victims), as well as the responses to it. The results of this research open the door to new thoughts on the place and influence of attitudes in the social representation theory.
Facebook sexual offending social representations digital social networks content analysis sexual deviance