Youths, social media and gender-based violence: An emerging trend in Nigeria

The objective of this study is to investigate the emerging trend of social media orchestrated gender-based violence among youths in Nigeria. Nigeria has a population of one hundred and forty million people and a third of this population comprises of young people between the ages of 10 to 24 years with a youth literacy rate of 78.15%. Nigerian youths have adapted to the digitally savvy lifestyle and so are socially connected online. At least 1,714,000 Nigerians are on Facebook, with a good number of them being young. However, the ease of networking and communicating with people not known in real life has made youths vulnerable to predators, thus violence against women by friends met through social media has been on the rise. This study investigates social media orchestrated gender based violence among youths through a survey of social media users. A sample of 600 youths randomly drawn using the multistage sampling technique from Lagos state, the most populous state in Nigeria would constitute the study population. It is expected that the study will unravel the causes, prevalence and nature of social media orchestrated gender based violence and would serve as a basis for media literacy education.