“It feels like a prison”: students, teachers, and administrators speak to the ubiquity and impacts of technology-facilitated violence in secondary schools

This article examines how technology-facilitated violence (TFV) is experienced by students, teachers, and administrators in secondary schools across Ontario, Canada. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 29 participants, the study explores the multifaceted impacts of TFV within educational settings. The analysis revealed that technology-facilitated harms are long-lasting and ubiquitous and that the threat of harm is omnipresent. Participants described TFV as enduring and emotionally destabilizing, with effects that extended beyond digital platforms into students’ reputations, learning experiences, and institutional relationships. Educators, leaders, and students used spatial metaphors to describe the threat of TFV as inescapable and controlling force for young people. The persistent possibility of being targeted contributed a climate of fear that shaped how students navigated secondary school. The findings suggest that TFV is not an episodic or fringe issue, but rather a structuring force within contemporary school life.