Comparative Framing From Below: How Young People in Three Cities Interpret Cyber Dating Abuse by Drawing Boundaries Between Love, Harm, and Justice

As digital technologies become embedded in everyday life, interpersonal violence increasingly takes place in cyberspace. Existing studies have focused on how states, experts, and the media define what counts as cyber violence and abuse. Less attention has been paid to how ordinary people interpret and contest these definitions and how their interpretations are linked to broader contexts. Drawing on focus group discussions among university students in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Taipei, this paper examines how young people collectively draw boundaries between love, harm, and justice when interpreting cyber dating abuse (CDA). We identify four frames through which participants evaluated behaviours defined by scholars as CDA. We show that framing varies across gender categories, acts and cities, reflecting differences in gendered dating scripts, legal frameworks and sociolegal contexts. Our findings demonstrate that individuals do not simply adopt expert or legal definitions of abuse. They actively negotiate competing understandings by situating acts within particular domains, emphasizing causes or consequences, and invoking different moral principles. Our analysis develops comparative framing from below as a systematic framework connecting individual and interactional framing with sociolegal processes, and for explaining how ordinary people collectively negotiate meanings of contested behaviours in everyday life.