Research Centre for Better Living

A new online anti-objectification intervention for girls and young women

ARU's Prof Magdalena Zawisza is leading a £50k Include Plus sub-project testing an online anti-objectification intervention, developed with young women who use social media.

Did you know?

  • 56% of online harm is experienced on social media platforms (Ofcom Online Nation report, 2023)
  • ‘Content or language which objectifies, demeans, or otherwise negatively portrays women’ is one of the top ten harms experienced by women and girls. (Ofcom’s Online Nation 2023)
  • Such exposure can produce negative effects including: anxiety, shame, depression and eating disorders, which impair performance, lower aspirations (Zawisza-Riley, 2019), and create inequitable online spaces that reduce civic participation.

This quantitative effectiveness evaluation package is part of of an interdisciplinary project led by visual arts specialist Dr Dawn Woolley (Leeds Arts University), with Prof Sally Dibb and Dr Katie Thompson (Manchester Metropolitan University) as collaborators from Economics and Marketing.

In this sub-project Magdalena and her Research Assistant, Margot Lefevre, test the intervention’s effectiveness in promoting more resilient responses to harmful online content and in supporting wellbeing using pre- and post-intervention questionnaires.

Woolley, D., Dibb, S., Zawisza, M., Thompson, K. and Lefevre, M. Q. (2025) 'Online Objectification: Exploring barriers to digital civic participation through an anti-objectification intervention'. Report for Include+ on co-design and co-creation project with Getaway Girls, South Leeds.

Other outputs to date are an animation co-created with Getaway Girls, and a POSTnote (a short report produced for the UK Parliament).

ARU researcher