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| MEN RECEIVE MORE DEATH THREATS ONLINE THAN WOMEN
Debates surrounding
the place, presence and perception of women online manifests in an
astounding way. Column inches and a plethora of posts online are dedicated to
the cyber-harassment of women, which can be excruciating and vitriolic at times.
Over the last few years, the issue has garnered much attention, but could it be
that presenting cyberbullying as a gendered issue, instead of a human
issue, negates the bigger picture and in turn victimizes women, impeding
their progress?
A WOMEN’S ISSUE?
According to the most recent
research conducted in harassment and cyberbullying by the nonpartisan think
tank Pew Research
Center of more
than 2,800 people, 40 percent said they have experienced harassment
online. That figure mushrooms to over 70 percent who have seen others being
harassed.
Consider that an estimated
third of the world’s female population experience gender-based violence. Not
one country in the world has closed the gender pay gap, female infanticide has
resulted in generations of “missing girls,” and its possible to infer that the
subjugation of women is ubiquitous—and that online is no different to offline.
According to the Pew report,
women (especially young women) are “significantly” more likely to experience
abuse online. They experienced “disproportionately high” rates of certain, more
severe forms of abuse such as stalking or sexual harassment that left them
“traumatized.” Moreover, young women were twice as likely to find the
abuse “extremely
upsetting” than men.
Award-winning writer and
Internet culture commentator Amanda Hess is among a number
of female journalists who have spoken out against
their trollers. Her crime, as she puts it, is doing her job. Because she’s a
journalist, she expresses views and opinions that encourage debate and
discussion. But for years, she has faced a brutal onslaught of rape threats and
other forms of harassment.
“None of this makes me
exceptional,” she writes. “It just makes me a woman with an Internet
connection. A woman doesn’t even need to occupy a professional writing perch at
a prominent platform to become a target. As the Internet becomes
increasingly central to the human experience, the ability of women to live and
work freely online will be shaped, and too often limited, by the technology
companies that host these threats, the constellation of local and federal law
enforcement officers who investigate them, and the popular commentators who
dismiss them—all arenas that remain dominated by men, many of whom have little personal
understanding of what women face online everyday.”
This issue is indeed an
everyday occurrence for some women. Sites like Twitter have fundamentally
changed the way that people communicate with its ability to disseminate
thoughts and views to the world in just an instant. Its raw openness means that
those who want to harass can do so with minimal effort but maximum effect.
For example, Caroline
Criado-Perez, who led a campaign to for a woman (other
than the monarch) to be featured on British currency, was one victim of
vitriolic Twitter harassment. Her campaign was eventually successful, with
author Jane Austen selected as the
next famous Briton to appear on a banknote. But sexually lurid threats of
rape and disembodiment, death threats and questioning of
Criado-Perez’s motivations and credentials came in thick and fast. In some
cases these were so severe that it drove Criado-Perez to shut her Twitter
account down and report it to the police. Eventually Isabella Sorley and John
Nimmo were convicted and sentenced for “extreme threats.” Two years on,
the feminist activist, now returned to Twitter,
Until now, it’s unclear what
drove the level of hatred toward a woman who was campaigning for equality.
Criado-Perez has not been deterred and continues to use social media to raise
awareness for her campaigns. But cases like hers have increased in the last few
years.
For Brianna Wu, head of
development at Giant Spacekat and radio presenter, rape threats were not the
worst of the abuse directed at her on image-board website 4chan. Wu was forced
to leave her home after threats and packages were sent via mail. She was
labeled the derogatory term, social justice warrior, for speaking out against
the male-dominated gaming and tech industry by those who rallied around the
exclusion of women in gaming culture—the Gamergaters.
Brianna Wu, head of development at Giant Spacekat
received a number of rape and death threats online for working in the
male-dominated gaming and tech industry. Shannon Grant Photography.
“I’ve gotten so many harassing
tweets and emails that I now have an employee who works full-time handling
them,” she explains. “They’ve shared my home address so many times that I now
keep a baseball bat by the front door, and any unexpected knock can send me
into a panic. To them, no area of my private life is off limits to use against
me.” Wu says that at the last count, there were more than 400 pages
dedicated to exposing her as a “free speech hater” and “militant feminist.”
Wu is not the only woman
involved in the Gamergate saga to be harassed by
trolls. Zoe Quinn was accused of sleeping her way to
the top‘ Anita
Sarkeesian, a vlogger and writer, was the
subject of a game where you could beat her up; Jenn Frank and Mattie Brice ended up leaving their
professions because of similar attacks.
Wu believes that the
harassment she is getting is because she is a woman. She says, “I absolutely
think that women experience significantly more harassment than men, and in ways
that men could never possibly consider to be harassment.”
THE MALE VICTIMS
Cyberbullying is
regularly deemed a female-centric concern, however more men are the targets
of physical and death threats than women—and this statistic is
all-too-often overlooked. To negate (as some feminist critics, bloggers and
thinkers have done) the fact that men receive a higher sum of the total
abuse online is tantamount to not seeing the true problem.
Key is that Pew’s research also finds that “online
men are somewhat more likely than online women to experience some level of
online harassment overall.” This finding may at first seem inconsequential but
is hugely important when it comes to understanding cyber-harassment.
Demos, a UK-based nonpartisan
think tank, in collaboration with Sussex University,
“[W]e realized that year after
year, there were predictable episodic periods of very public crisis around
trolling and abuse especially being raised by very prominent women, and
especially, prominent journalists, but it was stretching to women in lots of
different fields,” says Carl Miller, co-founder and Research Director of
the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos.
Miller has been researching
language and decorum online and says, “In terms of extent I didn’t see an
imbalance in the level of hate that women get compared to men. In terms of
kind, yes. So when abuse aimed at women was meant to be hurtful or disturbing,
people were groping for the most damaging words they could which,
unfortunately, in this sense for women, are sexually aggressive words.”
Miller continues, “We do something called corpus linguistics which is
essentially tipping all the tweets into a great big bucket and start looking at
word frequencies and distributions within this massive bucket of words and the
abuse towards women was certainly more sexualized, it was certainly more
focused towards their physical appearance, and it certainly used a
constellation of sexually aggressive language that was not coming up in the
male category.”
Another counterintuitive finding when looking at perpetrators rather than victims of online harassment is that there seem to be just as many women hurling abuse as men. Miller finds that, “women tended to send more abuse to women, men sent more to men, but men did tend to send more to men and women.” |
Cyberbullying is often considered a women’s issue,
which negates the bigger picture as a human issue that affects women and men
alike. (Dean Bertoncelj/Shutterstock.com)
A HUMAN ISSUE
Rather than amplifying the
view that women are merely suffering due to comments from
loser men, it may be key to
open the debate and understand it as a wider issue of persistent and ongoing
misogyny in popular culture by everyone, regardless of gender.
Cathy Young, columnist and
author of Ceasefire!: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces To Achieve
True Equality, argues that calling it “gendered” harassment is exacerbating
the problem. “I have seen several times women on Twitter retweet or
screencap an abusive tweet that they got which isn’t necessarily gender
specific, and they will post it with a comment like ‘just another day of being
women on the Internet,’” she explains.
Young says that there are
gender-specific comments that men get and “we tend to think of men as the
default human being and so what happens to women is gender specific. I’ve seen
men get accused of being rapists or child molesters over something that they
wrote and…not a whole lot of women get called child molesters because again,
men’s problems just get called human problems.
“Feminists have often
criticized this way of thinking, but we are also perpetuating it. We need to
look at this as a human issue not a gender issue.”
A recent
investigation by academics into the types of people that sexually harass
women online finds that “low-status males increase female-directed hostility to
minimize the loss of status as a consequence of hierarchical reconfiguration
resulting from the entrance of a woman into the competitive arena.” But that
higher-skilled players were more positive towards women.
Replace the word misogyny with
misanthropy in much of this article and the result would be the same. Perhaps a
viable explanation as to why women face gendered harassment online is not
because they are women, but because they are successful, articulate or popular.
Cyber harassment exists and
the experiences of many women, famous or otherwise, proves that it can destroy
lives, but it’s important that we recognize it for what it is rather than
reading gender into the problem.
It may be that labeling the
abuse women get on the Internet as “online misogyny” and assuming that women
get more of it than men is making it a woman-only problem, thereby
placing it in the realm of women’s issues and women-only discussion groups
that relegate the debate onto the path of didactic intellectualism—a woman’s
problem for women to sort out.
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