YOU look like a tart desperate for c**k ... All feminists should be gang-raped to set them right. Plus work in a hore (sic) house for year or so.

That was an email typical of the type Emma Jane received on a weekly, daily and sometimes hourly basis in response to articles she wrote about feminist and social justice issues.

media_camera Dr Emma Jane says the extraordinary uptake of social media has created networked environments that facilitated “drive-by” attacks by anonymous users.

Between 1998 to 2012, Dr Jane’s articles and comment pieces in media including The Australian, attracted a stream of sexualised, violent e-bile. She never replied to the trolls but the abuse didn’t stop until she left journalism.

The hostility experienced by Dr Jane isn’t unusual. Graphic threats of rape, misogynistic abuse and homophobic slurs are increasingly being used to disagree with and shut down women in the cybersphere.

Now a Senior Research Fellow at UNSW, Dr Jane is leading a major federally-funded research project into the types of hostility being directed at women online including on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

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Most cyber-bullying research has so far focused on young people, with fewer studies done on the effects on adult targets or why so much cyberhate is directed at women and involves sexually violent language.

“Given the English language offers us an infinite number of ways to threaten and abuse each other, it is extremely revealing that the rhetoric of rape and sexualised violence has become so common online,” she said.

“My research suggests that women are being abused online because they are women, and that this reflects a tenacious — and possibly worsening — sexism in the broader community.”

Characteristics of cyberhate against women: •The target is a woman who is, for one reason or another, visible in the public sphere.

•The authors are anonymous or hard to identify.

•The message is sexually explicit, and usually homophobic or misogynistic.

•The message prescribes sex acts as “all-purpose corrective”

•The message includes scathing, appearance-related judgments.

Dr Jane said men copped plenty of abuse but for the most part it was very different to the “fat ugly slutty” trifecta directed at women.

Mob mentality played a part, she said, and once certain norms around language were created, it was easy for others to unthinkingly follow suit.

“I think this is the case with the proliferation of sexualised vitriol directed at so many women online. Misogyny has gone viral. Rape threats have become a sort of lingua franca — the ‘go-to’ response for men who disagree with something a woman says.”

Cyberhate was also starting to spill offline through practices such as “doxxing”, where a woman’s address or phone number was published to incite further harassment.

media_camera Video game developer Zoe Quinn was subject to 18 months of online harassment in what was known as ‘Gamer Gate’ after releasing her game, Depression Quest.

Rape threats have become a sort of lingua franca — the ‘go-to’ response for men who disagree with something a woman says

“You don’t need to be particularly famous to be the victim of gendered cyberhate. You just need to get a few too many retweets and your life can change dramatically,” said Dr Jane, adding the anonymity of the internet and the unwillingness of online platforms to bring perpetrators to account had played a role.

“Given the high levels of sexual and other types of violence experienced by women offline, these sorts of threats can be extremely unsettling.”

‘THESE ARE CONVERSATIONS WE NEED TO HAVE’

Like many women who appear regularly on television and radio to venture an opinion on social issues, Daily Telegraph columnist Sarrah Le Marquand has found herself on the receiving end of abusive and sexually violent messages on social media.

media_camera RendezView editor Sarrah Le Marquand.

Although she says she has developed a thick skin and refuses to engage with aggressive strangers, she admits to having called the police to report a string of anonymous tweets that repeatedly threatened to rape her and then “butcha” her children.

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“I am never one to shy away from all kinds of feedback,” says Le Marquand. “It comes with the territory and I am always happy to hear from people who disagree with me. But there does to seem to be a certain aggression reserved for women who work in the media and in recent years I have seen a rise in many of us being threatened with rape and violence in an attempt to silence us.”

Now editing the opinion site RendezView, Le Marquand sees first-hand the often vitriolic comments levelled at outspoken female writers, or, as she calls it “the frontline of online misogyny.”

“Because we are being read by a very mainstream audience, our columnists have to brace themselves for a fairly robust response,” says Le Marquand. “It can be an initial shock for some of our contributors who have previously written for female-dominated readerships or smaller blogs and are used to a much softer reception.

“Columnists very rarely get a soft reception at RendezView. But we embrace that because isn’t that the whole point? It’s easy to talk about polarising issues like feminism and domestic violence in an echo chamber – but these are conversations we need to be having in the mainstream media, even if it does potentially expose you to a lot more abuse.”

WOMEN IN THE FIRING LINE

Many high-profile women have been victims of cyberhate, with more targets speaking publicly about the threats they received online.

TV personality Charlotte Dawson, who was a victim of trolling, became an ambassador for a major anti-cyber-bullying initiative before taking her own life in February, 2014.

media_camera Clementine Ford’s response to the Sunrise program’s Facebook post attracted a violent stream of threats and abuse.

Feminist writer Clementine Ford was besieged with threats of rape and violence earlier this year including being told to “sit on a butchers knife” after she spoke out about breakfast program Sunrise’s attitude toward victims of nude photo hackings.

Ford, who took one abuser’s threat to the police, has since called for action against online abusers, telling girls and women to publicly name and shame the men who subject them to revenge porn and online misogyny.

US game developers Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu and feminist Anita Sarkeesian, suffered 18 months of sustained abuse, rape and death threats and doxxing in what became known as “Gamer Gate”, which many view as a campaign against the rise of women in the gaming world.

Dr Jane said there was a tendency to downplay material because it was “just words” or “just the internet” but gendered hate speech had real impacts.

“In addition to silencing and electronic disenfranchisement, other trends are emerging: for example, many of the women I’ve interviewed have stopped posting selfies and now restrict their online self-representation to images of their cats and dogs.”

media_camera Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes vs. Women, which examined female video game characters, triggered a campaign of sexist harassment, doxxing, public rape threats, even a computer game in which she was bashed to a bloody pulp. She was forced to cancel speaking appearances and leave her home as a result of repeated death threats.

She said most female targets were dissatisfied with the responses from social media platforms and police when they reported online abuse or asked for help.

“I do, however, think the public advocacy work of female cyberhate targets is increasing the public’s awareness that this is a serious problem with the potential to cause women great suffering and that, in its most extreme form, constitutes a criminal act.”

Cyberhate: the new digital divide?

The federally-funded UNSW three year project is seeking interviewees who are prepared to talk about the vitriol they have experienced via the internet and on social media.

Participants are sought Australia-wide from two groups: those who have public profiles and women who are not in public life.

If you’ve experienced rape threats or other gendered hostility online and are interested in taking part in the study, go to the project website.

This project will culminate in an international symposium in 2017 and the results will be used to help canvas real-world solutions for online platforms and policies.

Dr Jane will also be speaking at Cybersexism: How did the internet become unsafe for women? at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas on September 6.