2. The More Identities You Have, The More Abuse You Face

The combination of racist and sexist abuse received by Diane Abbott is reflective of a wider trend of ‘intersectional discrimination’. That is, discrimination that targets an individual on the basis of their different identities.

Any analysis of online abuse against women should not be limited to only applying a gender lens to the data. When you are a woman with multiple or intersecting identities, your experience of the world is not just limited to your gender. Your race or disability or sexual orientation, for example, can have just as much of an effect as your gender — if not more — on how you are treated both in the physical and digital world. In the case of online abuse, women of colour, religious or ethnic minority women, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or intersex (LBTI) women, women with disabilities, or even non-binary individuals who don’t conform to traditional gender norms of male and female, will often experience abuse that targets these different identities.

Diane Abbott standing out in our analysis is an acute example of how intersectional discrimination works. The abuse that she faces is not just sexist and misogynistic; it’s also incredibly racist.

Examples of Abusive Tweets mentioning @HackneyAbbott

For example, she recounted to me the response she received after she spoke about her experience of online abuse in a recent parliamentary debate.

“My office got flooded with communications, both by letter and by email. People sent us emails and letters full of swastikas, people sent us postcards and letters with pictures of monkeys and chimps. People sent us hundreds of emails using the word nigg*r — that’s the sort of response we get. It’s highly racialised and it’s also gendered because people talk about rape and they talk about my physical appearance in a way they wouldn’t talk about a man. I’m abused as a female politician and I’m abused as a black politician.”

Our findings demonstrate intersectional online abuse against women MPs in more than one way. Despite representing only 8.8% of women MPs in Westminster, Asian women MPs were found to receive the most abusive tweets per MP.

Race of Women MPs in Westminister

Number of Abusive Tweets Received by Women MPs Categorized by Race

Our analysis shows that Asian women MPs receive 132 abusive tweets per MP. This is 30% higher than white women MPs who receive 92 abusive tweets per MP. Given the disproportionately high levels of abuse against Diane Abbott, black women MPs were found to receive 2,781 abusive tweets per MP — but when Diane Abbott is excluded from the analysis — the findings show black women MPs receive 81 abusive tweets per MP.

Number of Abusive Tweets Per Day against Women MPs Categorized by Race

Earlier this summer I spoke to Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, a former MP for the Scottish National Party and the first Black Asian Minority Ethnic (BAME) woman from Scotland to be elected to any Parliament whose Twitter account was also included in our analysis. Tasmina explained how she began experiencing online abuse during her campaign for the 2015 general election.

“When I was elected in 2015 and even during my election campaign, I found myself at the other end of horrific levels of abuse. And the question is: why might that be? Is everyone receiving the same levels of abuse? Is it women? Is it because I’m Black Asian Minority Ethnic (BAME)?”

When I asked Tasmina for examples of the type of abuse she faced she told me that somebody once tweeted her home address and postcode which then required police to patrol her house. The police have also advised Tasmina to designate a safe room in her house where her family should meet in case a threat made online should transpire. She also recalled a pile-on of abuse she received after appearing on BBC Question Time in November 2016.

“People said I should be grabbed by the pussy, that I should have items inserted into me…people were inciting others on Twitter to follow on the bandwagon and retweet [the abuse]. These people have been reported to the police, as have others who have suggested that my family should be bombed or my house blown up… ”

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Examples of Abusive Tweets Received By or Mentioning Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh

Tasmina wasn’t surprised about the high levels of online abuse experienced by Asian women MPs. She explained:

“I am from a Scottish Asian community. I am a Muslim. And I’m a Woman. So it’s everything. It has an exponential effect, so people will pile on for a variety of different reasons. Some of them because you are all of these things, and some because you are one of these things, or two of these things, which makes it so much more difficult to deal with, because you just wonder where do I start with this?”