Welcome to part ten of my series on speaking out against hate directed at women.

Today, I bring you the words of Michael Nugent. Michael is a writer from Dublin, Ireland, and chair of the advocacy group Atheist Ireland.

Michael speaks specifically about cyber harassment and how the majority of people who are harassed are women and that we as a community need to actively attack the problem. He helps us to remember why I started this series in the first place -that it is not just isolated experiences it is a pattern of behavior that we are seeing and it needs to be addressed.

Michael’s comments after the jump.

From Michael:

We should not tolerate, in any of our online or offline communities, any sexual

harassment or abuse or threats of violence against women that we would not

tolerate if they were directed against our family or close friends. On the

Internet, many women face a pattern of online sexual harassment, including

rape threats, in the technology, business, entertainment, atheist,

skeptical, pop culture, gaming and many other online communities.

This can cause women to feel hurt and frightened, to hide their female

identity online, or to retreat altogether from the Internet. And this can

in turn affect other aspects of their lives. Our online identities and

online networking are increasingly important to our social lives and

careers. And our friends and employers may see this hate speech when

searching online for information about us.

Professor Danielle Citron of University of Maryland school of law has

written extensively on this issue. She says that cyber gender harassment

can involve a perfect storm of threats conveying a desire for physical

harm, doctored photographs, privacy invasions, lies, and technical

sabotage. She reports that, from 2000 to 2010, more than seven in every

ten victims reporting cyber harassment were women. And when men were

harassed, it was often for being or seeming gay. She argues that legal

changes were crucial in the battles against domestic violence and

workplace harassment, and that we should reframe cyber gender harassment

as a civil rights violation.

We must actively tackle this problem in each of our own communities. Doing

this is one part of how the atheist and skeptical communities can start to

become more inclusive, safe and supportive, and I’ve written elsewhere in

more detail about how we can discuss this reasonably. We should also

create a united front of online activists from different online

communities, to properly research the impact of this abuse across all

online communities, and to work together to find the best ways to

eradicate it.

Most men have no idea of the relentless nature of this type of online

abuse, and how devastating the cumulative impact can be. Because most men

don’t get the same type of sexual abuse as women do, and because the

Internet can seem to be an artificial environment, we can easily become

desensitized to abuse that would outrage us if it was aimed at our sisters

or friends or daughters or wives or mothers.

You may sincerely believe that people are exaggerating the scale and

impact of this abuse, or that it is prudish or victorian to be concerned

about it. Or you may see it as a trivial problem that goes away when you

turn off your computer. If any of these thoughts cross your mind, you

should consider some actual examples of what this abuse really looks like,

and imagine experiencing this from the perspective of the victims.

Emotional trigger warning

Warning – there are lots of emotional triggers here, but many people are

unaware of the extent of the problem so I think it is important to give

examples. If you don’t want to read the examples, skip to the next section

headed “This is a pattern of behaviour”.

In 2007, top technology writer Kathy Sierra got a series of online

threats, including “I hope someone slits your throat and cums down your

gob”. When she blogged about them, the threats intensified, and she

cancelled her speaking events and closed her blog.

In 2007, the online group Anonymous published the personal details online

of a nineteen year old video blogger, along with doctored photos of her face on

naked bodies, and the threat “We will rape her at full force in her

vagina, mouth and ass.”

In 2008, when entrepreneur Alyssa Royse wrote a critical review of a

Batman movie including branding ideas, she got a stream of abusive

comments including “You are clearly retarded, I hope someone shoots and

rapes you”.

In 2009, a Wyoming man posted a Craigslist advert in the name of his

ex-girlfriend, saying that she had fantasies of being raped by “a real

aggressive man with no concern for women”. Another man responded by

breaking into her house and raping her.

In 2010, an eleven year old Florida girl was accused online of having had

sex with a local musician. She made a profanity-laden video response,

which triggered intense online bullying against her, and she had an

emotional breakdown online.

In 2011, Rebecca Watson highlighted the online abuse that she gets as a

blogger on Skepchick and as a podcaster on SGU, including “You deserve to

be raped and tortured and killed. Swear I’d laugh if I could.”

In 2011, when a fifteen year old girl posted a picture on Reddit of

herself holding a Carl Sagan book that her mother had given her for

Christmas, adult men posted hundreds of crude comments about ways that

they would like to have sex with her.

In 2012, the pattern continues. Since Anita Sarkeesian started a project

to highlight how video games portray women, some gamers have threatened

her with rape, violence and death, and have created an online game where

you can beat her up.

Sherri Shepherd, co-host of The View, recently filed a police complaint

against @DaCloneKiller who tweeted to her that “somebody should drag u in

a back alley and rape you”. She will have to subpoena Twitter for

@DaCloneKiller’s identity.

Then we had “Is it immoral to rape a Skepchick because they are so

annoying?”, an unfunny joke aimed at a small group of identifiable women,

that is even less funny against the background of this relentless stream

of online abuse of women.

This is a pattern of behaviour

This is a pattern of behaviour, not a series of isolated incidents. It is

gradually becoming less acceptable to sexually harass or threaten women in

real life. But that message has not yet reached the Internet, where

anonymity and hostile debate and absence of oversight make it easier for

us to evade responsibility for our actions.

Some people insist that we can say what we want because the Internet has

its own rules, while others argue that the right to free speech, even when

hateful, must be protected. When New Statesman wrote an article about the

Anita Sarkeesian case, a commenter named AllyF provided this counter to

that argument:

“What you fail to understand is that the use of hate speech, threats and

bullying to terrify and intimidate people into silence or away from

certain topics is a far bigger threat to free speech than any legal

sanction. Imagine this is not the internet but a public square. One woman

stands on a soapbox and expresses an idea. She is instantly surrounded by

an army of 5,000 angry people yelling the worst kind of abuse at her in an

attempt to shut her up. Yes, there’s a free speech issue there. But not

the one you think.”

There is also the wider context of sexism in general. If we as men faced

this pattern of sick online abuse simply because of our gender, I suspect

that we would urgently take action to tackle the problem. If we fail to

take the same action when women face this problem, our inaction reinforces

prejudice and discrimination against women generally. We may not mean to

do that, and we may not even be aware of it, but the impact of our

inaction remains the same.

Tackling sexism is a complex problem, with no magic answers. We should

rigorously analyze the extent of sexism in our communities, both online

and offline, and we should test and refine the best ways to eradicate it.

But we must not deny that it exists, or reinforce it with prejudice and

discrimination. Instead we should actively work to create inclusive, safe

and supportive communities, in which we can live together as equals,

regardless of our race, gender, sexuality or ability levels.

And we should work together on this so that, ultimately, we never again

have a fifteen year old atheist girl excitedly posting online about her

Christmas present of a Carl Sagan book, then reading crude comments about

adult men wanting to have sex with her, and having to respond: “Dat feel

when you’ll never be taken seriously in the atheist/ scientific/

political/ whatever community because you’re a girl. :c ”

Some sources for this post:

Law’s expressive value in combating cyber gender harassment. Prof Danielle

Keats Citron, Michigan Law Review, Dec 2009

http://www.michiganlawreview.org/assets/pdfs/108/3/citron.pdf

The Offensive Internet: Speech, Privacy, and Reputation. Edited by Saul

Levmore and Martha Nussbaum, Harvard University Press, 2011

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674050891

Misogynistic cyber hate speech: testimony of Prof Danielle Keats Citron to

UK parliament committee on cyber hate, Oct 2011

http://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2143&context=fac_pubs

Women bloggers call for a stop to ‘hateful’ trolling by misogynist men.

Vanessa Thorpe and Richard Rogers, The Observer, Nov 2011

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/05/women-bloggers-hateful-trolling

This is what online harassment looks like, Helen Lewis, New Statesman,

July 2012

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/internet/2012/07/what-online-harassment-looks