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Law in the Internet Society
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Little Dark Age-- By MarianaFranceseCoutinho - 10 Oct 2019 In 2019, online harassment is not a new phenomenon: it has reached a status so commonplace that there are even online harassment glossaries available. There are reports of bloggers being systematically harassed as early as 2007 due to their online presence, and that has continued to happen – if anything, such systematical abuse seems to have increased with the popularization of access to the internet and the rise of social media. Both male and female people who have an online social media presence are victims of harassment and threats, but women who dare step foot in traditionally male-dominated fields such as gaming or sports journalism are almost certain to face some type of persecution. This is only amplified by the fact that the role of women in Westernized society has been confined to human chattel, homemakers and caretakers until fairly recently in history, leaving us with a small number of areas that are considered “typically feminine” – and with leadership and positions of power in general not being considered feminine at all. Revealingly, men do not suffer such rampant attacks when they decide to work on a field that is traditionally or mostly female: male nurses, primary school teachers or psychologists are not commonly harassed, online or otherwise, due to their gender. On the other hand, a 2014 survey about scientific fieldworkers reveals that 71% of women field researchers have received inappropriate sexual remarks. Furthermore, the content of online attacks for men and women are usually different: while a male journalist may be criticized over an article he wrote for his ideas and suffer personal attacks based on his individual beliefs, female journalists tend to suffer attacks based on gender, including misogynistic insults and humiliation due to their physical appearance. Anyone can be an idiot, or stupid, or an absolute moron. Only women are called every imaginable slur for “prostitute”, and only for women is it run-of-the-mill to receive violent, graphic threats about what unknown, anonymous internet dwellers intend to do with their bodies. A survey by the International Federation of Journalists reports that nearly two-thirds of women journalists suffer gender-based attacks online. Furthermore, more than half the women reported they had been threatened or abused in a face-to-face encounter in the course of their work, with over a quarter saying they had been physically attacked. According to Amnesty International, a female journalist or politician is harassed on Twitter every 30 seconds; and those statistics are even worse for black women and women belonging to ethnic minorities. These online attacks may easily translate to physical attacks: in Ukraine, for instance, physical assaults on female journalists increased by 50% in 2018. The chilling effect provoked by online abuse against female journalists is not to be ignored. 38% of women journalists who were subject to online harassment admitted to self-censorship. According to the International Women’s Media Foundation, nearly one-third of female journalists considered leaving the profession due to online attacks and threats. Female journalists are routinely forced to close their social media accounts due to threats and intimidation. The victims are not the only ones affected by the consequences of this campaign of online violence: when female voices are self-modulated and smothered due to fear, the public debate suffers. The democratic environment misses out on different female perspectives. The public debate itself, by consequence, becomes a lot less democratic, pluralist and representative. The fundamental right to freedom of expression is heavily threatened, and this presents an issue for the whole of society. It is time to take action against this phenomenon, and to demand action from those who avowed to protect the fundamental rights to freedom of expression and freedom of information. Broad statements for the protection of these rights will not have the desired effect. Positive measures must be drafted and undertaken, be it by member states of the European Union – who must uphold the European Convention on Human Rights – and signatories of international treaties such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, be it through Recommendations by the Council of Europe and Resolutions of the United Nations or other applicable means. Express channels should be made available for women so that they may report threats and harassment; swift legal and police action should be taken against perpetrators; and states should demand a stronger level of cooperation from social media channels in the face of such menacing criminal activity if the rights to freedom of expression and to freedom of information are to be upheld. Furthermore, governmental bodies for monitoring the implementation of recommended measures should be created; with permanent monitoring systems arranged. Actual policy changes in order to improve the social media environment for female journalists and women in general should take place. Law enforcement should receive training in order to provide effective responses for online harassment victims, and change the way they address cybercrime and online threats to women. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram should suffer heavy external pressure, if need be, in order to cooperate with the crackdown on abusers – after all, they are the ones most equipped to deal with the problem of online harassment against female journalists on its very root. Even if they consider themselves unable to provide identification of online users due to privacy norms, they should have internal rules in place enabling them to evict specific users or network connections from accessing their services, or pre-emptively monitoring such users’ outgoing messages and interactions for forbidden content. The number of female voices in the public sphere is already seriously lacking. Female journalists cannot continue to be coerced into silence through online persecution, or this will have serious costs for freedom of expression and gender equity, both online and offline. Seeing as social media has an increasingly greater role as a space for disseminating information, it is of paramount importance that freedom of expression of all journalists – but especially women – can be effectively protected in this new plane, so that we are all able to listen to the voices that have been silenced for so long.I think this draft assumes that the reader needs to be convinced about the existence of misogyny. This causes you to spend much of your space upon what you (and I) know is the most basic of human realities about injustice. Let's, in the next draft, assume instead what we know: that the ideology of all patriarchal societies begins with an "understanding" of women that justifies their constant mistreatment and brutalization. Therefore, as the Net is becoming the external nervous system of humankind, it absorbs, embeds, reflects, and ultimately reinforces misogyny. If what needs doing can be done with the European human rights administrative framework, then let's use your space in the next draft to say how. If, as I suspect, you don't believe any more than I do that equality for women can be achieved through such small adjustments in such localized places; if you believe, as I believe, that we need more fundamental changes in society, across humankind, to achieve even basic fairness to women, maybe the next draft could reflect that. Perhaps you could put forward some ideas about how the Net could be changed to work for women's safety, equality and freedom, instead of against them. You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
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