Online Abuse and Harassment

Abstract

In recent years, gendered violence online in forms such as rape threats, cyberstalking, and image‐based abuse has become increasingly prevalent, toxic, and harmful. Contrary to claims that cyberhate is mostly innocuous because it is virtual rather than “real,” the widespread suffering caused to women has been shown to be substantial, tangible, and embodied. Gendered cyberhate causes women significant social, psychological, reputational, economic, and political harms, and is understood as constituting a new form of workplace harassment as well as an emerging, economic dimension of existing, gender‐related digital divides. The problem has received extensive international media coverage, as well as being the subject of calls for urgent intervention from organizations such as the United Nations (UN) and Amnesty International. Yet a wide range of insidious structural, institutional, and technological factors continue to make gendered cyberhate into a problem that can be difficult to understand and appreciate in its damaging entirety, let alone to combat. In a nutshell, while the technology is new, the threats of sexual violence, victim‐blaming, and institutional inaction associated with online abuse and harassment directed at women can be seen as sitting squarely in far older traditions. Among other things, this illustrates the tenacity of misogyny, the ongoing impacts of systemic gender inequity, the complexity of social problems flowing from machine–human interactions, and the continuing relevance of feminist activism.

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