QUOTE
Abstract
Society routinely fails to take seriously harms suffered by women. It trivializes or overlooks phenomena that profoundly impact women’s basic freedoms. No term even existed to describe sexual harassment of women in the workplace until the 1970s. The refusal to recognize harms uniquely impacting women has an important social meaning—it conveys the message that abusive behavior towards women is acceptable and should be tolerated.
The online harassment of women exemplifies twenty-first century behavior that profoundly harms women yet remains too often overlooked and even trivialized. This harassment includes threats of physical violence, doctored photographs portraying women being strangled, postings of women’s home addresses alongside suggestions that they should be raped, and technological attacks that shut down blogs and websites. It impedes women’s full participation in online life, often driving them offline, and undermines their autonomy, identity, dignity, and well-being. But the public and law enforcement routinely marginalize women’s experience, deeming it harmless teasing that women should expect, and tolerate, given the Internet’s Wild West norms of behavior.
Grappling with the trivialization of cyber gender harassment is a crucial step to understanding and combating the harm that it inflicts. My previous work Cyber Civil Rights explored law’s role in deterring and punishing online abuse. This Essay emphasizes what may be law’s more important role: its ability to de-trivialize cyber gender harassment and change the norms of acceptable online behavior. Recognizing cyber harassment for what it is—gender discrimination—is crucial to educate the public about its gendered harms, to ensure that women’s complaints are heard, to convince perpetrators to stop their bigoted online attacks, and ultimately to change our online culture of misogyny to one of equality.
Society routinely fails to take seriously harms suffered by women. It trivializes or overlooks phenomena that profoundly impact women’s basic freedoms. No term even existed to describe sexual harassment of women in the workplace until the 1970s. The refusal to recognize harms uniquely impacting women has an important social meaning—it conveys the message that abusive behavior towards women is acceptable and should be tolerated.
The online harassment of women exemplifies twenty-first century behavior that profoundly harms women yet remains too often overlooked and even trivialized. This harassment includes threats of physical violence, doctored photographs portraying women being strangled, postings of women’s home addresses alongside suggestions that they should be raped, and technological attacks that shut down blogs and websites. It impedes women’s full participation in online life, often driving them offline, and undermines their autonomy, identity, dignity, and well-being. But the public and law enforcement routinely marginalize women’s experience, deeming it harmless teasing that women should expect, and tolerate, given the Internet’s Wild West norms of behavior.
Grappling with the trivialization of cyber gender harassment is a crucial step to understanding and combating the harm that it inflicts. My previous work Cyber Civil Rights explored law’s role in deterring and punishing online abuse. This Essay emphasizes what may be law’s more important role: its ability to de-trivialize cyber gender harassment and change the norms of acceptable online behavior. Recognizing cyber harassment for what it is—gender discrimination—is crucial to educate the public about its gendered harms, to ensure that women’s complaints are heard, to convince perpetrators to stop their bigoted online attacks, and ultimately to change our online culture of misogyny to one of equality.
This is especially interesting in light of the new demographic information which gives on 13% of active contributors on Wikipedia as being women.
This merits discussion.
