Is the Internet unsafe for women?

Many hail the Internet as the ultimate democratic tool. Everyone has a voice and has access to information and to others they wouldn’t have otherwise.

But many women are finding the Internet an unsafe place and have experienced terrible abuse and threats for stating their opinions.

In the January/February issue of Pacific Standard, Amanda Hess exposes this reality in her article “Women Aren’t Welcome Here.” 

She begins the article by telling about receiving messages from a Twitter account set up, it seemed, for the purpose of making death threats to her.

I cannot recount the entire text here, but the writer says, “I am 36 years old, I did 12 years for ‘manslaughter,’ I killed a woman, like you. … Happy to say we live in the same ­­state. Im (sic) looking you up, and when I find you, im going to rape you and remove your head.”

Hess is a journalist who writes about sex (among other things). She dialed 911. The police officer who showed up two hours later didn’t know what Twitter is. But Twitter, for Hess, is where she spends much of her time.

She offers other examples of abusive language and threats but notes that she’s not exceptional. She gives examples of other women writers who have been threatened.

And it’s not just professional writers, she says. “According to a 2005 report by the Pew Research Center,” she writes, “women and men have been logging on in equal numbers since 2000, but the vilest communications are still disproportionately lobbed at women.”

That survey also reported that 5 percent of women who used the Internet said “something happened online” that led them into “physical danger.”

Another study showed that simply appearing as a woman online can inspire abuse. “In 2006,” Hess writes, “researchers from the University of Maryland set up a bunch of fake online accounts and dispatched them into chat rooms. Accounts with feminine usernames incurred an average of 100 sexually explicit or threatening messages a day. Masculine names received 3.7.”

While there are laws against cyberstalking, the Internet is global, and law enforcement jurisdiction is local. And the abuse has become so prevalent that women are often told to ignore it.

But this carries a cost, Hess writes. “Threats of rape, death and stalking can overpower our emotional bandwidth, take up our time and cost us money through legal fees, online protection services and missed wages.”

Police often tell women who’ve received threats to go offline, but that has costs as well “as the Internet becomes increasingly central to the human experience,” Hess writes.

Another study found that Internet harassment is routinely dismissed as “harmless locker-room talk,” perpetrators as “juvenile pranksters” and victims as “overly sensitive complainers.”

The justice system, Hess says, tends to treat Internet threats as less real and don’t follow up.

She notes that while American police forces are overwhelmingly male, “the technology companies that have created the architecture of the online world are, famously, even more so.”

Hess, understandably, is interested in finding solutions to this problem. It affects her every day.

But all of us need to be aware of this alarming situation and look for ways to make every part of our world, including the Internet, safe for everyone, particularly women.