A New Survey Reveals How Widespread Abuse Against Female Journalists Is. The Results Are Sobering.
Female journalists face a wide range of abuse, both online and offline. This can include:
Verbal abuse: This can include name-calling, insults, threats, and intimidation. Most of these comments have undertones (or overtones) of misogyny.
Sexual harassment: Women journalists are often subjected to unwanted sexual advances, comments, and gestures, both in person and online. This can make it difficult for them to do their jobs effectively and can also have a negative impact on their mental health.
Physical violence: This can include assault, battery, and even murder—12 female journalists were murdered in 2022 alone.
Online abuse: This can include trolling, doxxing, and swatting (the act of making a prank call to emergency services in order to set them upon a particular address).
Economic abuse: This can include job discrimination, pay discrimination, and being denied access to resources—this is a harder piece of abuse to face because it is systemic and often embedded into the workplace. Stereotypes about women are also embedded into portrayals of the media—female journalists are often depicted in film and on television as unrelenting, rude, or otherwise antagonizing.
According to a survey conducted by the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) in 2019, which surveyed nearly 1,100 journalists from 125 countries, 63 percent of female journalists reported experiencing some form of intimidation, threats or abuse in relation to their work. In comparison, 38 percent of male journalists reported experiencing the same.
Additionally, a study conducted by the International Women's Media Foundation (IWMF) in 2018 found that among the female journalists surveyed, 64 percent had experienced gender-based violence in the course of their work. This included sexual harassment, physical assault, and online harassment. In comparison, only 18 percent of male journalists reported experiencing gender-based violence.
Female journalists face this abuse within “seconds” of tweeting or posting their work. A look at Washington Post columnist Rana Ayyub’s Twitter, for instance, shows that about 3.6 percent of the engagements on one of Ayyub’s most engaged posts (12,000 engagements) were abusive comments or retweets. It only took 12 minutes from the time Ayyub posted the tweet for her to receive the first abusive response.
Unfortunately, Ayyub is used to this kind of abuse in real life, and referred to the data as a "slice of life." "This is co-ordinated and organised, this is not coming in isolation. This is why it is extremely important to understand the [connection] between offline and online harassment. There is a very thin line that differentiates [the two],” she said.
"If Twitter collapses, the trolls, the haters, the networked disinformation agents will find them wherever they go. They’re not disappearing anytime soon, sadly," said ICFJ global director Julie Posetti. In response, ICFJ, in partnership with the University of Sheffield, have created the Twitter Abuse Dashboard, which uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze tweets in real-time and look for abusive engagement.
"We are doing this [founding the Twitter Abuse Dashboard] out of an act of desperation and exasperation because the platforms have dismally failed to take this problem and threat seriously,” said Posetti, “and to provide appropriate opportunities to monitor and escalate within their system the targeted online violence that women experience.”
"Ultimately, we would hope and expect that platforms would come on board with something like this, to facilitate it themselves and to work with us. But we are not in that situation currently. The door remains open for serious collaboration."
Twitter, run by open misogynist Elon Musk, is not likely to collaborate on this front, but the problem is widespread. Female journalists face tangible threats to their lives every single day. The time for action has passed.
