How Women Journalists Are Taking a Stand Against Online Violence
Online violence targeting women journalists has reached alarming levels, posing serious threats to their physical and psychological well-being—and those statistics are steadily increasing. In response to this growing problem, journalists and researchers are joining forces to develop tools, techniques, and policies to combat this issue.
Julie Posetti, the deputy vice president of global research at the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) and Nabeelah Shabbir, an ICFJ senior research associate, are sounding the alarm on this. “The most important thing is making clear that [online violence] is not a lesser harm – it really needs to be recognized and brought to the fore,” said Posetti at the International Journalism Festival in April. “Online violence is designed in part to suppress, chill, silence and effectively roll back women’s rights that have seen gains over decades.”
According to a global study called The Chilling, conducted by ICFJ and UNESCO, a staggering 73 percent of women journalists have faced online violence in the course of their work. These attacks often involve threats of physical (25 percent of that figure) and sexual violence (18 percent), stalking, doxing, and targeting of their families and personal lives. Moreover, the abuse extends beyond gender and often includes intersectional elements such as religion, race, sexual identity, and age. The frequency and intensity of these attacks create a pervasive sense of fear and can have severe consequences for the physical safety of women journalists. Washington Post contributor Raya Ayyub has said that on average, she is attacked once every fourteen seconds.
Perpetrators of online violence often go unpunished, further emboldening them to escalate their harassment. Patricia Devlin, a Northern Irish journalist, could not obtain police protection even after receiving credible threats against herself and her newborn son. “If police can’t commit a man who sends a rape threat to a journalist’s baby, with evidence, how are we going to do anything else?” said Devlin.
What’s worse, individual bad actors are no longer in the majority of people who coordinate these attacks. Online attacks are increasingly orchestrated by powerful actors, including governments, with the aim of discrediting journalists and laying the groundwork for legal action, such as what happened to Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa, who faced criminal libel and tax charges after repeated legal proceedings intended to shut down Rappler, her independent outlet in the Philippines. Disinformation campaigns, often tied to divisive issues (such as the 2016 United States elections or the Brexit vote) provide an opportunity for authorities to target journalists and undermine their credibility in order to further their own interests.
Posetti and Shabbir are at the forefront of developing solutions to combat online violence against women journalists. One piece of this is the Online Violence Early Warning System, done alongside computer scientists from the University of Sheffield. This system will enable newsrooms and watchdog organizations to monitor and respond to attacks in real-time by identifying common hashtags, accounts, and keywords used by perpetrators. This data will help raise awareness of the scale and severity of the issue in order to make legal actors such as judges, the police, and attorneys take the issue much more seriously so that they don’t fail journalists as they failed Patricia Devlin.
Posetti, Diana Maynard from the University of Sheffield, and Shabbir are also collaborating with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to create online violence monitoring guidelines for media organizations. These guidelines aim to foster “a more gender-aware newsroom culture” that prioritizes the mental health of women journalists facing online attacks. “Part of what has to be done is to definitely, fully understand that there’s a gendered nature to these attacks and appreciate the fact that workplace injury is also psychological injury, that it’s serious,” Shabbir said.
These attacks are only the beginning of what journalists as a whole could be facing due to online, targeted violence versus women. The consequences of failing to monitor and act on these threats opens the door for other communities to be targeted—and to be targeted easily. If these attacks against women journalists are taken seriously and given the proper resources, we may yet avoid catastrophic outcomes.
