Mina Khani

When we talk about online violence against women, what are we talking about? Research from the B.S.I. Institute in Germany shows that 12% of internet users have been victims of online violence at least once. This online violence includes sexual harassment, with the majority of victims being women between the ages of 14 and 39. (1)

If we accept, based on the research and observations available in this online space, that researchers are gradually accepting a form of violence as cyber violence, which can sometimes have very serious legal consequences, shouldn’t we also accept that women are often the first victims of such violence in this open space? Shouldn’t we, alongside the existing definitions of online violence, provide a unified definition of online sexual violence against women? In other words, shouldn’t we acknowledge that online violence against women is a separate and distinct form of online violence that requires separate examination and separate payment from other types of online violence?

Online violence against women cannot be considered as a separate issue from the anti-women space that exists in the general society. The reality is that the anti-women space adapts itself to any platform. In the workplace, it takes one form, in public spaces it takes another, in homes and family spaces it takes a different form, and now in the online space it takes yet another form. However, the story remains the same: the lack of safety for women.

What is at the core of this unsafe space can be attributed to two main issues: 1) Lack of sexual awareness and understanding of gender-based violence, and 2) Lack of collective and societal efforts to make the space safe for women and to address prominent instances of this violence in various spaces. Therefore, if we want to talk about the violence that women face on online social networks, we cannot overlook the broader platforms that enable such violence. We must acknowledge that the violence that restricts and endangers women’s activity on social networks is not separate from the overall concept of misogyny and is not isolated.

Such harassments do not seem to be beyond the general imagination:

Verbal violence against women who participate in political discussions and are quickly referred to their gender to silence them or the discussion is made sexual with them.

Multiple messages that women receive from men in private inboxes, in which they engage in direct sexual conversations without any initial background or mutual consent.

Threatening and harassing messages that women receive in this space are usually referred to a space other than the online space.

Political criticisms in which women are viewed as sexual objects or are belittled by existing anti-women stereotypes.

And even a type of monitoring and tracking of women and their activities on social networks by those close to them.

But what is beyond the common imagination is not such images of women’s harassment on online social networks, but rather recognizing them as a form of violence and sexual and gender-based harassment. Usually, even when these types of harassment are considered a form of violence, they are reduced to verbal harassment (verbal sexism) and precisely for this reason, their examination as specific forms of sexual and gender-based harassment by feminists is also interpreted as a sensitivity to the fields of sexism and verbal gender-based discrimination by activists in this field.

In such moments, it should be noted that online violence is not just limited to verbal violence in the realm of language. When women are subjected to sexual harassment and humiliation in their private inboxes, they are experiencing a form of sexual harassment. We must remind ourselves that although these incidents occur in the virtual space, the targets of such violence are real humans with real lives. Any form of sexual humiliation and harassment they experience in this space has a direct impact on their personal and social lives in various social contexts, including virtual and non-virtual ones. The insults and sexual harassment on social media depict everything in the circle of language, but the nightmares and fears of victims of sexual and gender-based violence in this space are real.

They are being removed from social media spaces in a real way, or their activity in these spaces is limited in a real way. When they are humiliated in public spaces, this humiliation has a direct impact on their real-life friendships and work spaces. Their families can become aware of these events, and all of these are real manifestations of violence against women in the personal and social lives of female users in virtual spaces.

In this way, a form of male-dominated and unequal social activity that has dragged the space of gender-based oppression from homes and public places to schools and workplaces to online spaces must be explained, and now it wants to limit it to jokes and verbal impurities on the surface, normalizing this violence and excessively generalizing this issue without considering its destructive personal strains in public space for real and legal persons who are subjected to these harassments.

The main question here is not whether we can completely eliminate violence from online spaces without having a social platform in place. The answer to this question is quickly and without a doubt: no.

The main question is: How can we turn these online spaces into an environment for explaining these issues and their connections? How can we believe that online violence is not limited to the online space? And that it is not only limited to verbal violence and linguistic sexism? The question is: How can we use the remaining spaces to raise awareness about this? German critic Klaus von Wagner, in a critical program on German ZDF network, said about feminism: “It is often said that sexism cannot be easily recognized, but that is not true. Sexism, like pornography, can be easily recognized when it is seen.”

Sources:

For more information, refer to the website of the B.S.I Institute in Germany, which addressed this issue in one of its studies in 2011, titled “Online Violence is Not a Child’s Game”.