Women journalists receive much more online harassment and abuse than men: UK research

The screenshots below are from the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights report, Violence, Threats and Pressures Against Journalists and Other Media Actors in the EU, which was its contribution to the second Annual Colloquium on Fundamental Rights, last month.

I’ve said from the outset, 26 years ago, that if I had been a man, people would not react to me as viscerally as they do, with other women being the most violently abusive.

When Politico announced my name as one of its ’28’, yesterday, the Facebook group Women For Women, which was ostensibly set up to promote Maltese women’s rights and feminism (yes, they’ve just woken up in 2016, when that particular lorry has long since trundled past), spent most of the day ripping me to shreds in a convent-schoolyard snipe-fest.

Some of those women could barely contain themselves, dripping poison all over their iPads. I didn’t know whether to laugh at them or feel pity at the fact that, in middle age, they remained confined mentally, emotionally and intellectually to the schoolyard, aged 15. Had I been physically present, I would have had to protect myself from their attempts to claw out my hair and scratch out my eyes. They should have done something with their lives, and then perhaps they would have felt better about themselves.

But the women don’t make sexually offensive remarks or rant on in vulgar and crass abuse. They’re just bitchy, envious and spiteful, with a strong undercurrent of feeling threatened by somebody who’s done something when they’ve done nothing themselves and also found excuses for ‘not having been able to’. It’s the men who specialise in vulgar sexual language and insults, but relatively few men, and it’s always the same ones.

I strongly suspect that most of the abuse which women journalists receive, as examined below, actually comes from other women. The rest is from men who feel threatened and inadequate, and who attack the woman they instinctively feel would reject them or look down on them (it works that way in real life, off line, too). That’s been my experience, anyway. You’ve got to be pretty tough to deal with it – but as I said, the women are the worst.