Abstract
The networked and often public nature of social media postings means that abusive missives (including those targeting a single individual) may be seen by many others. Absent from the burgeoning body of literature into gendered online hate are the experiences of women who, while peripheral to direct attacks, are nonetheless affected by them. Hate crime scholarship has argued that hate crimes and hate speech send a message to both the target and their community: one that serves to terrorise and control those who share the target’s identity; to stake a claim to on or offline territory as belonging to the perpetrator and their group; and to reinforce notions of acceptable and unacceptable identities. Similarly, feminist work into sexual violence has argued that fear of victimisation comes, in part, from knowing what other women have experienced. Noting the importance of these ideas, this chapter examines how online misogynistic abuse affects bystanders. Drawing on empirical research, the chapter explores how online abuse does not have to be directly experienced in order to generate constraint, apprehension, fear, and control. More positively, indirect experiences may motivate bystanders to try to respond to and resist online misogyny.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
While in this study, the abuse examined was that targeting feminists, but this definition could be expanded to include other women that experience abuse online,
- 3.
For a broad overview see the extensive work of Powell and Henry (Henry & Powell, 2015, 2016; Powell & Henry, 2017) on technology-facilitated sexual violence, as well as work on cyber-stalking (Citron, 2014), non-consensual sharing of indecent images (Citron & Franks, 2014; McGlynn & Rackley, 2017; McGlynn et al., 2017) and being subjected to receipt of unwanted sexual images (Vitis & Gilmour, 2017).
- 4.
Gillian here refers to Tolkien’s work Lord of the Rings (1992). The Eye of Sauron is a manifestation of the antagonist Sauron, watching over the lands of Middle Earth for the protagonists of the story—the hobbits Frodo and Sam, and their allies.
- 5.
‘A situation in which criticism or abuse is directed at a person or group from multiple sources’ (Oxford Dictionaries, 2019).
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Smith, J. (2021). Bystander Experiences of Online Gendered Hate. In: Powell, A., Flynn, A., Sugiura, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Gendered Violence and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83734-1_20
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