Sexual Threats Stifle Some Female Bloggers - washingtonpost.com
The Washington Post today ran a story on women bloggers being targeted with harassment and threats of violence:
As women gain visibility in the blogosphere, they are targets of sexual harassment and threats. Men are harassed too, and lack of civility is an abiding problem on the Web. But women, who make up about half the online community, are singled out in more starkly sexually threatening terms -- a trend that was first evident in chat rooms in the early 1990s and is now moving to the blogosphere, experts and bloggers said.
Beyond the obvious revulsion against threats of sexual violence against anyone, there are several additional reasons why this story is particularly disturbing. Not only are many of the attacks quite graphic, but also the perpetrators are often able to remain anonymous on the Internet. While one's first sympathies go to the victims, the consequences for the blogosphere are also likely to be severe. I would venture to say that a majority of the high quality blogs that I read regularly are written by women, and for women in the Maghreb the Internet seems to have been a particularly liberating opportunity for public expression. It would be a shame for the criminal actions of a few sociopaths to shut down access to free expression on the Internet for over half of the population. Finally, if my daughters want to blog when they get older, I want them to be able to do so without fear.