Harrasment of Women on the Internet

This article was very interesting and disturbing to read at the same time.  It was not pleasant to read the baffling statistics and personal experiences of Amanda Hess being harassed online, especially being a woman myself.  One statistic that really stuck out to me was “of 3,787 people who reported being harassed from the year 2000 to 2012, 72.5 percent were female.”  That is a significantly large number and it should not be that high in my opinion.  You have to ask yourself, why is the number so much higher for women compared to men?

What really surprises me is that when multiple attempts were made to report incidents to the police, almost all of them dismissed the cases and considered them just another online ruse.  What is even worse is when attempts were made to bring the cases to larger law enforcement agencies and those agencies having little to no drive to investigate the threats further.  I can only imagine how frustrating that must be.  You think you are going to the right people and assume that you will be assisted but instead get the opposite.  How would you feel if you were in that situation?

I think it is unfair to tell women to take a break from social media when threats arise.  In Amanda Hess’s case, she lives alone and uses the internet to connect with family.  What I think is more unfair is when women like Jessica Valenti, a prominent feminist, is forced to vacate her home due to terrible threats.  Not only did Jessica vacate her apartment for a week, but she also changed her bank accounts and got a new number.  I would personally be very scared if I had to go through this process because of the great unknown.  The worst part is that the threats do not stop even when you think you have made smart decisions to protect yourself.  The FBI gave her some advice that ended up being useless in my opinion. 

The FBI advised Jessica Valenti to “leave her home until the threats blew over, to never walk outside of her apartment alone, and to keep aware of any cars or men who might show up repeatedly outside her door.” The reason why I think this advise is useless is because if the FBI advised me to do that I would feel paranoid about everything and that is no way to live.  To conclude, Jessica Valenti was just one person used as an example in Amanda Hess’s article to demonstrate how real and cruel threats from the internet are, and how they affect multiple women’s lives in many different ways.