Are our girls safe online? Spoiler: No, they're not

COVID-19 has sent us all online. Every week the notification that alerts me to my ‘screen hours’ is showing a steady increase and even my grandparents are zooming (or trying to). Of course, those spending more time than ever plugged in are our teens. Teachers across the country are doing the most incredible job of remote teaching but the implications of this increase in time spent online reaches beyond the curriculum and has repercussions for gendered violence that many are unaware of. 

Just how safe is the internet for girls? 

In March this year, to celebrate the birthday of the internet, the inventor of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, wrote an open letter stating that "the web is not working for women and girls”. He discussed how online harassment disproportionately targets women and girls and that the high rates of sexual harassment, threatening messages and distribution of sexual images without consent all create an abusive, gendered landscape.

In 2016 the Guardian published research based on 70m comments published on their website over ten years. They found that out of the 10 most abused writers, eight were women and the two men were black. The experiences of female MPs follows a similar trend and at the end of last year when 18 female MPs decided not to seek re-election many attributed that decision to the online (and offline) abuse that they had had to deal with. On closer inspection of the data it also becomes clear that BAME women MPs are far more vulnerable to attack, with a report by Amnesty finding that 41% of tweets analysed targeted BAME women MPs over their white colleagues (despite there being eight times more white women MPs than BAME). 

But this is not just an issue that affects women in the public eye. University students have been reporting incidences of online harassment for years, yet less than 25% of institutions still don’t have adequate procedures in place to deal with this behaviour. Students like Natasha Jokic, former student at Bath University, have been speaking out to highlight this problem. Natasha writesthat when she reported her online abuse the professor asked her what a hashtag was and she calls for more nuance to the advice given to those experiencing this abuse, “I wish that the answer was as simple as “lock down your social media posts and block people”, but this feels too similar to “don’t wear short skirts and drink too much”.”

It is no coincidence that these different groups of women and girls are experiencing high levels of online abuse; this harassment is systematic and it is gendered. We must realise that just because our girls and young women are behind screens does not mean they are safe. It is yet another example of how those who perpetrate gender violence adapt to new methods and technologies to maintain an imbalance of power that goes back centuries. As this landscape becomes an increasingly integral part of young people’s lives we must act fast to educate our youngsters and to reverse the discrimination and oppression being enabled.