A new study confirms what Cathy Young has contended for several years: that the notion of Internet abusers specifically targeting women, especially outspoken women, with their hatred and threats is wrong.
The Pew survey of over 4,000 American Internet users over 18 conducted in January challenges those contentions. Forty four percent of the men and 37 percent of the women said that at some point, they had experienced at least one of the behaviors the study classified as harassment.
Most of this abuse involved offensive name-calling and being embarrassed on purpose. However, 12 percent of men and 8 percent of women said they’d been the target of a physical threat; 6 percent of men and 8 percent of women said they had been stalked; 8 percent of men and 7 percent of women they had experienced “sustained harassment”; and 4 percent of men and 8 percent of women said they had been sexually harassed.
And all the dramatic claims about the terrible hardship of being a woman on the Internet with an opinion? Entirely wrong: men in the Pew survey were almost twice as likely as women (19 percent vs. 10 percent) to say they had been harassed online due to their political opinions. Part of the disparity is no doubt due to the fact that men are more likely to talk politics on the Internet; in one recent study, 60 to 65 percent of Twitter users tweeting on political topics were men. But it certainly doesn’t sound like men who talk politics have it any easier.
from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/2u6t7bl
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