Danielle Citron’s Hate Crimes in Cyberspace is a breakthrough book. It has been compared, and with good reason, to Catherine MacKinnon’s Sexual Harassment of Working Women. The book makes three major contributions. All are central to furthering the equality of women and men both in cyberspace and elsewhere.
First, Citron convincingly catalogues the range of harms, and their profundity, done to many women and some men by the sexual threats, the defamation, the revenge pornography, the stalking, and the sexual harassment and abuse, all of which is facilitated by the internet. Women who blog on virtually any topic, certainly on feminist or sexuality sites but also on technical software or engineering sites, or who simply have a presence in cyberspace in any of the various forms the medium permits, can be and frequently are targeted for extreme forms of vitriolic and sexualized assaults, not just from a few isolated and psychopathological bad apples, but by large groups of linked commentators, who quite intentionally and explicitly spread the cyber-hate through organized, networked technologies, and to virtually all corners of the cyberspace. The assaults threaten the victim and sometimes her family members—particularly younger sisters—with sexual injury, rape, dismemberment and murder, and are sometimes accompanied by personal information such as place of employment and addresses. The defamation comes in the form of claims that the victim is incompetent at her work or in her career, hyper-sexualized (e.g., that she enjoys sex with strangers, with home addresses included), or dishonest or fraudulent, which are spread widely, and are intended to professionally injure and humiliate the victim in her workplace or school, and prevent her advancement or hiring in her field. “Revenge pornography” refers to the publication for public consumption and without the victim’s permission of nude photos or videos which may have been made with the victim’s knowledge, but are then widely distributed for the express purpose of exacting revenge, usually because of a break-up. Stalking is in the form of constant harassment and surveillance on line, with the threat of it spilling over into offline stalking as well. The harassment and abuse take all of these forms as well as others: chat rooms created and dedicated to the destruction of the victim’s reputation, or to the expression of hate and sexual insults, or to the mounting of threats intended to intimidate or terrorize. Continue reading "Cyber-Sexual Harassment"
