Harassment at 1200 words a minute

In a university computer room near London, Petra struggled to finish an overdue essay. A message appeared on her screen: a member of staff wanted a "conf" -- an on-line discussion. "It started fairly harmlessly, but soon moved into questions about what I was wearing, what I looked like, my sexual preferences..."

The staff member implied he could use his computer access privileges to track Petra (not her real name) down -- to "show me why feminists were wrong about sex, that 'women really like to be taken over, I know you will!'... This abuse of authority was made still worse by the fact that he knew how to send me threatening messages whenever I was logged on and I was too computer- inexperienced to know how to stop them... I couldn't use the computers for months and consequently got behind in all my classes that involved their use."

Petra "can't help wondering how often women feel threatened by this sort of thing." So do others. In October the Australian newspaper The Age reported: "A five-member group was formed last month to investigate the extent of sexual harassment occurring via [Melbourne] university's computer networks and electronic mail systems."

One estimate comes from an operator of ISCABBS, an Internet- accessible bulletin board system in the US with 15,000 users from around the world. He estimates that the system staff have to deal with perhaps 3000 complaints about online harassment per year.

Any mention of this subject tends to produce a small flood of furious responses. The "moderator" of one semi-private discussion group announced that she planned to exclude a man for sending objectionable messages to women: "An extended and heated discussion about the first amendment and freedom of speech commenced" -- what people who participate in on-line discussions call a "flame war".

Many fear that sensationalist coverage of the Net, by journalists to whom it's a technological mystery, will lead university administrations to panic and restrict their freedom of expression. The unclear legal position of electronic communications -- and US institutions' paranoia about law-suits over any kind of harassment -- may justify this fear. The Internet is as essential to its legitimate users as the phone system. Does anyone suggest that telephone companies should be liable for harassing phone calls?

So how does electronic harassment compare to other forms -- on the phone and in person? And, since the Net is relatively new to British academe, what is it?

First, it's an extension of other workplace harassment, through new technology. A harasser (almost always a man) obtains the target's electronic mail address, as he might get a home phone number. He types messages into his computer, and they appear in the target's "mailbox" or directly on her screen.

Sometimes this is an extension of a "local" problem -- as for graduate student Angeline, who suffers from "A man who I no longer wish to date continuing to ask me out approximately semi- monthly over the computer. His mail is easy to ignore, and that's exactly how I deal with it."

Sometimes harassment occurs in forms specific to the Internet, which connects upwards of 10 million people, a great many of whom are male science and technology students. It costs them nothing to send a message. Their target may be anywhere in the world -- whereas obscene phone calls from Britain to Australia are probably rather rare.

Some Internet users join in "chat" sessions, typing messages which are immediately be seen by other users. This can be a cheap way to stay in touch with friends thousands of miles away. But anyone appearing in public "chat" under a woman's name is likely to be deluged with sexual enquiries. One woman reports: "It was as if I had just entered a singles bar filled only with hungry lounge lizards" -- she knows what to expect, but why should she have to put up with it?

Cheris Kramarae, researching issues of gender and computing at the University of Indiana, reports that "When H. Jeanie Taylor and I published an article on harassment on the Net, we received some additional harassment -- name-calling, and suggestions that we just stay off the Net if we don't like what we 'hear'. This seems similar to the 'If you don't like it, just leave the country!' verbal attacks of those who would critique aspects of, say, the US government."

Many harassers pick targets from public discussion groups. These can lead to friendly discussions -- indeed, a couple of correspondences started while researching this article may continue. But they can also turn unpleasant. Petra's harasser was reacting to opinions she'd posted in discussions about rape and women's safety.

Angeline has "tried to be careful about letting information about my home address and phone number be listed anywhere, but I suspect that someone highly motivated and computer literate could track down whatever kind of information they wanted. This is perhaps the most disturbing aspect." Anyone suffering harassment should get help from their their computer support team to remove such details from the system.

On-line harassment leaves a record in computer files, making it easier to discipline than the "he says, she says" of face-to-face trouble. In response to my on-line queries, however, a security officer with a very large network wrote me a careful treatise on the legal arguments she'd had to deal with, concluding: "Electronic mail can be printed off to be used in court, but how do you prove that the alleged harasser is the one that sent it?" On-line harassers are likely to be highly computer-literate. Some can "forge" messages so that they appear to come from somewhere else. This is intended to foil the recommended response, when ignoring a harasser fails, of forwarding their messages to their computer system's administrator. But a dedicated and sympathetic "sysadmin" can still track them down.

Many -- not all men -- say that electronic harassment is easier to deal with than other kinds. If you know how, you can get your computer to filter out, or automatically to return, all messages from a given person -- with a rude rejoinder optionally attached. "Too bad there's no parallel in real life," one woman comments.

Others believe that the newness of the medium contributes both to the incidence of electronic harassment and to the shock of an obscene message appearing in the middle of your work. To consultant and instructor David Horvath, "It is different because it appears on a computer screen. Material from a computer tends to have a very high credibility rating... It can be very intrusive -- people tend to personalize their computer environments... their personal space is being violated by an outsider."

Sheila Denn is Secretary to the Dean of Medicine at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She believes harassers "may have less of a person-image of the person they are harassing: the harassee can be dehumanized due to the lack of visual/verbal cues... the Net is finally beginning to see an influx of people other than white males, so these issues are going to come more to the forefront. The fact that the kinds of statements and behaviour that are occurring on the Net are being punished more stringently in the 'outside world' makes it somewhat more likely that those people with pent-up feelings are going to vent them in this new, more 'anonymous' medium."

Some suspect that harassers are "geeks" who'd need a ring-bound manual to learn how to conduct a face-to-face conversation. "Many of the males on the net do not have active social lives," suggests Sarah at the University of Tulsa. "Some men displace their angry feelings toward one woman onto all women... The net is a perfect place to anonymously vent hatred toward real females. Many try to make up for their lack of social life by attempting to gain a social life from the computer, and this may be why they ask personal sexual questions." Or, as computer scientist Alan Carroll puts it: "Net culture has been determined by 'geeks', who generally get to grow up taking a lot of verbal harassment. They learn to deal with it. Because of this, they don't understand why others don't do the same." Another electronic correspondent indignantly responds that the "geeks" she knows are at least as likely to be gentlemen as are the footballers.

Leslie Regan Shade of McGill University in Canada suggests that "Perhaps 'aggressiveness training' could become one of the components," alongside technical assistance, of "mentoring" for women dealing with the Net. If it is to be more than a toy for the boys, it must "create a friendly online environment, one that allows women to speak their thoughts without having to hide their gender."

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Written
13 November 1993

This version is © copyright 1996 Mike Holderness; moral rights are asserted.

A mini-survey

After the responses to the passing mentions of sexual or gender politics in my Invisible College and Down and Out pieces, I filed this one with trepidation. If there was a vociferous response, I've not seen it. The reason may be that the results of the mini-survey speak for themselves: the issues are too complex to reduce to any short slogan.