Study: Why women hurt more by cyber-bullying than men

Women are more prone to online bullying than men, with a majority saying they are swamped with offensive comments, personal attacks and invasion of their privacy.

According to a new report, online bullying, especially for women in positions of power or influence takes place through “defamation or libel, stalking, falsification, fraud, intimidation, offensive comments, personal attacks, graphic violence and invasion of privacy”.

This came with a startling revelation that nearly three out of every five women (57 per cent) “use social media to get help and emotional support or practical advice for the challenges they face in life”.

These challenges include “depression, nutrition, exercise and relationship advice”.

The dilemma for some of the women is that when they get angry at the comments, they fire off threatening and abusive text messages to the perpetrators – through the messaging applications—but their tormentors (if men) mostly call and deliver their dose of insults and threats.

The bad news for that preference –text messages are evidence— is that the women hand evidence to their targets who can then haul them to court for prosecution.

Men, on the other hand, are the main victims of women’s online wrath. Nearly three out of every five men have complained that they had been ‘bullied’ though text messages, though some women have been on the receiving of their sisters’ wrath.

Some women have even stalked men on Facebook to an extent that nearly a third of the men interviewed said the site was “a source of online harassment”. On the flip side, nearly half of the women who were interviewed —one out of every two—said they had been bullied via voice calls.

The antidote for online harassment for the women is that they simply block the obnoxious tormentors, or if it is on Facebook, they ‘unfriend’ them.

“Women’s main responses to digital harassment are to report the incident to friends and family, block or unfriend contacts on social networks or confront the perpetrator. Of those women who were harassed online or via mobile phone, one in four did nothing at all about it. The main reasons reported for inaction were: “it’s not worth reporting”, “it happens all the time” and “authorities don’t care,” reads the report.

The main victims are women leaders and journalists who because of their visibility are exposed to millions of faceless people online who take advantage of the digital anonymity to say anything.

The laws, the report said are “generic” and “do not pay special attention to women and girls”, and therefore many culprits get away. But it is not just the harassment that is gnawing at women who have access to the Internet; there is also the usefulness of the Internet to make their lives better and the cost of accessing the information superhighway.

Income generation

The study of the International Association of Women in Radio & Television noted that more than half of the women –54 per cent— said “the internet technology had not created economic activity and increased income generation at all for them”.

The burden for the Jubilee administration which rode to power on the promise of access to cheap Internet is to make sure more women get access to the global communication network and reap the digital dividends.

“Special consideration for free training should be given to women and girls from peri-urban and rural areas whose poverty levels are higher as a consequence of long-term marginalisation,” reads the report titled ‘Women’s Rights Online Translating Access into Empowerment’.

“Whereas there are concerted efforts to provide access to ICT, women may fail to embrace it due to lack of legal and regulatory frameworks that can tackle such online crimes.

“That is why it is essential to lobby Government to enact policies and laws that will provide adequate interventions geared towards the protection of women on the online space,” the report notes.

The report noted creative use of the Internet “can help women, especially the poor and marginalised, gain a greater voice in public debate”. “Despite the cost of data and devices and the need for a certain level of digital know-how, it can still be easier and less intimidating to post a comment online than, say, to travel to a public meeting and gain the floor to speak, or seek an audience with a public official or get a letter published in a mainstream newspaper,” noted the report.

Aside from surveys by Ipsos Mori, the report quotes the Communication Authority of Kenya, the ICT Authority, and even the police as the sources of most of the data.