Thank you very much.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Soraya Chemaly, and I am the director of the Women's Media Center Speech Project. Our work is focused on curbing online abuse and on expanding freedom of expression. To that end, we work with technology companies, civil society advocates, and legislators who are, together, trying to end gender-based and intersectional violence. Thank you very much for inviting me to speak to you today about this important topic.

I know that you recently heard from West Coast LEAF. The work they do has been valuable for raising awareness about the scope of online harassment, which really is an anodyne expression for a complex spectrum of malicious behaviours. To reiterate what Kendra said, we believe that online harassment is really inseparable from offline violence, so much so that the taxonomy we developed, which I'm happy to share with anyone if you are interested, is based on the domestic violence Duluth model, which talks very much about power and control.

As the last speaker here today on this topic, I believe, I would like to focus with some granularity on the costs of this harassment, which are often minimized. This impedes our ability to develop effective legal, social, and technical solutions.

First of all, I can't really stress enough that this harassment exacts a very steep tax on girls' and women's freedom of expression and on our civic and political participation. It is a form of direct resistence to girls' and women's parity participation in the public sphere and needs to be recognized as such.

Women's artistic, creative, and political speech is routinely challenged by individuals and by mobs but, importantly, is also challenged institutionally in ways I'll touch on. It is sort of moderated off of platforms.

According to global studies, one in five girls and women feel that the Internet is an inappropriate space for them. When other women, girls, and boys witness this public harassment or surveillance, denigration, shaming, and objectification of women, they learn that public space is really not for girls and women.

Women in all areas and stages of electoral politics, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum, face pervasive hostility online, including, in some countries, electronically enabled sextortion by members of their own parties, and, almost uniformly, pornification. Women who watch this harassment step away from political participation when they do.

Similarly, women journalists are among the most common targets of harassment. I came to do this work as a writer. Almost immediately upon engaging in social media, the harassment I encountered was very jarring. It was very explicit and violent.

Safety and preventing violence have to be central concerns in this conversation, but the danger of focusing on them solely is that we risk defaulting to paternalistic solutions and approaches that tend to ignore women's freedom of expression.

In the case of public figures, those we are most likely to hear about in the media, anonymity is often cited as the culprit. However, anonymity is not the main problem, and in fact, it can be a dangerous red herring. It is not a factor in the majority of cases of violence that involve women, as is the case offline. Women are harassed online, as are girls, by people they know, including school peers, acquaintances, intimate partners, neighbours, former intimate partners, employers, and in some communities, family, religious, and political authorities. In many cases, anonymity is vital and provides privacy and protection to people who might not otherwise engage.

From a bird's-eye view, the harassment women face online is predictable in that it's just the most recent manifestation of the age-old hostility to women entering traditionally male-dominated spaces. It is, indeed, a digital corollary today to street harassment.

Frankly speaking, it's redundant to use the words “male dominated” when referring to virtually any public sector. Online or off, for example, women in the STEM fields, finance, politics, and sports experience high rates of sexual harassment and resistance to parity participation. This is particularly consequential, however, in the tech sector, not only in terms of women being harassed in these spaces but also in terms of how products are designed and built and how policies are developed in response. For example, there are online harassment tactics that do not violate laws and should not violate laws, but they do violate the terms of service and user guidelines of particularly influential platforms.

Many private platforms, which now have more “citizens” than some countries, are regulating speech and deciding what constitutes safety, violence, threat, morality, and harm every minute of every day. I therefore include in the definition of “harassment” the industry's lack of diversity, moderation policies, and its algorithmic unaccountability.

Second, harassment effectively leverages both women's necessary hypervigilance and societal tolerance for violence that is gender-based, as well as the law's inability to recognize emotional and psychological harms as legitimate. Women do have concerns about their physical safety and the safety of their immediate families, but they also report tremendous and sometimes debilitating psychological distress, anxiety, depression, anger, and post-traumatic stress. Women also incur much higher financial costs related to staying safe. They pay for insurance, therapists, reputation managers, higher travel costs, and other associated expenses.

Third, abuse and its threat limit women's social, educational, professional, and economic opportunities. Threats to women's ability to earn a living are particularly evident when abuse is part of ongoing intimate partner violence and acquaintance abuse, such as stalking or incidents of non-consensual revenge porn. This harassment also inhibits girls' and women's ability in emerging markets and in new sectors of the economy to take advantage of economic opportunities that we know exist.

I am often asked: Why focus on women? Isn't everyone harassed? This is true, and everybody is and can be harassed. But the harassment that girls and women face online is almost always intersectional, which means it's much more likely to occur. Gender is coupled with race, religion, class, ethnicity, disability, and gender identity, making it more likely that women are targeted. In the same way that Muslim women bear the brunt of lslamophobic violence because they are both women and Muslim, women online bear the brunt of intersectional abuse. Many responses to the problem of harassment and hate ignore this reality, so we don't actually end up with solutions that apply to women in the end.

Girls and women are also the majority of targets of the most severe forms of online assault: mass public shaming, mob attacks, rape videos, extortion and doxing, non-consensual sexualization, stalking, and electronically enhanced surveillance. Harassers derive power from the historical fact that women continue to live with sexist and patriarchal norms of all kinds. They count, for example, on women being judged for their sexual behaviour and humiliated, shamed, and penalized in their communities because of it.

Lastly, there is a direct connection between a lack of diversity in the technology sector and the exacerbation of abuse that marginalized people experience. Demographics determine design, and the design of these socio-technical systems frequently enable harm, instead of understanding, from the start, how to anticipate and reduce it. It is a serious problem in tech companies, the criminal justice system, and in society overall that men with the power to make change—still a remarkably homogenous group—do not appreciate the differences between the harassment they are likely to encounter and the intersectional harassment that most women do. Men are more likely to be called names and to be harassed in one-off incidents meant to embarrass them, whereas when women encounter harassment, it is gendered, sustained, sexualized, and more often than not linked to some form of offline threat of violence. Additionally, the harassment of many people, including men, is often focused on their defying rigid gender and sexuality norms, so, in a sense, it is deeply misogynistic. This is why LGBTQ youth experience online bullying at such high rates, at up to three times the rates of their straight peers.

The Internet is a transformative space for girls and women. However, the very qualities that make the Internet a revolutionary space also enable powerful variations on old themes: violence against women and the cultural policing of girls and women, because we are girls and women. The medium of the Internet presents unprecedented scale and amplification for sexual discrimination and misogyny. Online abuse costs perpetrators next to nothing in terms of time, money, or effort. It is networked, easy to proliferate exponentially, and produces a permanent record that is readily available and manipulated with malice. The norms and laws that we would usually turn to for precedent are woefully inadequate.

The legal scholars Danielle Citron and Mary Anne Franks argue that online abuse is first and foremost a civil rights issue, not only for women but for all historically discriminated against and marginalized groups. “Civil rights laws”, writes Citron in her book Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, “would redress and punish harms that traditional remedies do not: the denial of one's equal right to pursue life's important opportunities due to membership in a historically subordinated group.”

Our goal is to increase understanding of the nature and scope and costs of online harassment, misogyny and abuse, in order to contribute to frameworks that will ensure that free speech is a right that extends equally to all who want to and should be part of the public commons. To that end, we are working to design research, create legal responses, advocate for diversity in tech, and develop social networking support systems for people who are targeted online.

Thank you for dedicating your valuable time and efforts to this problem.

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