The high-stress nature of working in politics is increasingly taking a toll on staff and politicians. But an additional threat to the personal wellbeing and safety of politicians resides outside Parliament, and the threat is ubiquitous: online violence against women MPs.

Since her election in 2017, Green Party MP Golriz Ghahraman has been subject to persistent online violence.

Ghahraman’s resignation following allegations of shoplifting exposes the toll sustained online violence can have on a person’s mental health.

In an interview with Vice in 2018, Ghahraman expressed how the online abuse was overwhelming and questioned how long she would continue in Parliament.

Resigning in 2024, Ghahraman said in a statement:

it is clear to me that my mental health is being badly affected by the stresses relating to my work

and

the best thing for my mental health is to resign as a Member of Parliament.

Ghahraman is not alone in receiving torrents of online abuse. Many other New Zealand women MPs have also been targeted, including former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson, National MP Nicola Willis and Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer.

Words can not only hurt, but they can seriously endanger a person’s wellbeing.

Online violence against women MPs, particularly against women of colour, is a concerning global trend. In an Australian study, women MPs were found to be disproportionately targeted by public threats, particularly facing higher rates of online threats involving sexual violence and racist remarks.

Similar online threats face women MPs in the United Kingdom. Studies show that women of colour receive more intense abuse.

Male politicians are also subject to online violence. But when directed at women the violence frequently exhibits a misogynistic character, encompassing derogatory gender-specific language and menacing sexualised threats, constituting gender-based violence.

Golriz Ghahraman’s exit from politics shows the toll of online bullying on female MPs

Many say it’s become overwhelming, writes @LegallyFeminist (@ucnz).https://t.co/PSsG9OBCii

— The Conversation – Australia + New Zealand (@ConversationEDU) January 19, 2024

Our legal framework is not enough
New Zealand’s current legal framework is not well equipped to respond to the kind of online violence experienced by women MPs like Ghahraman.

The Harmful Digital Communications Act 2015 is designed to address online harassment by a single known perpetrator. But the most distressing kind of abuse comes from the sheer number of violent commentators, most of whom are unknown to the victim or intentionally anonymous.

This includes “mob style” attacks, where large numbers of perpetrators coordinate efforts to harass, threaten, or intimidate their target.

Without legal recourse, women MPs have two options — tolerate the torrent of abuse, or resign. Both of these options endanger representative democracy.

Putting up with abuse may mean serious impacts on mental health and personal safety. It may also have a chilling effect on what topics women MPs choose to speak about publicly. Resigning means losing important representation of diverse perspectives, especially from minorities.

Having to tolerate the abuse is a breach of the right to be free from gender-based violence. Being forced to resign because of it also breaches women’s rights to participate in politics. Therefore, the government has duties under international human rights law to prevent, respond and redress online violence against women.

“More than 70 national elections are scheduled for 2024. But one group is likely to be significantly under-represented: women. A major reason is the disproportionate amount of abuse female politicians and candidates receive online.”https://t.co/SuPn36zLb4

— Indo-Pacific Defense FORUM (@IPDefenseForum) January 12, 2024

Steps the government can take
United Nations human rights bodies provide some guidance for measures the government could implement to fulfil their obligations and safeguard women’s human rights online.

As one of the drivers of online violence against women MPs is prevailing patriarchal attitudes, the government’s first step should be to correctly label the behaviour: gender-based violence.

Calling online harassment “trolling” or “cyberbullying” downplays the harm and risks normalising the behaviour. “Gender-based violence” reflects the systemic nature of the abuse.

Secondly, the government should urgently review the Harmful Digital Communication Act. The legislation is now nine years old and should be updated to reflect the harmful online behaviour of the 2020s, such as targeted mob-style attacks.

New Zealand is also now out of step with other countries. Australia, the UK and the European Union have all recently strengthened their laws to tackle harmful online content.

These new laws focus on holding big tech companies accountable and encourage cooperation between the government, online platforms and civil society. Greater collaboration, alongside enforcement mechanisms, is essential to address systemic issues like gender-based violence.

Thirdly, given the increasing scale of online violence, the government should ensure adequate resourcing for police to investigate serious incidents. Resources should also be made available for social media moderation among all MPs and training in online safety.

More than ever, words have the power to break people and democracies. It is now the urgent task of the government to fulfil its legal obligations toward women MPs.

Dr Cassandra Mudgway is senior lecturer in law, University of Canterbury. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Threats, intimidation and misogyny have long been a reality for women in public life around the world, and the pandemic appears to have amplified this toxic reality.

Aotearoa New Zealand is led by one of the world’s best-known female prime ministers, Jacinda Ardern, and was the first country in the world to grant all women the right to vote.

Yet even here today, attempts to silence, diminish and demean the prime minister, female MPs and other prominent women have plumbed new depths, leading to calls for more robust policing of violent online and offline behaviour.

Unfortunately, the phenomenon extends well beyond elected representatives and public health professionals into most workplaces, including academia.

Women working in universities, including those in positions of academic leadership, are also routinely subjected to online vitriol intended to shut them down — and thus to prevent them exercising their academic freedom to probe, question and test orthodox ways of making sense of the world.

One of the commonest defences of abusive or threatening language (online or not) is an appeal to everyone’s right to free speech.

And this has echoes within universities, too, when academic freedom becomes a testing ground of what is acceptable and what isn’t.

A duty to call it out
The international evidence indicates that almost all of this behaviour comes from men, some of them colleagues or students of the women concerned.

The abuse comes in various forms (such as trolling and rape or death threats) and takes place in a variety of settings, including conferences. It is enabled by, among other things, the hierarchical nature of universities, in which power is stratified and unequally distributed, including on the basis of gender.

Threatened scholars warn that online harassment risks academic freedom. Rebekah Tromble and Patricia Rossini feared for their safety when the conservative online world turned against them last summerhttps://t.co/FZYo1e8Qzf pic.twitter.com/WLPGRRzIe0

— Times Higher Education (@timeshighered) February 15, 2019

As male academics we have an obligation not just to call out these sorts of behaviour but also to identify some of the corrosive consequences of the misogyny directed against women academics, wherever they may work.

We need to use our own academic freedom to assess what can happen to that of academic women when digital misogyny passes unchecked.

Whose freedom to speak?
Misogyny in university settings takes place in a particular context: universities have a statutory obligation to serve as producers and repositories of knowledge and expertise, and to act as society’s “conscience and critic”.

Academic freedom is what enables staff and students to carry out the work through which these obligations are met. This specific type of freedom is a means to various ends, including testing and contesting perceived truths, advancing the boundaries of knowledge and talking truth to power.

It is intended to serve the public good, and must be exercised in the context of the “highest ethical standards” and be open to public scrutiny.

A great deal has been written about threats to academic freedom: intrusive or risk averse university managers, the pressures to commercialise universities’ operations, and governments bent on surveilling and stifling internal dissent are the usual suspects.

But when women academics are subjected to online misogyny, which is a common response when they exercise academic freedom, we are talking about a different kind of threat.

Opinion: Misgendering students is not “academic freedom.” It’s an abuse of power. https://t.co/AatNwzrnB1

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) April 1, 2021

Betrayal of academic freedom
The misogynists seek to silence, shut down, diminish and demean; to ridicule on the basis of gender, and to deride scholarship that doesn’t align with their own preconceptions of gender and body type.

Their behaviour is neither casual nor accidental. As journalist Michelle Duff put it, it is intended to intimidate “as part of a concentrated effort to suppress women’s participation in public and political life”.

Its aim is to achieve the obverse of the purpose of academic freedom: to maintain an unequal status quo rather than change it.

It is to the credit of women academics that the misogynists frequently fail. But sometimes the hostility does have a chilling effect. For a woman to exercise her academic freedom when she is the target of online threats to rape or kill requires considerable bravery.

Women who continue to test perceived truths, advance the boundaries of knowledge and speak truth to power under such conditions are academic exemplars. They are contributing to the public good at considerable personal cost.

‘Whaddarya?’
The online misogyny directed at women academics is taking place in a broader context in which violent language targeting individuals and minority groups is becoming increasingly graphic, normalised and visible.

We do not believe the misogynistic “righteous outrage” directed at academic women is justified under the statutory underpinnings of freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech — within or beyond a university — is not absolute, and to the extent that it is invoked to cloak violent rhetoric against women, existing constraints on that freedom (which are better thought of as protections for the targets of misogyny) need strengthening.

Men who engage in online misogyny almost always speak from an (unacknowledged) position of privilege. Moreover, by hiding their sense of entitlement behind core democratic notions, their self-indulgence does all of us a disfavour.

With academic freedom comes the moral responsibility to challenge misogyny and not stay silent. What so many women across New Zealand’s tertiary sector are subject to poses a challenge to men everywhere.

The kind of conduct our women colleagues are routinely subjected to is the sort of behaviour at the heart of Greg McGee’s seminal critique of masculinity and masculine insecurity in New Zealand, the play Foreskin’s Lament. In the final scene of the play, the main character stares out at the audience and asks: “Whaddarya, whaddarya, whaddarya?”

He might have been asking the question of every man, including those of us who work in universities.

Dr Richard Shaw is professor of politics, Massey University; Dr Andrew Dickson is senior lecturer, Massey University; Dr Bevan Erueti, senior lecturer — Health Promotion/Associate Dean — Māori, Massey University; Dr Glenn Banks is professor of geography and head of school, School of People, Environment and Planning, Massey University; Dr John O’Neill, head of the Institute of Education te Kura o Te Mātauranga, Massey University, and Dr Roger McEwan is senior lecturer, Massey University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz