When the image of Aylan Kurdi, the Syrian boy who was found
lying dead on a sea shore in Turkey surfaced on internet, social media
including Twitter were flooded with posts expressing concerns for war refugees. One of the worst causes of destruction of
human civilisation is definitely the war. When as a young student I used to
read about World Wars, I used to believe that wars are parts of history and
this would never occur in modern age. But my childish thoughts were smashed
with growing up years when I learnt that wars in different forms still exist
and they are more devastating than before.
The television channels used to show live broadcasting of soldiers preparing
for counter attack in borders and like many other young women I often used to
think that such reporting are done by men. But I was proved wrong. Be it Barkha Dutt’s reporting on Kargil war between
India and Pakistan or her coverage of
2008 Taaj attack in Mumbai , like many other girls, we knew Barkha as a
reporter meant to cover risky areas. Remember Maya Mirchandani , the reporter
who was one of the last to cover Sri Lankar President Chandrika Kumaratunga’s
campaign rally when the Kumaratunga was hurt due to bomb explosion ? Following
female journalists like Barkha or Maya, many female journalists came up to take
this venture of reporting war crimes, political hooliganism, scams etc
literally risking their lives. Among
these brave women brigade, I have my own cousins who have also suffered
physical injuries in the course of their duties.
But with the advent of digital communication
technology, attacks on women journalists have become more organised, personal
and also patterned. Sagarika Ghosh, one
of the senior most women journalists in India was one of the worst victims of
Twitter trolls. In my BBC interview (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-22378366)
regarding attacks on women on social media I expressed my anguish over the issue
of lack of empathy and sympathy from the part of criminal justice machinery to
the female victims, especially in case of trolling or bullying, even if they
are celebrities . Undoubtedly, this is a major cause which motivates the perpetrators
to abuse such women. In my recent
publication titled “A retrospective analysis of S.66A: Could S.66A of the
Information Technology Act be reconsidered for regulating “bad talk” in the
internet?” Published in Indian Student Law Review (ISLR), 2015(1), pp 98-128, I
took up Sagarika’s case as a prime
example as how women may be victimised online irrespective of their position in the society.
They may also be targeted by misogynist posts including online sexual abuse. The reasons may vary from professional
jealousy from own colleagues, workplace harassment to even dislike by members
of particular group or organisation, who may motivate supporters to individually
attack the women concerned online. The very
recent case of the Delhi Journalist Swati Chaturvedi, who became a victim of sexist trolling allegedly by another senior
journalist may be seen as a good example
in this case( http://indiasamvad.co.in/6524/showstory/Beware-of-sexist-remarks-Delhi-journo-to-become-first-to-be-arrested-for-Twitter-trolling).
But it would be wrong to presume that
such atrocities happen only in India. Consider
the case of Sharmila Seyyid, a SriLanka based war crime reporter; because of
her work, she was attacked online and once Twitter and other social media were
also used to spread the news of her death and the morphed picture which showed
her raped. She was very much alive but these tricks were taken up to send her
death threats and make her family feel extremely insecure about her life (See http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/sharmila-seyyid-online-trolling-death-threats/article7109863.ece).
But she is not the only one Sri Lankan female reporter to be victimised online.
Another Sri Lankan war crime reporter named Dilshy Banu, who is also the writer
of four books, was also attacked online. Dilshy, unlike other women was not
trolled in the social media. But whenever anyone searches her name with the key
words of her name, the search engine gets flooded with web links of
pornographic sites which has her name with a slight change in the spelling. Dilshy
contacted me for help and permitted me to use her case study. It is unfortunate that similar to many other
women journalists, Dilshy’s name has been added to vicious misogynist posts on
internet and these web links may stay for a long time like those ugly posts targeting
other women journalists, which are still floating in some sites, unless search
engines themselves pull down those web links. on a positive side,the number of such links showing porn contents which are tagged with Dilshy's name are reducing. But the process is slow. But as may be seen, such act of
pulling down of misogynist posts needs the cooperation not only from the NGOs,
but also from the criminal justice machinery where the victim should report the
crime for getting a legal recognition of the offence, the search engines as the
intermediaries and of course the general public who may help these brave women
by ‘positive Google bombing’. It is
understandable that like India, many other south Asian countries including Sri Lanka,
Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan etc may not have well developed laws to prevent
cyber misogyny targeting women; and even if they do, the foreign based
intermediaries may need to work more cooperatively to help prevent such sorts
of victimisation since the viral nature of the offensive posts may make the individual stake holders almost
impossible to erase them completely. It is
unfortunate to note that this may be one of the reasons that more orthodox
countries including Iran etc, periodically block many websites including Google
or may even create prohibitory sanctions for using internet.
It is understandable that all of us have
freedom of speech and expression and as I mentioned in my article on S.66A, the
courts, not only in India, but all over the world, are slowly expanding the
scope of free speech guarantee. The latest
example is obviously the Elonis decision in the US on which I wrote my blog @ http://debaraticyberspace.blogspot.in/2015/06/the-elonis-decision-why-would-indian.html
. But that does not mean that people can take internet or digital communication
technology to continue attack on women, including journalists.
Let us join hands to stop online
victimisation of women irrespective of jurisdiction.
Please Note:
Do not violate copyright of this blog. If you would like to use informations
provided in this blog for your own assignment/writeup/project/blog/article,
please cite it as “Halder D. (2015), “Cyber misogyny of female journalists”, 9th September, 2015, published in
http://debaraticyberspace.blogspot.com/
