Online Abuse 101

Anything you need to know about online abuse and the types of online abuse.

Any behaviours that incites sharing embarrassing or cruel content about a person to impersonation, doxing, stalking and electronic surveillance to the non-consensual use of photography and violent threats using a diversity of tactics and malicious intentions is included as Online Abuse

Meanwhile, the online harassment of women, sometimes called Cybersexism or cyber misogyny, is specifically gendered abuse targeted at women and girls online. 

The purpose of harassment differs with every incidence, but usually includes wanting to embarrass, humiliate, scare, threaten, silence, extort or, in some instances, encourages mob attacks or malevolent engagements.

Tactics are wide running. They are at times lawful, however unsafe and significant. They might be lawful, yet abuse a specific stage’s rules and terms of administration. A few, yet not all, are illicit, including, however not constrained to Child Pornography, Copyright Infringements, Data Theft, Defamation, Extortion, Intentional Infliction of Emotional Harm, Libel, Privacy Infringements, Sexual Harassment, Sexual Surveillance, Stalking and True Threats.

At the point when a harasser, or gathering of harassers, intentionally attacks or attacks numerous online spaces for the reasons for hassling an objective. Cross-stage badgering is extremely successful on the grounds that clients are as of now unfit to report this degree and setting of the provocation when they contact stages, every one of which will just consider the provocation occurring on their own destinations.

The distribution of sexually graphic images without the consent of the subject of the images. The abuser gets pictures or recordings over the span of an earlier relationship, or hacks into the casualty’s PC, internet based life records or telephone. Ladies make up in excess of 95 percent of detailed casualties. It is characterized as the non-consensual dissemination and distribution of close photographs and recordings.

The distribution of sexually graphic images without the consent of the subject of the images. The abuser gets pictures or recordings over the span of an earlier relationship, or hacks into the casualty’s PC, internet based life records or telephone. Ladies make up in excess of 95 percent of detailed casualties. It is characterized as the non-consensual dissemination and distribution of close photographs and recordings.

Coordinated attempts at defamation happen when an individual, or, some of the time, sorted out gatherings intentionally flood web based life and audit locales with negative and disparaging data.

DOS stands for “denial-of-service,” an attack that makes a website or network resource unavailable to its users.

The unauthorized retrieving and distributing, regularly by hacking, of an individual’s very own data, including, yet not restricted to, complete names, addresses, telephone numbers, messages, life partner and youngsters names, budgetary subtleties. “Dox” is a slang variant of “reports” or .doc. Causing fear, stress and panic is the objective of doxing, even when perpetrators think or say that their objective is “harmless.”

The use of the internet and other forms of technology to exert financial pressure on a target, usually a woman involved in intimate partner abuse. This might include, for example, denying access to online accounts, manipulating credit information to create negative scores and identity theft.

Women face online threats globally, yet they run a unique risk in conservative religious countries, where blasphemy is against the law and where honor killings are a serious threat. Accusing someone of blasphemy can become, itself, an act of violence.

A flood of vitriolic and hostile messages including threats, insults, slurs and profanity.

Verbally abusing is common online. Gendered harassment, however, involves the use of words, insults, profanity and, often, images to communicate hostility towards girls and women because they are women. Typically, harassers resort to words such as “bitch,” “slut,” “whore,” or “prostitute” and include commentary on women’s physical appearances.

The deliberate optimization of malicious information and web sites online so that when people search for a target they immediately see defamatory content. In 2012, for example, Bettina Wulff, the spouse of Germany’s then president, sued Google because the company’s autocomplete search function perpetuated rumors that she was once a prostitute.

Online grooming is when a person uses social media to deliberately cultivate an emotional connection with a child in order to sexually abuse or exploit a child.

Online hate speech is language or imagery that denigrates, insults, threatens, or targets an individual or groups of people on the basis of their identity – gender, based on race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, disability, or other traits. Hate speech usually has specific, discriminatory harms rooted in history and usually employs words, action and the use of images meant to deliberately shame, annoy, scare, embarrass, humiliate, denigrate, or threaten another person. Most legal definitions of harassment take into consideration the intent of the harasser.

Identity theft is defined as “crimes in which someone wrongfully obtains and uses another person’s personal data in some way that involves fraud or deception, typically for economic gain.” The law applies to any person or entity who impersonates another person on the Internet with the “intent to obtain a benefit or injure or defraud another.” The identity theft can also be used as the scheme of online scam, pretending as someone else by using their data on social media to gain something that is commonly used as part of ongoing intimate violence. The difference between these two is that identity theft benefits the perpetrator, while impersonation results in a distinct harm to another person

In Real Life Attacks describe incidents where online abuse either moves into the “real” world or is already part of an ongoing stalking or intimate partner violence interaction. IRL trolling can also mean simply trying to instill fear by letting a target know that the abuser knows their address or place of employment.

Hostile mobs include hundreds, sometimes thousands of people, systematically harassing a target. In Indonesia this act is sometimes organised and people who are doing this commonly known as buzzer. Attacks on public figures like influencers or politicians have been conducted by cybermobs.

Videos of rapes in progress that are subsequently used to shame or extort, or are sold as nonconsensual porn whose sole purpose to share and distribute the video is to deprive people of dignity by humiliating, and harassing them. In most cases the videos are used to blackmail, shame and extort. Research found that multiple publicized cases of teenage girls, whose rapes were filmed and shared, committed suicide.

Online abusers will often threaten to or engage in harassing their target’s family members, friends, employers or community of supporters.

Harassers frequently objectify their targets, including through the use of manipulated photographs and sexually explicit descriptions of their bodies. Girls and women’s photographs are often used without their consent and manipulated so that they appear in pornographic scenes or used in memes.

Targeting vulnerable people by using the names and images of lost ones to create memes, websites, fake Twitter accounts,Facebook pages or Instagram accounts.

Most people think of spying and surveillance in terms of governments spying on citizens, however, women are frequently illegally (and legally) surveilled. This happens in their apartments; in changing rooms; department stores; supermarket bathrooms; on public stairways and subway platforms; in sports arenas and locker rooms; in police stations and in classrooms while they teach. The minimizing expression, “Peeping Tom,” is particularly insufficient given the impact of the nature, scale and amplification of the Internet on the power of stolen images and recordings to be used in harmful ways.

Criminal activity consisting of the repeated following and harassing of another person on the internet. Stalking is a distinctive form of criminal activity composed of a series of actions that might constitute legal behavior. For example, spamming messages or calls and social media spying by animus users are actions that, on their own, are not criminal. But, when these actions are coupled with an intent to instill fear or injury, however, they may constitute a pattern of behavior that is illegal. Records reveal that 70 percent of those stalked online are women and more than 80 percent of cyber-stalking defendants are male.

Sexting is the consensual electronic sharing of naked or sexual photographs. This is different, however, from the non consensual sharing of the same images. While sexting is often demonized as dangerous, the danger and infraction is actually resident in the violation of privacy and consent that accompanies the sharing of images without the subject’s consent. For example, while teenage boys and girls sext at the same rates, boys are between two and three times more likely to share images that they are sent.

A form of gender-based bullying often targeting teenage girls. Slut-shaming, stalking, the use of nonconsensual photography and sexual surveillance frequently overlap, amplifying impact on targets. Amanda Todd, Rehtaeh Parsons, Audrie Potts, Felicia Garcia, Tyler Clementi, Rachel Ehmke, Steubenville’s Jane Doe and Jada are people who were targeted by combinations of these tactics.

Swatting is a high-stakes prank where someone makes a false police report with the intention of luring law enforcement to the residence of a person who’s done something to anger them. The goal is to get police officers, and particularly a SWAT team, to respond. Harassers will report a serious threat or emergency, eliciting a law enforcement response that might include the use of weapons and possibility of being killed or hurt.

Rape and death threats frequently coincide with sexist, racist commentary. While online threats may not pass current legal tests for what constitutes a “true threat,” they do generate anxiety and alter the course of a person’s life.

While not traditionally thought of as a form of online harassment and abuse, trafficking involves multiple types of electronically-enabled abuse. Social media is used by traffickers to sell people whose photographs they share, without their consent, often including photographs of their abuse of women as an example to others. Seventy-six percent of trafficked persons are girls and women and the Internet is now a major sales platform.

Sending unsolicited pornography, violent rape porn gifs or photographs in which a target’s photograph has been sexualized. For example, in 2003, the website for UNIFEM, the United Nations’s Development Fund for Women, was stolen online by a pornographer who populated the site with violent sexual imagery. More recently, editors at Jezebel, an online magazine, reported that an individual or individuals were posting gifs of violent pornography in the comments and discussion section of stories daily. Writers at Jezebel, almost all women, were required to review comments sections daily. Women politicians, writers, athletes, celebrities and more have their photographs electronically manipulated for the purposes of creating non consensual pornography and of degrading them publicly.