Sexual Threats Stifle Some Female Bloggers

SEXUAL THREATS STIFLE SOME FEMALE BLOGGERS
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Ellen Nakashima]
As women gain visibility in the blogosphere, they are targets of sexual harassment and threats. Men are harassed too, and lack of civility is an abiding problem on the Web. But women, who make up about half the online community, are singled out in more starkly sexually threatening terms -- a trend that was first evident in chat rooms in the early 1990s and is now moving to the blogosphere. The treatment of women online is not just an equivalent of what happens offline, some women say. The Internet allows the content to be seen immediately, often permanently and far more widely than a remark scribbled on a restroom wall. A 2006 University of Maryland study on chat rooms found that female participants received 25 times as many sexually explicit and malicious messages as males. A 2005 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that the proportion of Internet users who took part in chats and discussion groups plunged from 28 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2005, entirely because of the exodus of women. The study attributed the trend to "sensitivity to worrisome behavior in chat rooms."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/29/AR200704...
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