Content warning: descriptions of sexual harassment, mentions of sexual assault and rape
[dropcap]S[/dropcap]exual harassment is often thought of as something intrinsically tied to the physical world. From getting catcalled on the street to receiving unwanted advances from an acquaintance, our typical notions of harassment are too frequently grounded in non-consensual interactions within physical relationships and spaces.
The internet has changed things — and our notions of harassment need to change in response. The experiences of online harassment survivors are no less valid, and the need to listen to their voices no less vital.
I spoke to 15 students about their experiences with online sexual harassment. The responses I received were overwhelming, humbling, and at times frightening. We don’t often think of the internet as an unsafe or evil place, but the stories told here might cause us to reconsider. The profound impact harassment has had on these students’ lives and the lives of others should spur us to confront this issue head on.
Persistent or predatory?
Unwanted romantic and sexual advances often escalate into the territory of harassment when parties refuse to take no for an answer. Many of my sources reported being singled out, being tracked down, receiving repeated messages from insistent individuals, or being otherwise targeted through online platforms like Facebook and Snapchat. Such experiences are common within a multitude of online spaces and apps, even on platforms where you would least expect them to take place.
Daryna has had multiple experiences with harassment on LinkedIn — a platform that, by all accounts, is intended to be a professional online environment — in which men have initiated conversations under the guise of beginning a professional relationship but quickly shift to making comments about her appearance or suggesting that she go out with them on dates. When Daryna turned down one invitation, the man managed to get a hold of her personal email and attempted to add her on other social networks.
A notorious arena for unsolicited sexual advances is the world of dating apps like Tinder, where inboxes are cluttered with lewd openers and cringe-worthy one-liners. One of Nicole’s matches, despite seeming normal in his profile, messaged her unsolicited and increasingly graphic descriptions of what he wanted to do to her, which made her very uncomfortable. When Adina cancelled a date she had set up on Tinder, the match she was supposed to meet called her a whore and accused her of leading him on.
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Adina believes such experiences have as much to do with the dating app environment as the people behind the screen. She tells me that simply being active on a dating app can create the perception that you are looking for sex and are therefore open to receiving any and all sexual advances, no matter how misguided that might be. In the long run, the environment breeds a toxic sense of entitlement to sexual experience, which may make some users feel uncomfortable or threatened.
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Ray*, a gay man of colour, tells me about his experience on dating apps like Grindr and Scruff, where overt instances of racism are normalized and often justified as sexual preferences. All of the harassment Ray has experienced on dating apps has had racial overtones.
“Some of the things will just be so racist that it comes across as funny,” he tells me. “There was this one guy who told me he was trying to sleep with one guy from every country. He’s like, ‘Where are you from? I’ve slept with guys from Thailand, Japan, Vietnam, Laos, and I’m trying to find someone from Hong Kong, China, India, are you any of those?’… Another told me he wanted me to be his ‘manga prince’ or something. He used some sort of Japanese term from anime.”
It is common knowledge that the internet can serve as a breeding ground for various forms of bigotry. The accessibility of online platforms can have profound repercussions in terms of the dissemination of harmful ideas, making it easy for some users to spread hatred while hiding behind the anonymity their laptop screens provide — all the while gaining support from cohorts of virtual followers.
After Pam* cut ties with a friend she had dated, she was disturbed to discover that he secretly owned an anti-feminist Reddit account, which featured misogynistic comments about women in general and about her and her friends. Pam came across multiple threads and comments linked to his profile that had themes of sexual violence; other users commented on his posts referring to women as ‘bitches’ and ‘cunts,’ stating that women needed to be raped in order to be taught a lesson.
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The anonymous nature of many online communities, and the separation between users online, also has the potential to facilitate behaviour that can only be described as predatory.
In her mid-teens, Manuela* was harassed by someone she met on an internet forum whom she initially trusted because he was a well-respected member of the online community. Wanting to explore her sexuality in a virtual space, Manuela corresponded and had cyber sex with the user over the course of a few weeks.
Though their initial interactions were relatively harmless, things quickly escalated into something more insidious. “It became pretty apparent pretty soon that he was basically a pedophile,” says Manuela. The man was significantly older than her and would frequently talk about how attractive and innocent he found young girls to be. Manuela was also aware that he had dated girls even younger than she was at the time.
When Manuela refused to send him naked photos of herself, the user became verbally abusive. “He would start to guilt me and shame me every time we talked about sending him my nudes,” she says. “He really would get into my head and just say a lot of terrible things. About how I’m worthless and terrible and selfish and narcissistic… It was very classic abusive behaviour.” At one point, he threatened to come find Manuela and rape her.
Max* sent naked photos of himself to a popular Tumblr user. He later came across a troubling post the user had made mocking a 12-year-old’s experience with self-harm. When Max confronted him, the user reblogged his comments to their public Tumblr and attached Max’s nudes to the post. “I felt so violated,” explains Max. “I’d [experienced] sexual assault before in my life. Everything just came rushing back. Everything I thought I was able to compartmentalize and store away in my head… all those things came back to me.”
Dave* had a frightening experience with Tagged.com, a website that matches Facebook profiles and facilitates conversations between users. Dave matched with a beautiful blonde girl, and the two of them started video-chatting and having cyber sex over webcam. The ‘girl’ turned out to be a scam artist stationed in the Philippines with an elaborate extortion operation. The person had set up a fake profile and used video footage from another source to trick Dave into thinking there was a woman on the other end of the screen. The man screenshotted Dave masturbating on camera, tracked down Dave’s family members on Facebook, and demanded money, threatening to send the photos to his family if Dave did not comply.
Terrified, Dave wired the man some money and begged him to stop, and the man eventually deleted all but one of the images he had on his hard drive. Dave finally blocked him, deactivated his email and Tagged.com accounts, and changed his privacy settings on Facebook. The man did not contact him again.
“I never heard anything from anyone, so I figured he must have actually taken pity on me,” said Dave. “But he still may very well have that last photo, and could bring my name up at any time.”
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Personal conflicts in online spaces
While trolls, creeps, and criminals lurking the internet’s darkest corners might paint a stereotypical picture of the dangers associated with the online world, the internet also facilitates and enables harm between people in ‘real-life’ relationships.
In 2014, a man who asked Joyce* out attempted to escalate their relationship very quickly; this made her uncomfortable to the point where she chose to stop talking to him. In 2017, completely out of the blue, the same man messaged her, writing, “ahaha you’re fat now and your boobs sag. Karma does exist.” Joyce had had very limited contact with him immediately after she ended things, and they hadn’t had any contact at all over the course of three years.
“Frankly the whole thing was uncomfortable and appalling,” says Joyce, “but I was just shocked at how long he held this grudge for after I very politely turned him down.”
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After she left her summer job, Fiona* exchanged Facebook information and phone numbers with a co-worker whom she considered a friend. Two hours later, to her shock, he sent her unsolicited photos of his penis. Although Fiona responded negatively, he refused to leave her alone. Over the following weeks, he sent Fiona persistent messages asking her private questions about her sex life and accusing her of leading him on.
When Fiona confronted her co-worker, his response was disturbing. “When I openly told him, you know, ‘What you’re doing constitutes sexual harassment, because this is not okay,’ his response was literally, ‘This is turning me on,’” she says. On the other end of the phone with her, my stomach churns at the thought that her harasser found the situation all the more sexually arousing.
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When Khrystyna was 17 years old, someone at her workplace messaged her on Facebook, telling her that he had been “watching her” and made sexual comments about her body, including that he sometimes got “hard” at work while staring at her. Khrystyna later found out that he was nine years older than her. Even after Khrystyna changed jobs, for the next five years the man continued to pester her with messages, some sexually explicit, others angry that she was not responding to his advances. Once, he sent her a photo of his penis.
A substantial portion of online harassment occurs when intimate relationships go sour. When one of Khrystyna’s ex-partners found out she was seeing someone new, he sent her angry threatening messages and voicemails about harming her, himself, and her new partner. Another ex left sexist comments on all of the feminist Facebook posts she put on her profile; when she confronted him about it, he told her all she needed was “a good dick.”
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When Talia* started receiving suspicious messages from her friend Noelle’s* Snapchat account, they discovered someone had gotten a hold of Noelle’s password. Over the course of a few months, Talia and Noelle were bombarded with random dick pics and threats that Noelle’s intimate photos would be released if Talia did not send intimate photos to Noelle’s Snapchat account.
Though their harasser never revealed their identity, Talia and Noelle believe that it was Noelle’s ex-boyfriend, who had sexually assaulted Noelle at a party. Though Noelle never told anyone except Talia about her assault, he denied the fact that the encounter was not consensual and became convinced that Noelle was spreading rumours about what had happened.
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Some of the most extreme cases of online harassment between intimate partners involve ‘revenge porn’ — disclosure of a person’s intimate images without their consent. After Bethany* broke off a long-term relationship, the person she had been dating leaked her intimate images online. Many of Bethany’s friends, as well as complete strangers, were able to gain access to the photographs. She received an onslaught of unsolicited explicit images, harassment, and judgment from the people around her.
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Chloe* was involved in a rocky on-and-off relationship with her girlfriend, Evie*. In order to rope her back into the relationship when things went sour, Evie would blackmail Chloe, threatening to send Chloe’s intimate pictures to her parents. After Chloe finally cut things off, Evie managed to gain control over Chloe’s email and Snapchat accounts and was able to access intimate pictures and videos of Chloe and her new partner in the ‘Memories’ section of her Snapchat account.
Alarmed, Chloe got in touch with the police, but it was too late. Evie had followed through on her promise and sent the photos and videos to Chloe’s mother. Chloe had not previously been open about her sexuality with her parents; the incident forced her to reveal her sexual orientation to her father.
When she was in ninth grade, Indira’s* friend began a long-distance online relationship with an older man she had met on Omegle and who she later discovered had been operating through a fake account. When the two of them got into a fight, he posted a photo she had sent him of her masturbating on her Facebook wall. “About five hours passed until she realized it was there,” says Indira. “By that time, her friends, family, all the people she knew had seen it. She was 15.” Indira also tells me that sending intimate pictures or screenshots of her female classmates was normalized at her high school.
These experiences are not only disturbing, they are also highly illegal. Though Chloe opted not to press charges, it is worth noting that under the Canadian Criminal Code, what Evie did could classify as extortion, an offence carrying a maximum penalty of life in prison. Meanwhile, the girls involved in intimate photo leaks at Indira’s school were all underage.
“For the most part we were under 18,” says Indira. “That’s child pornography.”
The extent to which perpetrators are willing to violate the privacy and dignity of the people around them is alarming. Perhaps there is something about the online environment that makes the decision to do so easier and more appealing.
“The internet enables and empowers to amplify what they would have done in person, or maybe wouldn’t have done in person, given the circumstances,” says Daryna. She explains that the distancing effect the internet has on personal relationships can enable people to make decisions they might not otherwise have made in person.
Fiona tells me that, prior to her experience with harassment, she considered her co-worker a friend and did not suspect he was capable of such behaviour given the way they interacted face-to-face. “There were absolutely no signs that he could behave this way,” she emphasizes. “As soon as he had access to my social media, it completely changed his specific behaviour and how he could interact with me.”
The internet has the potential to drastically change a person’s behaviour — sometimes to the extent of seeming like an entirely different person. In the case of Fiona’s co-worker, moving their interactions to the digital sphere meant him feeling entitled to her sexual attention and open to share a side of himself that she clearly did not want to see.
“He genuinely did not seem to understand why what he was doing was not okay,” she says.
Damage beyond the digital
The harassment that takes place in the online world can have profound and tangible repercussions for victims. We should not underestimate the potential psychological stress associated with being exposed to repeated unwanted graphic or threatening sexual messages, having your most intimate photos shown to others, or feeling physically unsafe as a result of these experiences.
Because Max’s pictures had been posted on a popular Tumblr account, countless other users had access to them; some actually reached out to him personally, making jokes or continuing the harassment, though others expressed support for him in his situation. Traumatized, Max’s grades and personal relationships suffered dramatically; when he lost his achievement-based financial aid, he was forced to recount his experience in detail to the university administration.
“Victims get revictimized constantly,” he says. “You always have to relive that trauma when you explain it.”
What happens online is also undoubtedly and necessarily connected to the analogue world. Ray draws a connection between the threats of violence he has received on dating apps and recent cases such as that of Bruce McArthur, who, as of press time, is facing six charges of first-degree murder in relation to the deaths of primarily racialized gay men in the Church-Wellesley neighbourhood. “It’s usually an older white man messaging a younger man of colour, wanting to somehow enact and play out his fantasies of dominance and submission and racial power and authority and control,” Ray tells me.
Unsurprisingly, traumatic experiences can change how users behave online. All too wary of incurring further harm, many sources reported deleting their social media accounts or otherwise modifying how they navigated the internet. Daryna has taken steps to scrub her LinkedIn profile of certain personal details, ensuring that the image she projects is professional to the point of being “sanitized” so as to ward off unwanted attention.
The very fact that the onus to take such precautions is often placed on those who have faced harassment, and not the perpetrators, is highly problematic. Nevertheless, this logic continues to pervade interactions between harassers and their targets. After Fiona confronted her co-worker about the photos he sent, he accused her of leading him on, said things like “don’t pretend that you didn’t want this,” and “take some responsibility,” and told her that his girlfriend didn’t need to know about what he had done — that it would be their “little secret.”
Even more problematic is the extent to which victims internalize that mentality. A number of the sources who came forward had at some point minimized or second-guessed their experiences, unsure whether what had happened to them could be classified as harassment or was serious enough to warrant intervention. A troubling number of sources began their stories with, “I’m not sure if this is what you are looking for,” or “I’m not sure if this counts.”
For many people who experience harassment, the prospect of redress might not seem reasonable in the first place. Khrystyna draws attention to the fact that, in many circumstances, the reporting procedures themselves are unclear, require much emotional labour from victims, and simultaneously afford no guarantee that their complaints will be taken seriously.
Bethany did not report the person who distributed her intimate photos or the people who harassed her. She tells me now that she wishes she had, but she was paralyzed by fear of retaliation, as well as by the inexplicable guilt she felt about what had happened to her.
Bethany was also afraid that sharing her experience with more people would cause things to spiral even further out of control. “It’s no longer just you involved, it becomes a larger array of other people,” she explains. “It becomes something so much more, something so much bigger than what you are.”
Khrystyna also expresses that a lot of women do not process interactions as sexual harassment due to the extent to which such behaviour is normalized in broader society. “When you grow up with people constantly validating the predatory behaviour of boys and men, you eventually learn that apparently that’s ‘just how men are’ and you as a woman are just required to sort of live with it,” she says. “And it can take a long time to unlearn that.”
“I’m sure you’re familiar with the fact that lots of people who are survivors minimize experiences,” says Manuela, speaking to the trouble she had reconciling with her abuse. For the few weeks she was being threatened and degraded online, Manuela would cry herself to sleep almost every night after logging out of her conversations with the forum user with whom she had been corresponding. Despite the emotional toll this experience took on her at the time, years went by until she realized that the man’s behaviour classified as abusive.
Manuela explains that because everything was happening online and the man never physically came to her jurisdiction, her feelings of pain, shame, and fear sometimes felt unreasonable or unjustified. “It just took that long to see it as harmful,” she emphasizes. “Because it felt like it didn’t impact anything, because it was digital.”
We’ve now seen that the internet’s grasp is far-reaching, and that the impact of online harassment has implications that extend far beyond the digital sphere. But when your harasser is not physically in front of you, and you are separated by a screen and a network, it is all too easy to convince yourself that what you are experiencing is insignificant — that what is happening to you is not entirely real.
Routes to redress
Victims should not have to feel as if their experiences are invalid, and clearly something needs to be done to remedy the injustice that can take place online.
One approach is to confront social media outlets about the ways in which their structures might inadvertently facilitate online abuse. Given the frequency with which harassment takes place online, outlets can certainly take proactive steps to prevent it from happening. Most major social media outlets have now integrated mechanisms for users to report offensive or hateful content. To help dissipate potential toxicity on dating apps, Nicole and Ray suggest incorporating regular reminders for users to be respectful when they reach out to one another and embedding clearly visible reporting tools onto the main interface.
But there are limitations to what social media outlets can or will do in this regard. After repeatedly being locked out of her account by her harasser, Noelle reported her situation to Snapchat, which helped her disable her account. But both Adina and Khrystyna have tried to report sexist Facebook comments, and Facebook has neglected to take them down.
Some complainants turn to law enforcement for assistance, with mixed results. Though Dave found the officers who took his statement to be helpful and reassuring, Chloe’s experience was lacklustre. When she took her case to the Toronto police, they told her they would go to Evie’s house and talk to her in person. As far as Chloe knows, that never happened.
“The process was really long,” says Chloe. “It took a month for them to simply leave a message being like, ‘Don’t contact her.’” Not wanting to wait any longer for the police to take action, Chloe resorted to getting in touch with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) through a mutual connection, and an RCMP officer went to Evie’s house that night to give a warning.
At the same time, Chloe appreciates that police at least have the influence necessary to scare people into compliance with the law. “Even if the police don’t necessarily do anything, I think a lot of people are still afraid of consequences,” she adds. “A lot of people are just stupid, but they’re not just going to do something regardless of what the police say. If the police say stop, a lot of people will stop.”
Importantly, many complainants have indeed managed to achieve redress through formal channels. Deeply frustrated with the repeated unsolicited photos and messages she received from her co-worker, Fiona wound up filing a complaint with her former management, who took it very seriously. She believes the employee was eventually fired.
Finally, there is the potential to achieve positive change through grassroots, community-based channels — often themselves facilitated by online networks. Adina mentions the existence of Toronto-based Facebook groups that women join to alert one another about experiences of harassment they have experienced with specific men on dating apps. The sheer ubiquity of these experiences, especially for women and other marginalized people, means there is power to be harnessed from banding together.
Toward a better internet
The experiences of the people I spoke with, and the concerns they raised about the nature of online platforms, are valid, concerning, and demand redress. At the same time, they bring us to a crossroads in terms of how we want to think about the internet in the first place.
Certainly, elements of online environments make it easier for harassment to take place. But by and large, the internet also facilitates positive connections and relationships; it traverses otherwise impossible distances and barriers and is integral to the openness and accessibility of knowledge, information, and dialogue in the twenty-first century. In many circles, internet access is considered a basic human right.
“As someone who has made a lot of friends and connections online,” says Manuela, “I think there’s a really complicated conversation to be had there about how it can be possible to make things safer for people without just villainizing the medium.”
Under these circumstances, an overly restrictive or heavy-handed approach might be inappropriate. The internet can definitely unearth the worst parts of human nature — but it can also be a space for productive dialogue and innovation. Any solutions we put forward to addressing its uglier facets should be sensitive to that.
In the meantime, it is encouraging to see that many people are growing more comfortable sharing their experiences. Multiple sources expressed gratitude that someone was willing to publish their stories and hoped that speaking on the record would bring courage to others who were contemplating doing so as well.
An immense amount of suffering ties these stories together, but it is compassion and resilience that will ultimately propel them forward.
“I am in a place where I am safe from [my abuser],” says Manuela. “He can’t touch me anymore. He can’t hurt me. So I just feel very sorry for him. I feel more sorry for all the people he’s probably hurt along the way, and probably in much worse ways than me, but he needs help in a way that I don’t think any system currently would provide.”
“[The] people who probably had to endure his bullshit need help in ways that the system doesn’t provide either,” adds Manuela. “They should come first.”
*Name has been changed at the individual’s request