Laura Bates

Both worldviews rest heavily on the perception of women being without humanity, individuality or soul.

We are talking about an industry that exploits men’s worst fears, preys on their vulnerabilities and literally trains them in harassment, stalking and even sexual assault.

she was intensely harassed online by gamers, who saw her commentary as an attack on the industry and an unwelcome attempt to sanitise or ‘feminise’ it

competing to outdo one another in the extremity and obscenity of the abuse

after police refused to carry out searches for firearms in advance of the event, because of Utah’s open-carry laws

it demands transparency of statistics while spreading false facts, and it portrays itself as the champion of downtrodden victims while espousing the creation of greater gains and protections for the group already most privileged in our society

So, when we tell women to simply switch off, or spend less time online, or stop visiting certain websites, what we are really saying is that they, not their harassers, should suffer the negative consequences of trolling

Advice that we shouldn’t ‘feed the trolls’ implies that the problem is simply inevitable: that men will always harass, abuse and degrade women, so we must inevitably take steps to protect women, rather than trying to tackle the problem at its root.

research carried out with 4,000 women across eight countries found that almost a quarter of women aged between eighteen and fifty-five had experienced online abuse or harassment, with the figure at 33 per cent for women in the US

Over three-quarters of the women who had experienced harassment or abuse on social media made changes to the way they used such platforms, and a third stopped posting content expressing their opinions on certain issues