Cybermobbing: Weibliche Täter, männliche Opfer

In der jüngsten Vergangenheit waren Feministinnen über Websites wie hatr.org, "Awareness-Teams" auf Facebook, aktuell einer Kampagne gegen verbale Gewalt bei Twitter und andere Manöver einigermaßen erfolgreich damit, Cybermobbing zu gendern, also so zu tun, als ginge Hate Spech im Internet vor allem von Männern gegen Frauen aus. Tatsächlich läuft es häufig auch umgekehrt. Wenn etwa Christian Schmidt und die Lesern seines Blogs über Evolutionsbiologie diskutieren, werden sie auf Twitter von weiblicher Seite schnell als "Maskufaschos" angefeindet.

In den letzten Tagen sind erfreulicherweise mehrere Artikel erschienen, die die Geschlechterklischees in der Debatte um Cybermobbing hinterfragen und darauf hinweisen, dass es auch viele weibliche Täter und männliche Opfer gibt.

Online abuse is not limited by gender stellt etwa Glen Poole im britischen Guardian klar:

Anyone following the debate about gender hate-speech on social media in recent months could be forgiven for thinking that online abuse is always perpetrated by men and suffered by women. And yet a survey by the website Knowthenet in 2011 found that 19-year-old males were most at risk from cyberbullying among teenagers, with 85% saying they had been victims, while figures from the World Health Organisation reveal that men account for 81% of violent deaths globally every year.

In reality, men and women of all backgrounds are vulnerable to online abuse and it can come from the unlikeliest of places. Last week, the men's lifestyle magazine GQ published some of the violent threats tweeted at them by One Direction fans for making singer Harry Styles apparently look like a "man whore" in a recent cover shoot. Much like the offensive tweets directed at feminist campaigners, the online abuse of GQ's staff included death threats and threats of sexual violence, with calls for all the men who work for the magazine to be castrated.

Where is the outcry when One Direction fans threaten to mutilate the genitals of male journalists? Why is a Facebook group called "If Girls Get Period Pains Why Don't Boys Get A Kick In The Balls Once A Month" deemed acceptable? And why are so many women tweeting with the hashtag #KillAllMen?

We need to talk about women findet auch die Feministin Portia Smart:

There are over 100 different forms of abuse where women abuse women including: stalking, bullying, sexual abuse, domestic abuse. Abuse also happens online by women against women. This includes – harassment, cyber-bullying , Gaslighting, mobbing, verbal abuse. It also happens within feminism. And yet…..feminism is deathly quiet on the issue. The anger & volume that we collectively use to denounce male violence is noticeably absent when it comes to women that abuse. I want to find out why – not only why women abuse other women, but why feminism is not able to engage about it.

Als Feministin interessiert sich Smart leider nur für weibliche Opfer, auch ist für sie letzten Endes der Mann bzw. das Patriarchat an allem schuld ...

Twitter Row: What About Male Victims? fragt hingegen Niall Paterson für Sky News und berichtet über seine eigenen Erfahrungen mit Cybermobbing. Bezeichnenderweise geht auch hier die Hate Speech von der feministischen Fraktion aus:

A female tweeter I didn't follow had seen me show Mrs Duffy the footage, and tweeted that I was a **** for doing so - an interesting word for a self-confessed feminist to use - yet did not identify me in her tweet.

One of my followers alerted me and I replied to the profanity - after all, I stood by the story and the way in which we'd reported it.

My words were immediately re-tweeted. For the next 24 hours I was subjected to abuse and threats of violence from many of this writer's 70,000-odd followers. (...) Despite a reporter's thick skin, I'll confess to a sleepless few nights. I'd never received such constant abuse and it certainly affected me emotionally. But I kept it to myself.

I recount this tale not out of a desire for sympathy.

After all, over the years I've been on Twitter there have been regular tweets accusing me of this or that, slagging off my accent and ancestry whenever I present the news, threatening me with violence, threatening those I know with violence - although plainly not in the numbers I received post-Duffygate - and I've dealt with them in a way that I've felt comfortable with on a case-by-case basis.

Observing the ongoing debate about the way in which Twitter polices itself, the dialogue has focused on threats and abuse as part of the spectrum of sexism and misogyny, which was clearly not the case with me.

I asked the question on Twitter earlier - where do men who've received abusive tweets and threats of violence fit into this discussion?

It's not immediately clear. The simple answer is that threats of violence are criminal, whether the recipient is male or female.

Leider dürfte es noch geraume Zeit dauern, bis die Debatte über Cybermobbing ihren sexistischen, männerfeindlichen Unterton verliert.