A study carried out in Australia proved that about 50% of women receiving harassment online would report it, and of those women who would report harassment, 76% of them were women under 30. The harassment ranged in severity, going from unwanted contact to blatant sexual harassment. With the overwhelming amount of harassment, this may induce social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, to take a bigger role in preventing such things from happening. After this study, Twitter claimed that they would push further to tackle abuse and threats while Facebook also released a new feature that would offer support to people who seem to be at a risk of committing suicide.
- Nearly half the 1,000 respondents in the research by the digital security firm Norton had experienced some form of abuse or harassment online.
- Among women under 30, the incidence was 76%.
- The online quantitative survey was carried out with 1,053 women in Australia aged 18 and over in February this year.
- Seventy per cent of women said online harassment was a serious problem in 2016 and 60% said that it was getting worse
- Harassment is overwhelmingly taking place on social media, which facilitates 66% of cases – three times as many as by email (22%) or text (17%).
Online safety and security is becoming a pressing issue with many offenders believing that harassment is ok when it is online as their identity would never be found out. However as women are starting to gain confidence in reporting harassment, this issue seems to be slowly taken care of as pressure has been put upon social media sites where the majority of online harassment occurs.
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