Why it is up to all of us to clean up the internet
IOFTEN think how much life has changed during my generation. I’m not referring to measurable things like industry, transport, business, or retail and community structure, rather than the way we live as a collective community that expanded interrelationship, and its situation as stakeholders in gender equality and opportunity.
This social revolution began in the 1960s. These are the years that the teenagers of the 1950s carried the baton of social traditions not so dissimilar to Edwardian rankings. With a job for life, they got on with it, married, had kids, and handed the job over to a new hopeful and better placed generation.
Women of the 50s anticipated a future the same as their mothers and grandmothers endured. The breaking of some far off ‘glass ceiling’ was as unreal as a glance through Alice’s looking glass.
Times though were changing. Backed by full-time occupations with improved wages, this generation gazing wistfully from their council house windows, calculated a new life with house ownership and holidays further afield than the caravan sites of North Wales and Blackpool boarding houses.
And in the space of 10 years, a revolutionary tool arrived that liberated women from being the conventional confined domestic architect, to the unlocking of a gateway to improved status. What had been mostly the responsibility of men, overnight gave women an equal role in family planning. It was, of course, the magic of female oral contraception.
The Pill, to give it its popular name, was introduced in the UK in 1961 for married women only. But by 1970 it had become the common device for women in taking control of their bodies and enabling greater sexual freedom. As a cathartic consequence, it also unashamedly improved the social and professional lifestyle of women.
Backed by supportive legislation, women became increasingly freed from suppressed functions to becoming recognised achievers at all qualified levels.
While the mass majority of men actively welcomed and promoted gender equality, and still do, it has to be said there has always been a division of men who refuse to ascribe to change, and explicitly articulate negativity. Even in our much-enlightened times, the presence of macho boldness still holds a presence in community assemblies where they instinctively flex their matey resolve.
It is this group, the threatening idiomatic cynic, the egotist, the sceptic, that lurks in the darker corners of social media using it as a weapon of spite, intimidation and threat.
Most data-gathering units reporting online hate crime against women indicate there is clear evidence that this is escalating. This is demonstrated in the volume of respondents who have testified to being exposed to hostile and explicit messages, pornographic photographs, cyberstalking and other forms of internet abuse.
Aside from subjecting young people to bullying and to revenge posts, it is women in professions, and those in the public realm, who are the most targeted recipients of intimidation.
The Economist Intelligence Unit completed a study in 2020, that recorded credible measurements of the prevalence of online violence against women highlighting sexist and hateful language deliberately designed to attack or humiliate, and this represented 65 per cent of all online abuse.
Politicians are anxious to find ways to prevent this. Of course, it is right to blame owners of social media sites.
And it is certainly on the most popular community platforms currently used by 3.6 billion people worldwide, that most explicit messages are delivered.
So, if social media sites are the weapons, it surely is important to identify the triggers that fire the guns.
It has become urgent to expose the abhorrent groups and hate-filled individuals, and to prosecute them to conviction. And the owners of social media sites must be more positive in vetting and in assisting in the active pursuit of offenders.
But the long-term solution, if that can ever be achieved, lies in education. And that begins in the home with kindness and respect. Time, it is, to take another look at ourselves.