Their names are Marion, Laura, Anne-Cécile, Sara, Sandrine, Alice, Nora, Manon… They are between 13 and 65 years old, come from all origins and all social backgrounds. They are schoolchildren, streamers, activists, videographers, high school students, students, business leaders, employees, stay-at-home mothers or retirees. And there are thousands of women who experience gender-based and sexual violence online every day, whether they are online or not, whether they “expose themselves” online or not.
Their faces are glued to the bodies of porn actresses, their nudes (naked photos) or intimate videos are published on the networks, embellished with degrading comments of a sexual nature. They are threatened with death, rape, insulted. They are encouraged to commit suicide. We make them sing, we wait for them in front of their homes, at their place of work; they receive calls at night. Sometimes they have to move, stop working. Some try to end their lives. Others live on borrowed time, fearing the next wave.
Assaults where the boundary between virtual and physical world is erased, in a continuum of violence that overwhelms them, sometimes destroys them. Multifaceted cyber attacks, named by Anglo-Saxon terms (slut-shaming, doxing, revenge porn, sextortion, flaming, deepfake) revealing different practices, which can be combined, and which all have the same goal: to silence, humiliate and destroy the lives of women thanks to digital tools.
Trapped
According to figures from the StopFisha association, 73% of women have already been victims of gender-based or sexual violence online, and women are twenty-seven times more likely to be cyber-harassed than men. A Hubertine-Auclert Center study data from 2018 shows that one in three women have been threatened by their partner or ex to have intimate photos or videos disseminated, some of which were obtained by force, threat or without their knowledge.
This horribly banal story could pretty much sum it all up. The morning everything changed for Laura Pereira Diogo, she was 17 years old. “I wake up and see a naked video of me in a Snapchat story. » The panic. Her boyfriend, with whom she regularly FaceTimed, recorded it and released the sequence a few days after entering the final year. He quickly deletes it, but the damage is done, other boys took screenshots and re-shared it.
“It went all over town. I was afraid that my parents or my little brothers would find out. » Laura contacts her city’s digital department to find help and get the videos removed. “They didn’t even know what a story was, they told me there was nothing we could do. » She believes, wrongly, that she cannot lodge a complaint without her parents since she is a minor. Isolated, trapped, she ends up trying a bluff with the famous friend behind the video: “You’re going on a basketball career, if you don’t make sure it’s suppressed everywhere, I’m going to the cops and you say goodbye to your future. » The young man will execute somehow.
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