Today, both the New York Times and the Guardian have articles about online sexual harassment. The Guardian’s article describes several cases in which women bloggers have been harassed for such simple things as posing with a political figure, or speaking their minds. In our daily lives most people would agree that harassment is unacceptable but in cyberspace, sites that include attacks in women see their numbers soar. To make matters worse, if someone “cat calls” you on the street, you can just walk away and it will probably be over, when this happens on the web there is a permanent record. Besides many of these attacks easily move these sites up in rank, leaving women to deal with realities that include them in basic Google searches in the most derogatory ways.
The New York Times article focused more on how the web has become a free for all atmosphere, yet how prominent bloggers, both men and women, are working to establish some basic rules. The basic rules were first proposed by BlogHer, and are beginning to reach broader acceptance, since this type of harassment is affecting not only women, but also people from a variety minority groups.
(This post was originally used for my technology class.)
Elisa Camahort
Hi: Thanks for the link to the article. Would just like to clarify that BlogHer has a set of guidelines for participation on our own community site. Those guidelines have been referenced by Tim O’Reilly as he set out to work on his ideas regarding a code of conduct, but we in fact are not working with him on that and are more proponents of the idea that every site/blog owner has both the right and even the responsibility to set their own guidelines (as opposed to trying to create guidelines for everyone else to follow.) That distinction was not drawn very clearly in the article, but you can see more of our thoughts on that distinction at my blog: http://workerbeesblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/theoretically-going-to-be-in-mondays-ny.html and from Lisa on a BlogHer post (in the comments): http://blogher.org/node/17887#comment-17365