Almost half of female social media users experience sexually abusive behaviour online, claims a University of Huddersfield researcher.

Now Megan Kenny says social media providers must do more to control the problem and legislation is lagging far behind the reality of today’s connected world.

Megan is completing a PhD project in which she appraises and analyses the levels of online abuse experienced by both male and female social media users, ranging in age from the early teens to over 70. Out of 370 anonymous participants in the online survey that she conducted, 261 were women and 46% of them reported sexual victimisation.

Megan Kenny from the University of Huddersfield

Megan’s doctoral thesis is titled Who’s Following You? and she has investigated most of the common social media sites – Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. She has also examined dating apps such as Tinder, but found that they were actually used less frequently for unwanted sexual behaviour.

The most frequent experience was being asked to share sexual images of themselves, followed by unsolicited sexual images and requests to talk about sex. Some 41% had experienced threatening behaviour online – mostly offensive messages.

Some of the anonymous participants in Megan’s survey admitted that they had been perpetrators of cyberviolence themselves with 13% confessing to sexual behaviour.

In addition to compiling statistics, Megan also sought individual stories that illustrate the experience of suffering online abuse. Distressed respondents included a woman who found that an innocent image she had placed on Facebook had been hijacked for pornographic websites.

She said: “The findings confirmed what I anticipated, to be honest, particularly with sexual and threatening behaviour. But I think that people are experiencing significant harm as a result of cyberviolence.

“It is important to stop distinguishing between online and real life. We live in a world in which online and offline are increasingly merging. So it is all real life and it all has an impact.”

Huddersfield University
Huddersfield University

Megan says social media providers need to take more responsibility over the issue of abuse.

“They are condoning this behaviour through inaction,” she said, adding that current legislation is inadequate. “The world is changing and the law needs to change to catch up with it.”