‘When I Saw Women Being Attacked … It Made Me Want to Stand Up and Fight’: Reporting, Responding to, and Resisting Online Misogyny

Abstract

This chapter explores how feminist women talk about their responses to receiving or encountering online gendered hate. Structured around a taxonomy of responses, four approaches are considered: reporting to the police, reporting to social media sites, engaging with the perpetrators of online gendered hate, and digital vigilante activism. Participants appreciated how the different approaches could be valuable but also acknowledged the consequences that engaging in each response might have. No one approach to dealing with online gendered hate is likely to be entirely successful or unproblematic, supporting the idea that a strategy comprising a range of different actions and organisations are necessary to respond to and mitigate online gendered hate.