“Journalists are prepared for critical situations … but we are not prepared for this”: empirical and structural dimensions of gendered online harassment

• Autor(a) principal: Sampaio-Dias, Susana
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Outros Autores: Silveirinha, Maria João, Garcez, Bibiana, Subtil, Filipa Mónica de Brito Gonçalves, Miranda, João, Cerqueira, Carla
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.21/16495
• topic: Women journalists; Onlineharassment; Journalists’safety; Emotional labour; Critical realism; Normalisation

This article discusses online harassment against women journalistsexploring self-reported incidents, effects, and trust in safetymechanisms. Drawing on twenty-five semi-structured interviewsof women journalists in Portugal, we use a feminist and criticalrealist framework to explore the causal structures and generativemechanisms that explain their vulnerability to online abuse. Weidentify three overarching themes: increasing visibility in acontext of higher hostility towards journalism and insufficientsafety mechanisms; intersectional gender inequality and culturalmores that foster it; and (individual) responses to harassment.These themes show that women journalists’actions are bothconstrained and enabled by existing structures and culturalattitudes. While they tend to deny harassment is caused by theirgender, seeing it mainly because of their job, they admit thesexualised and gendered nature of the insults, seeing this as anadded offence not experienced by their male counterparts. Theyalso see harassment as a continuation of inequality and prevailingsexism andfind the protection mechanisms insufficient andineffective. As a result, they assume an extra burden of emotionallabour to deal with online bullying, admitting self-censoring andthe need to develop resilience strategies.