We need to talk about political violence against women

In April last year, a 56-year-old-New Zealand man, Michael Cruickshank, was sentenced to one year in prison for threatening to kill then prime minister Jacinda Ardern.

In one email, Cruickshank threatened to “personally wipe [her] off this fucking planet”. In another, he said he would “blow her head off”. Over four months he sent Ardern 88 lengthy emails.

In the nine years Nicola Sturgeon served as Scotland’s first minister she was also regularly the target of sexist and gendered trolling and abuse. In 2017, The Herald in Scotland reported that police were investigating a “catalogue of horrific online abuse”, and extreme threats were so common that there was an account on Twitter dedicated to highlighting the hundreds of examples of threats and hate speech directed at her. 

So it should come as no surprise that when Ardern and Sturgeon both recently resigned, they alluded to the toll this kind of sexist abuse had taken. They spoke of the fact that they were “human”, though experiencing distinctly dehumanising treatment. 

“The only interesting angle you will find is that after going on six years of some big challenges, that I am human. Politicians are human,” Ardern said in response to speculation as to the “real” reason she was stepping down. 

Sturgeon echoed that: “I am a human being. And every human being, every day, wrestles with a whole load of conflicting emotions. And over the last number of weeks, probably since around the turn of the year, I’ve been struggling with just that.”

These recent events prompted me to reflect on the last time I wrote about the phenomenon of “political violence against women” in 2019. From common acts of harassment to misogynistic and sexist verbal attacks, much of it increasingly online, women in politics are consistently undermined. The whole point of this treatment is to discourage them from being politically active. 

The academics who study this (all too common) treatment call it “political violence” against women.

At the time, I was critiquing a Sunshine Coast Daily front page featuring Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk in the crosshairs of a rifle and the headline “Anna You’re Next”. There had been a number of high-profile instances of political violence against women in politics, including the murder of UK parliamentarian Jo Cox in 2016. 

“We have descended through too many tiers of Dante’s Inferno now,” wrote Sam Smethers at the time, who was then CEO of the UK feminist campaign group The Fawcett Society. “We have seen an MP murdered. We are seeing others receiving multiple death and rape threats. Many have additional security. Our politics have changed.”

Yes, they have. 

Now, three years later, I am frustrated that the problem seems to be as bad as ever, contributing to the loss of two extremely talented women from the front line of politics, as it was always designed to do. 

In a coming BBC documentary, Sturgeon brands the current political climate for women “harsher and more hostile” than ever before, blaming social media for facilitating “the most awful abuse of women, misogyny, sexism, threats of violence”. 

Last week #ShePersisted, a US based non-profit working to address gendered disinformation against women in politics, released a report titled Monetising Misogyny, which illustrates the scale of the current challenge. It concluded that online hate has “become a tool of the right and a lucrative business that is driving women out of public life and putting democracy and human rights at risk”. 

So what does this mean for women in the Australian political sphere? What does it mean for getting more women into politics? And what does it mean for people who could take tangible action to combat this growing problem? A recent episode of political violence directed at Australia’s new Ambassador for Gender Equality, Stephanie Copus-Campbell, is illustrative of just how far we have yet to go.

Just last week, Copus-Campbell, was on the receiving end of a torrent of online abuse, much of it in relation to her appearance. As I watched the debate about her experience unfold, I couldn’t help but notice that elsewhere in the world experts have pointed to the need for policymakers to use data to better understand this dangerous phenomenon in order to better combat it.

In the US, the Princeton University and Anti-Defamation League’s threats and harassment data set does just that. A report out last year highlighted that women in US politics are three times more likely than their male counterparts to receive threats and harassment. 

Yet in Australia we are not measuring this nor having a prominent discussion on how it can be countered.  

Further to the point of countering political violence, one of the recommendation of the #ShePersisted report was for more democracies around the world to go in the direction of the European Union, which is enacting a Digital Services Act that places an obligation on social media platforms to mitigate the risks their services pose to society. 

When the treatment of Copus-Campbell made headlines last week, any discussion about the broader harms of this behaviour — the threats to our democracy — was absent, as was any discussion about the role of social media platforms in mitigating those harms. 

And, finally, there was the victim blaming.

Professor Michelle Ryan, director of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, said earlier this week: “People were saying things like, ‘She should have had more media training.’ That’s something that annoys me, this focus on the victim and not the perpetrators.” 

Ryan said that is reflected in Australia’s broader approach to political violence and online trolling, illustrated by the fact that the e-safety commissioner’s office focuses on “social media self-defence” for the victim.  

“We can’t ask women to change their behaviour rather than saying that this is completely unacceptable,” Ryan said. 

Sadly, in the three years since I last wrote about political violence, it seems we have descended further into Dante’s inferno. It was not lost on me that Copus-Campbell’s treatment was met with relative silence by senior political figures in the Albanese government, including a growing frontbench of female politicians who, I suspect, can relate. A withering look and characteristic no-nonsense spray against Copus-Campbell’s critics from Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong, effectively her boss, would not have been amiss. 

I hope recent events will embolden Australian political actors and policymakers to do more to tackle political violence against women — before it’s too late.