Hayden Munro: Racist and sexist abuse is constant for women in the public eye

All too often the racist and sexist abuse of female politicians through social media has no repercussions. Photo / 123rf

Opinion

OPINION

Dealing with constant death threats and racist and sexist abuse shouldn't be in the job description for our public figures.

But over the last few years, it's become a constant for any woman in the public eye, especially if they aren't Pākehā.

This topic's been getting a bit more attention lately - Ashley Bloomfield highlighted it this week during his resignation press conference, and it's been in the media a lot since Netsafe revealed that a Facebook account posting horrible abuse of female politicians was secretly being run by a member of the Young Nationals.

But in fact, it doesn't matter if you're on the left or the right, almost all of our female politicians are subjected to this kind of stuff. And it's the same for journalists, for public health commentators, for community leaders or activists.

Most of it comes from people hiding behind faceless accounts. The abuse is personalised, targeted and designed to intimidate, scare and silence.

Much of it is about exerting power over women by making them feel threatened, or about trying to punish people of colour for daring to step into the public eye.

Some people will be quick to say, "Oh but this kind of thing has always happened to politicians," but as someone who has worked for both male and female politicians over a period of time, I can tell you it's different for women, and it's getting worse. The advent of social media has been a game-changer.

When it comes to politics, this kind of abuse leaves us all worse off because it makes it much harder to convince good people to run for office.

And as someone who worked on political campaigns for more than a decade, my experience is it's the good ones who often need a bit of convincing.

The ones who are too keen, too excited about wielding power, too in love with the idea of themselves as an MP, those kinds of people don't need any encouragement - they'll crawl over broken glass to get ahead - but they're not the ones you want running the country in a crisis.

What we want, to put it bluntly, is normal people. People who know what life is like for the rest of us and genuinely care about making things better.

And for these people, there are already a lot of reasons they might not want to put their hand up.

Being in politics isn't easy. The hours are long, the pressure is immense, and the scrutiny is invasive.

And then there's the impact on families from all the time away. Very early on in my time working in Parliament, one politician told me sadly that his toddler had recently asked his wife, "When is Daddy next coming to visit?"

All of this means that convincing good people to put their hands up is hard enough already without asking them to take on a heap of anonymous abuse as well.

For political parties, it needs to be 100 per cent clear this kind of abuse is outside of the rules of engagement for political combat. It was good to see National condemning the abuse in the Christchurch case, and good to see the member involved resign straight away. No matter what side of the aisle you're on, weaponising anonymous attacks shouldn't be part of how we operate.

For the rest of us, there are things we can do as well.

We can report this kind of abuse when we see it online, we can confront people when we see them doing it, we can expect and demand that social media companies do more to stop it, and we can expect groups like Netsafe to more regularly unmask the perpetrators.

Ultimately what is needed are more consequences for those piling on the abuse. The allure of social media for people who want to do this stuff is that all too often they face no repercussions.

If we want to stamp this abuse out, that needs to end.