Sexual Harassment on Internet

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Sexual Harassment Types of Sexual Harassment 1.Gender harassment involves unwelcome verbal and visual comments and remarks that insult individuals because of their gender or that use stimuli known or intended to provoke negative emotions. These include behaviors such as posting pornographic pictures in public or in places where they deliberately insult, telling chauvinistic jokes, and making gender- related degrading remarks. Gender harassment in cyberspace is very common. It is portrayed in several typical forms that Internet users encounter very often, whether communicated in verbal or in graphical for- mats and through either active or passive manners of online delivery. Active verbal SH mainly appears in the form of offensive sexual messages, actively initiated by a harasser toward a victim. This type of gender harassment is usually practiced in chat rooms and forums; however, it may also appear in private online communication channels, such as the commercial distribution through e-mail (a kind of spamming) of pornographic sites, sex-shop accessories, sex- related medical matters (such as drugs such as Viagra and operations similar to penis enlargement). Passive verbal SH, on the other hand, is less intrusive, as it does not refer to one user communicating messages to another. In this category, the harasser does not target harassing messages directly to a particular person or persons but, rather, to potential receivers. For instance, this type of harassment refers to nicknames and terms attached to a user’s online identification or to personal details that are clearly considered offensive (e.g., CockSucker, WetPussy, XLargeTool, or GreatFuck for nicknames; “want a fuck?” in Internet relay chat (IRC) user’s details, for offensive message). Similar to verbal gender harassment, graphic-based harassment can be active and passive, too. Active graphic

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