Throughout $2012$ and $2013,$ several high$-$profile female activist bloggers and journalists experienced online harassment. Two of the most extreme cases involved British journalist Caroline Criado$-$Perez and feminist social critic Anita Sarkeesian, an American. Criado$-$Perez became the target of online abuse after she launched a successful campaign to convince the Bank of England to keep a woman on one of that country$$s bank notes. When the Bank of England announced that it would do so$,$ Criado$-$Perez and her fellow female activists immediately became the target of extreme abuse, primarily through the social media application Twitter. The women were repeatedly and graphically threatened with rape and murder, receiving about $50$ such threats per hour.

Sarkeesian became the target of a cyber mob when she launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a project that would investigate depictions of women in video games. Sarkeesian$$s Kickstarter campaign page, website, and YouTube videos were inundated with threats of rape and murder. An online game was developed in which players punched a photo of Sarkeesian until she was bloody and bruised. She was emailed images of herself being raped by video game characters. Her phone number and address were discovered and published on the Internet, and numerous attempts were made to hack her various social media and email accounts.

While the online harassment of women and girls is not new, the visibility of this phenomenon has greatly increased in the wake of these high$-$profile events. In $2014,$ magazines and news organizations such as the Guardian, the Washington Post, Forbes, and the Huffington Post have all reported on the online harassment of women. These various news reports typically discuss high$-$profile cases, link them to the more general widespread harassment of women online, and position the phenomenon as something that degrades women$$s quality of life. Other social justice activists, academics, and legal scholars have also published on the topic in $2014,$ with one legal scholar comparing online harassment of women to workplace$-$based sexual harassment of women and calling for a legislative response. At least one organization, Take Back the Tech, has started working to raise awareness of and promote an end to the online harassment of women. Though discussion is underway, a clear plan for combating online harassment of women has not yet developed.

The Online harassment of women:

A has both subjective and objective elements

B lack objective elements