A rape threat is a threat made against another person of rape or sexual assault. Rape threats may often be made anonymously or online through the use of social media, and especially against social media influencers. These threats are often made against prominent people such as high-profile writers, actors, comedians and politicians.
Measure of the general prevalence of rape threats varies substantially depending on whether studies examine online social media specifically; email, text messaging or other forms of communication; threats made in person; whether rape threats are considered a form of attempted rape; and whether rape threats are considered separately from other threats of unwanted sexual contact. According to one study of college-age women in the United States, as many as 90.5% of rape threats are not reported to police, with the most common reason for failure to report being that it was unclear if the action was a crime or that harm was intended.
Law enforcement and the courts have been criticized by victims and advocates for an inadequate response to rape threat, and existing laws may often not apply to threat issues via social media. At least two cases have reached national supreme courts.
Definition
A rape threat, or the threat of rape was defined by the National College Women Sexual Victimization Study as a "threat of unwanted penetration with force and threat of force", and by the National Violence Against College Women Study as "threatened forced sexual intercourse, including both psychological coercion as well as physical force". Alternatively, the National Crime Victimization Survey included threats of rape as a form of attempted rape.
Prevalence
According to a 2017 report from Amnesty International, 27% of women in the United Kingdom had received "direct or indirect threats of physical or sexual violence" and 47% reported receiving "sexist or misogynistic abuse".
Online harassment
Rape threats are often made online via social media as a form of online harassment, especially against women. According to English columnist Laurie Penny, "every female writer she knows has received threats of violence and rape." Australian author Emma Jane, described her career writing a weekly column as a "14-year rape-threat-a-palooza". According to Karla Mantilla, editor of the academic journal Feminist Studies, "Rape and death threats are so common that they are almost the rule rather than the exception when women are trolled or harassed online."
According to one study of 134,000 abusive comments on social media, 88% were found to occur on the platform Twitter, another 8% occurred on Facebook, and the remainder on various forums and blogs. Another review by Demos identified 100,000 uses of the word rape on Twitter between December 2013 and February 2014 and estimated that 12% of them were threatening.
Another examination found that 9% of women in Australia and 9.6% of women in the United Kingdom reported receiving "comments, email or text messages threatening sexual assault". For the UK, this was more common for women age 20 to 24 (%19.6) followed by women age 25 to 29 years of age (%17), while in Australia women age 40 to 44 was the most affected group (%13.5).
Against politicians
According to a 2016 study of lawmakers from 39 countries by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, 44.4% of elected female representative had been threatened with rape or violence while in office, and 65.5% reported that they had received "humiliating remarks of a sexual or sexist nature" either "several times" or "often". One respondent in particular reported that they had received over 500 online rape threats via the social media platform Twitter over the course of four days.