The Dark Side of the Mind: True Stories from My Life as a Forensic Psychologist

by Kerry Daynes

words that I was now staring at in disbelief. Online abuse is now a depressingly everyday part of life for women, especially those in the public eye. A 2017 study by Amnesty International clarified what any woman with a Twitter handle already knows. Online abuse of women is widespread, with one in five women suffering some kind of harassment, much of it sexually or physically threatening. The ‘online’ bit is something of a red herring, because the effects of the abuse are experienced offline, with over half of those surveyed reporting increased anxiety, panic attacks and stress as a result of the ‘virtual’ abuse, as well as other psychological consequences like loss of self-esteem and a sense of powerlessness. Amnesty’s ‘troll patrol’ counted over a million abusive tweets alone sent to the women in the study over the course of 2017 — that’s one every 30 seconds. The outlook gets even worse if you are a black or ethnic minority woman, and/or LGBTQ. This was still the comparatively early days of the internet and there wasn’t the same awareness around the perils of simply being a woman online. The idea that someone you’d never seen or met before could intimidate you from the anonymous comfort of their living room hadn’t yet been declared an occupational hazard of being female. I watched with a strange vibration inside my chest as each