Talk:Online gender-based violence

This article is not about violence, so it should not use that word in the title

This relatively new article appears to be from someone who is pushing a WP:POV about Cyberbullying and trying to get a new term accepted that makes cyberbullying seem worse than it is, by associating it with physical violence.

It is telling that the article about Cyberbullying (which is also a redirect from Online harasssment) never uses the term "violence" to describe cyberbullying nor harassment. And also telling that the article about Violence never once mentions "online violence".

Instead, a student has created this as their first article, out of whole cloth, to push the idea that Cyberbullying is "violence". This article has many references that discuss harassment or other behaviors but which don't call it "violence". Those would be fine sources for a page about harassment or cyberbullying, but not for a page that claims to be about "violence". Violence is well defined (in Violence) as "Violence is the use of physical force so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy." A prominent quote from that article also says, "For many people, ... only physical violence truly qualifies as violence." Online speech is not physical and it cannot qualify as violence. To the extent that the article's title or text claims that online speech is violence, it should be corrected or removed.

In addition, the article claims that this cyberbullying is "gender-based". But that is contradicted by the evidence; for example, the Cyberbullying article states, "Gaming was a more common venue for men in which to experience harassment, whereas women's harassment tended to occur more via social media." All genders are harassed online, and often by people of the same gender. Yet the article conflates cyberbullying with being "all about gender" and then goes on to jump to the conclusion that it's really about misogyny (hatred of women in particular, not about hatred of any other genders). These conclusions are not supported by either sources or reason.

It is clear why an activist who agitates about reforming problem X would like to see problem X described as "violence", since violence is not popular and many people properly object to it. It's the same strategy used by opponents and proponents of abortion, calling themselves "pro-life" or "pro-choice" on the theory that it paints their opponents as "anti-life" or "anti-choice". But merely calling problem X violence does not make it violence. You could call it "online killing" or "online torture" too, and even more credulous people might think problem X was therefore a bad thing, but that would be an abuse of the words killing or torture. The same is true of the word violence.

I propose that the best solution would be to delete the article under WP:NEO, or perhaps merge some of its content with the article for Cyberbullying. Gnuish (talk) 08:39, 19 August 2021 (UTC)