The words are of rare violence. Insults, threats of death or rape: Marion Séclin, Laura Boldrini, Kiah Morris and Laurence Gratton are victims of cyberharassment. The documentary Hail Bitch: Misogyny in the Digital Age gives them a voice, when their harassers try to deprive them of it. Each in turn, they tell their story, how they are not taken seriously when they denounce this digital harassment, and how fear gradually sets in. In Paris, actress Marion Séclin denounces street harassment in a video and says she has stopped counting at 40,000 messages of insults, death threats or rape. In Montreal, Laurence Gratton is now a teacher after being harassed during her studies by a classmate who was never worried. In Italy, following her inauguration as president of the Chamber of Deputies in 2013, Laura Boldrini received thousands of death and rape threats. Insults sometimes sent by politicians who sit in Parliament with her. Finally, in Vermont, in the United States, Kiah Morris must face a flood of sexist and racist hate messages as she begins her re-election campaign for district representative in 2016. The documentary also includes the testimony from the father of Rehtaeh Parsons, a teenager raped and cyberbullied who ended up committing suicide…
“The danger for women is that we don’t believe them when crimes are committed against them,” says Kiah Morris. We are not believed when it comes to rape, domestic violence, sexual assault and harassment or discrimination. What is dangerous is that we have gotten into the habit of not listening to women when we know there is a problem.” Thus, according to a UN study published in 2015, it is women who are the majority victims of harassment and violence on the Internet. “It’s a way of putting increasingly influential women in their place,” said Donna Zuckerberg (the sister of Mark, the founder of Facebook), author and specialist in online misogyny. Before tackling this theme, Guylaine Maroist (Quebec journalist, director and producer) made, among other things, documentaries on nuclear power which made things happen in Canada. With Lea Clermont-Dion, they hope to do the same with this film.
How was the idea of Hail Bitch: Misogyny in the Digital Age ?
I have been making documentaries for twenty years. Lea Clermont-Dion is a young feminist author very well known in Quebec. She received death threats following the publication of a book in 2015. She came to see me because she liked my work and she knew that we could make a film and at the same time try to find the tools to create social change. We devoted three years to research. We interviewed around a hundred experts and many victims. We realized that telling the story of just one woman might not have convinced as much of the scale of online misogyny and its universal nature. This is why we chose four women with different profiles who, however, all experience the same thing.
Each media exposure reactivates the phenomenon of harassment. Was it easy to convince them to testify?
It’s not easy to follow someone on camera who is going through a traumatic situation like these women are experiencing. The reflex is to want to isolate yourself, not to talk about it. They are afraid of reprisals from harassers. That’s why we went to meet them in the first place. Then we started filming in 2018 and finished in 2020.
Some hateful messages received by these women are transcribed on screen. Is this necessary for awareness?
Yes. Each of these messages is real. And there are a lot of things that we didn’t put because it was too shocking. Violence is so trivialized that we had to show what it is. At the same time, we wanted to highlight that there is a misogynistic ideology that is making headway, through YouTube videos, influencers, masculinist opinion leaders who are increasingly popular on all platforms. And at the time of the pandemic, we saw that there was growth.
You deliberately do not give a voice to the harassers…
We understood that their goal was to deprive women of their voice. Women’s freedom of expression is threatened by this digital violence. We said to ourselves that the film should raise awareness of what they are going through. This is how the idea of following them in their daily lives came about.
The most shocking thing is to see how these women are not taken seriously when they ask for help…
We already know this for cases of rape, or all cases of violence of a sexist and sexual nature. Then there’s this belief that since it’s happening online, it’s not real. Unfortunately, the damage can be even more severe through digital platforms because it lasts over time and women are plunged into a state of terror. Which means they withdraw from public space. Today, young women do not want to go into politics or have a public role because they are afraid of being cyberharassed.
Is the crux of the matter once again money?
There are several fronts but for the platforms and social networks, it is not in their interest to remove certain content. The most important thing in their business model is to have the most money and hate generates clicks, hate is shared. This is why a misogynistic ideology spreads and gains followers. The platforms and social networks are responsible and, in the United States, they are the ones being asked to resolve the problem. This is not how it should work in a democracy. We must have laws and enforce them.
You started working on this subject in 2015. How have things evolved?
We have observed a phenomenon growing, and growing even more with the pandemic. The positive aspect is that there is a lot of interest in the film, from everywhere. I think people want to find a solution. I see that in Europe, a law has just been passed (the Digital Services Act which imposes regulation on social networks). We still need to enforce these laws and raise public awareness.
What happens to these women today?
Marion withdrew from the platforms for a while because she was upset by what she had experienced. Today, she still creates content and pursues her acting career. Kiah Morris is the head of an awareness organization against gender-based and sexual violence in the state of Vermont. Laura Boldrini continues to fight. She shows exceptional courage. As for Laurence Gratton, she was again threatened with death when the film was released (in September 2022 in Quebec). We went with her to file a complaint with the police. Once again, he was told there was nothing we could do, which was false. We supported her in her efforts, then an article appeared in a major Montreal newspaper, so the police changed their minds and are now taking care of her case.
And after ?
Our goal is to continue to show this documentary everywhere, to help people run campaigns. In Canada, we went to the national assembly to request training for people working throughout the judicial system, and particularly the police officers who receive complaints. We want to help as best we can.