Jamille Bigio and Rachel Vogelstein
134 foreign affairs
party functions. In Kenya’s 2017 parliamentary election, a record number
of women ran for office, thanks in part to a rule requiring that no more
than two-thirds of the seats in a governing body be controlled by one
gender. But during the campaign, many of those candidates faced tar-
geted forms of violence, including threats of public stripping. Many of
these threats explicitly demanded that the women quit politics, hoping to
discourage women from accessing male-dominated political spheres.
Similar violence against female candidates and officials has marred the
political sphere in Bolivia in recent years. “Women [are close to parity]
now, and men cannot easily accept this,” remarked Katia Uriona, the
former president of Bolivia’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal.
Female participants in politics are disproportionately targeted on-
line as well, where they confront an onslaught of harassment on social
media. A 2016 survey of female politicians from 39 countries around
the world found that 82 percent had experienced some form of psy-
chological violence, with 44 percent facing violent threats. Similarly,
a 2018 survey of European female parliamentarians and staffers found
that 58 percent had experienced threats of violence online, with nearly
half being threatened with death or rape. In Afghanistan, the Interna-
tional Foundation for Electoral Systems has uncovered widespread
harassment of female candidates, often at the hands of party leaders,
police officers, or election administrators. And in the United States,
according to a study conducted by the Australian artificial intelligence
research company Max Kelsen, Hillary Clinton received close to twice
as much abuse on Twitter as did Bernie Sanders, her main opponent
in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary election.
A particularly pernicious element of the abuse that female political
participants endure is its sexual or gender-specific quality. Whereas
abuse against men in politics largely relates to their professional du-
ties, the online harassment of female candidates is far more likely to
include comments about their physical appearance or threats of sexual
assault. In some instances, harassers distribute sexual photos of fe-
male politicians, as was the case in Rwanda, when harassers posted
fake nude photos of Diane Rwigara, the only female presidential can-
didate in the 2017 election. Harassers also threaten female politicians’
loved ones: in 2018, researchers at the University of Bradford found
that an astonishing 62 percent of female parliamentarians in the United
Kingdom had received physical threats to their friends and family,
compared with only six percent of their male counterparts.