Book Review: Credible Threat. Attacks Against Women Online and the Future of Democracy by Sarah Sobieraj

Abstract

Credible Threat is not an easy read because Sarah Sobieraj dives deep into places nobody wants to find themselves. The book empathically and graphically illustrates —through the experience of 52 women interviewees—how it feels to wade in the dark and muddy waters digital abuse creates. The challenge this book takes on requires interdisciplinary thinking: understanding “how women who ... participate in public conversations about political and social issues navigate this menacing landscape, and the ways that this abuse—and women’s response to it—shapes political life more broadly” (p. 4). For this purpose, Sobieraj skillfully brings together (feminist) perspectives from sociology, political science, law, and economy—even connection points to psychology emerge, such as stress and coping. The author illustrates how digital abuse finds its precedents in historical inequalities, how the law has not yet managed to adapt to its specific characteristics, and how the individual “costs” must be collectivized to further understand the societal relevance of the abuse. Credible Threat is an award-winning, six-chapter must-read with points so manifold that this review can hardly do them justice. The book is based on the fundamental insight that digital abuse must be understood as a weapon in power struggles “to control political discourse that reflects and reinforces existing social inequalities” (p. 3). These struggles have existed and still exist offline as well. While such attacks feel “deeply personal” (p. 26), Sobieraj stretches that the abuse is “impersonal” (p. 25) in the sense that messages are generic and interchangeable. Most of all, digital abuse is intersectional—“unevenly distributed [even] among women” (p. 10). Attacks often lack information about the aggressors, can be ubiquitous on various platforms, and trigger anticipatory fear—all of which create a disorienting climate larger than “the sum of its parts” (p. 31). Sobieraj also helps us understand how we can unintentionally feed into this climate by: getting caught up in trivializing narratives that render the digital life as detachable from “real life”; not taking communicative violence seriously; or blaming the victims if the abuse is rendered as an inevitable result of Book Review