Online Safety
CHAIR: Sure. Senator Van.
Senator VAN: Commissioner, I've said this before in this forum and at the inquiry that this committee had only a few weeks ago: thank you for the work you do, I think it's brilliant. The harms that are being done online are incredible, both to children and to adults and, particularly, the victims are often women. And at this time and place, and particularly in this place, with the allegations that are being made, I think it's a very strong move that the parliament is taking to strengthen your powers. Perhaps you can just speak to how these powers will help women with harassment online, abuse online, unwanted shared images and the like. Can you just address that, please.
Ms Inman Grant: You wouldn't be surprised that 70 per cent of the reports of all forms of abuse that come into our office are from women and girls. That even applies to child sexual abuse, where 90 per cent of the perpetrators are men and 84 per cent of the victims are girls. That applies to image based abuse, youth based cyberbullying and adult cyberabuse. We have a couple of programs that cover the continuum of women and the spectrum of harms. Women that are particularly vulnerable are women that are experiencing domestic and family violence, and technology facilitated abuse is present as an extension of coercion, control and surveillance in 99.3 per cent of these cases. They deserve special protections. Through our eSafety women program, we have trained about 15,000 frontline workers in how to identify this and we're reaching women directly. We are also very concerned about what this means for women in public life. We know that women are three times more likely to receive online abuse, but the tenor and tone of the abuse is very different, too. It tends to be sexualised, violent, it will target things like your fertility or appearance—
Senator VAN: As we saw with our colleague Nicolle Flint.
Ms Inman Grant: Absolutely. It's rooted in misogyny and it's meant to silence women's voices. We know from women that they self-censor or they will get off social media altogether. The other thing is we have a program called Women Influencing Tech Spaces because we know that women in the public eye are also more vulnerable. We provide social media self-defence training to them and we are expanding and rolling that out further. We are also doing work with organisations like Safe Work Australia to make sure that employers are recognising that when their staff have to go online as a professional imperative, their policies around social media aren't just protecting their own reputation; they are putting in programs, policies and procedures together to protect and promote those women's voices. Social media did promise to be a great leveller in terms of promoting women's voices. We need to do a better job of protecting those voices online.
Senator VAN: Thank you. I was absent from the room earlier, so I didn't hear your earlier testimony. I won't go over things. I was downstairs in another committee, asking the Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Kate Jenkins, about her work, particularly about the Respect@Work report she did and a little bit about the work she is doing. She was talking about how a mixture of things need to come together to stop sexual harassment of women. In your opinion, will these changes to the online safety act help protect women?
Ms Inman Grant: I think they will, immeasurably, particularly with the serious adult cyberabuse scheme, and we will continue with our prevention programs, of course. I do believe that the proactive and systemic change work that we do, including the work we are doing around technology challenges and trends—the first one we did was on deep fakes. The first set of misuse we saw with deep fakes was around the morphing of women's heads onto other bodies and that sort of thing, but we also know it can cause a lot of malfeasance with respect to misinformation, disinformation and doxxing, which is a common threat vector that women are experiencing. We focused on harmful sexual behaviours, anonymity and identity shielding. Of course we know that a lot of trolls will use the veil of anonymity to try and abuse women with impunity. All of these things, I think, will come together and give us some potent new tools to help. Again, a lot of this abuse that we see is rooted in misogyny, in racism, in hate that is surfaced by social media. This abuse online targeting women reinforces the gender inequality that already exists in our societies and our institutions. So we really need to protect women in the cloud as well.
Senator VAN: As the report from the inquiry that you appeared at said, this bill is needed. I hope our colleagues will help bring it about, and all strength to you when you have those new tools. Thanks for appearing.
Ms Inman Grant: Thank you.
Full transcript here.
