NEW research by Amnesty International has highlighted the damaging impact on women of abuse and harassment on social media.

Their survey of women aged 18 to 55 across eight nations reveals that a quarter had experienced online abuse or harassment at least once, with 41 per cent of these respondents fearing for their safety, and over half suffering from stress or anxiety from aggressive responses to their posts. Some 46 per cent of the women surveyed revealed their abuse to be sexual or misogynistic, with 59 per cent saying it had come from complete strangers. In addition, around a third of women surveyed said they had withdrawn from public conversations online as a result of intimidation and threat.

For women in all walks of life, these figures, although horrifying, are no surprise. Just as most of us have suffered from harassment to some degree in our real lives, the same can be said of women’s online experience, ranging from cyberbullying and nasty trolling to threats of physical violence, rape or death.

During my time as an SNP MP, I was continually targeted on social media, with serious threats to my safety and my family’s reported to the police on a number of occasions, as well as sexual intimidation and racist abuse. Previous research conducted by Amnesty International has revealed the full horrifying extent of abuse directed at female MPs, with the most severe reserved for BAME female politicians. The combination of being a woman, an Asian and a Muslim seems to attract a certain toxic hatred and hostility.

I can understand why many of the women surveyed in this recent research reported trouble sleeping or experienced panic attacks; it worms its way into your psyche and makes you doubt yourself at a very deep level.

When women are attacked for their gender, it’s about power, it’s about trying to silence women and close down their point of view. I’m alarmed to see the number of women who have left social media because of their bad experiences or self-censor their views to avoid a barrage of sexual aggression. Where are their voices then to be heard? Who is protecting their right to freedom of expression? It is vital that the opinions of women are central to debate and discussion. Without their input, half the population ceases to be properly represented.

And, just like harassment in the real world, it takes no heed of age, class or profession – these are our teachers, our nurses, our teenagers, our mothers and our children that are being targeted. We need to have an honest conversation about how much damage this is doing to women’s mental health and what needs to change to combat it.

The problem is that the internet and social media is still such a new phenomenon that we don’t have the powers fully in place to halt the haters and raise the debate to a higher level. The volume of online aggression is so much that it’s nearly impossible to catch all the perpetrators, but the police, legal and government agencies are letting women down by their lack of innovative thinking and practical solutions to this ever increasing problem. We need collaboration to create frameworks that allow freedom of speech but protect women from discrimination and afford opportunities for prosecution and justice.

A good place to start would be with some of the most powerful corporations on the planet – Facebook, Google, Twitter and YouTube, who have all been in the papers recently for their woeful response to racist, misogynistic and sexually abusive content on their platforms. So far these giant firms have neglected their promises to keep a watchful eye on the kind of content their users are posting, preferring users themselves to report unacceptable images, films or attacks. The problem is that often the damage is done before a nasty Twitter feed is shut down or blocked, or an explicit photograph on Facebook has been shared a hundred times over. These huge conglomerations’ reticence to accept accountability or responsibility for the filth, hate and downright disturbing images and commentary that appears on their sites, while accruing massive revenues in advertising, has got to be one of the great injustices of our day. There must be far harder crackdowns on their failure to deal with the monster they have created and have now lost control over.

Evidence of online abuse gathered by Amnesty reveals just how far we have to go to re-educate areas of society about attitudes towards women, towards equality, respect and tolerance. Who are these trollers who hold these views, and why do they feel the need to intimidate, threaten and abuse? The sinister power of social media is its ability to hide the perpetrator, to distance the hater from the human on the receiving end of their bile.

But the end result can have far reaching and devastating consequences, from self-harm to suicide, in some tragic cases, or even murder. It is vital that we teach our children and young people how to communicate properly with each other, to bridge the gap between our differences so we fear less and understand more.

Only then can we deal with this epidemic seeping into every corner of our lives.