Gender Violence in Online Gaming
“Gender violence” refers to any act that seeks to harm a person because of their gender and exists due to abuse of power and inequality. This type of harassment, which occurs physically, has been extrapolated to the virtual world and is a reality that occurs today in online gaming.
Even though video games are typically considered males as their primary consumers, nowadays 40-47% of the whole industry is made up of females, according to a recent study by the Association of Women in the Videogame industry. This has led to a raise in gender violence in the gamer world.
Based on the same report, 82.1% of women who play video games online have experienced discrimination, harassment, or abuse at least once for their gender. The same happens with women who dedicate themselves professionally to being gamers, as professional players of Esports teams, where discrimination based on gender, workplace harassment, and mistreatment by their peers reach 85.7%. Other problems that are disclosed are the lack of job opportunities and the low wages in relation to men.
Our team also compiled research from the schools that work with our software. Our numbers show that 75% of the students who are part of BRAVE UP! have stated that they play online. In the same report, we were able to find out that 84.25% of females in the 5th grade actively use online games. However, this figure shows a decrease to 47.24% in 9th grade. In the case of men, the decrease is only 10% (from 93.5% to 83.6%).
Among the reasons that explain our findings that our software was able to detect, the strong decrease in the case of the females is due to the various discrimination and bullying situations to which they are exposed.
These figures confirm that the types of gender violence are recurring events in the gamer community, where women are forced to play with an avatar and nickname that are not considered feminine, share with a closed group of friends, give up playing in line or not use voice channels to avoid being exposed to these situations.
