- As children, we learned that sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.

But today's guest says that's not true.

Attacks with words produce real, physical and mental health consequences for their victims.

She's Alia Dastagir, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(upbeat music) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Alia Dastagir, a journalist and author whose new book is "To Those Who Have Confused You to Be a Person: Words as Violence and Stories of Women's Resistance Online."

She joins us today from New York.

Alia, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you for having me.

- You know, the book is incredibly timely, and important, and powerful.

Do you wanna give us just a quick overview of the book and then we'll get into it in some depth?

- Sure.

Yeah, the book is really an effort, I think, in many ways to kind of slow down a conversation about women and online abuse, online harassment and online violence.

So I think in many ways this conversation has progressed and we know more and talk more about digital harm today than we did 10 years ago.

But in other ways there are real kind of absences in terms of what we understand very deeply and intimately about what this kind of harm does to a body, to a mind, the ways that we kind of experience violence and abuse differently, the ways that we cope differently and make meaning differently.

So this book is in many ways an effort following the story about 13 women.

There's many other stories woven in, some of my own experience woven in, but it's an effort to really kind of, again, sort of slow down the conversation and show people what does it mean on a sort of deep, intimate level to experience online harm, and how ultimately are we surviving it?

- And, principally, you're talking about both real world, physical, and psychological, emotional consequences for this violence?

- Yes, absolutely.

I think it's...

I think there's just really...

I guess, I think it's important, maybe I can kind of start a little bit, talk a little bit about kind of the origin of this project, 'cause I think I can respond to sort of your statement in that way.

But, you know, the whole, the project sort of began with this kind of fundamental confusion that I was sort of having, because I couldn't ignore it.

I wasn't able to kind of ignore what was happening or I didn't feel like I could.

So my abuse kind of started to ramp up in 2016, right after the sort of first Trump election.

And it's kind of hard to describe exactly why you feel that you're being asked to ignore something, but did you just get the sense that people aren't really talking about it sort of in a day-to-day way?

Certainly there were people, there were many women online at the time who were writing about how difficult these experiences were and how important it was to take them seriously.

Black digital feminists like Sida Harry, and Shireen Mitchell, and Shafiqah Hudson were talking about this in the early 2010s.

Feminist bloggers like Jessica Valenti and Jill Filipiovic were talking and writing about this.

There was an excellent piece in the Pacific Standard in 2014 by Amanda Hess about this.

But even for all of that energy, I still felt like there was this real kind of mandate, sometimes explicit, sometimes more sort of tacit, that these experience, that I was gonna have to deal with it.

Like I was gonna have to kind of let this roll off my back a bit if I was gonna be able to continue to do my work, to do this job, to be a journalist.

And so the sort of, so the initial kind of animating question for me was, well, why can't I ignore it?

Or why can't we ignore it?

Or why shouldn't we ignore it?

And I think that kind of gets back to what you're saying.

Well, the answer is so multifaceted and complex, and that's why we're here to kind of talk today.

But in many ways it is because it has real psychological, physical, reputational, economic and social consequences.

And that is a large part of what this book is trying to stress and underscore, which is this sort of fundamental absurdity that anybody should be asked to ignore violence.

- So Alia, you yourself experienced online violence.

Can you give us sort of an overview of what that was and what you were doing at the time and how you reacted at the time?

And then we'll get into some of the other women that you write about.

- Sure.

So as I said, in 2016 is when I really started to, I think it was maybe 2016, 2017, I got my first really sort of profane and kind of disturbing piece of, I mean, I guess, I don't know if we call it hate mail anymore, but it was a piece of hate mail.

And it was, I remember the first time I experienced a message like that, I was so, like I just sat so still for so long, like I was just still with myself.

Now, I think back on it and I feel slightly humiliated, but this is the point, right?

Like, so there's something very sort of initially kind of stunning about it.

And so it started to kind of trickle in in 2016, 2017.

And I didn't really...

When I was, sorry, when I was a journalist, a reporter, a full-time reporter at "USA Today."

And at the time I was covering, I was covering gender, I was covering race.

It was intersecting with politics.

I was covering a bit of mental health, but, you know, I was writing a lot about feminism and particularly feminism under a Trump presidency.

So this made me a target for certain corners of the internet.

And so it started with kind of a trickle, and then it is kind of incredible because the data supports this, that in the five years after that, like online abuse of women just surged.

And I felt it, I felt it, I knew it in this real, concrete and visceral way.

It just kept ramping up, ramping up, ramping up.

And then occasionally I would write a story that just resulted in just a total deluge.

And you'd be, you know, you'd be checking your email at work and then you would leave and you'd go home and you'd be trying to live as one does and do all this other life, like whether it was, you know, be with friends, or read a book, or be with your children, or be with yourself.

And it would just trail you like kinda everywhere you went.

And it's interesting because I wonder if readers think that I decided to write this book after an experience in 2022, which I write about in the book, and I'll talk about where I had my first really, really big, I was the target of a coordinated harassment campaign that was sort of launched by QAnon, and Donald Trump Jr. sort of, kind of encouraged it.

And it was such a, it was a traumatic, it was totally traumatic.

But, interestingly enough, I had decided and was actively trying to write this book years before that.

So it's interesting because I think it sort of speaks to the fact that you don't have to have the most egregious or overwhelming or, you know, sort of terrifying experience in order to feel like these things are changing the texture of your life and that there's something worth attending to and studying.

So I decide, you know, I tried to, in 2019, I was ready to kind of work on this project, and interestingly enough was not as successful, but in 2022 then had this very, very... God, it's even hard to talk about it now.

Like I feel myself having, you know, to, I've had to talk about it in a couple of interviews.

And I'm sort of reluctant to speak about that, like just the way that I kind of have a still, even now, a physical reaction to it.

But I think it speaks to how traumatic it was.

Like I speak about it as it was an experience where I don't really think that my body understood, my body did not understand that it was safe in my house.

Like I didn't feel safe.

Do you have a question?

Oh, I'm sorry.

- No, yeah, I'm wondering, Alia.

- I'm not supposed to pay attention to that yet.

- No, I'm wondering if you, so the stories that you recount from so many other women are evocative and personal and emotional, and, you know, what you're describing here is real trauma that you experienced.

- Yes.

- How, was it difficult to conduct these interviews?

Was it therapeutic?

Like what, in the process of writing this book, what did it do for you as someone who's been both a reporter of, but also a victim of online violence?

- That's such a great question.

I think that, I think that it helped me in sort of validating my own kinds of reactions, but actually it was really difficult, and I write about this a little bit, because I felt pretty guilty for asking people to, you know, we do this in journalism a lot.

Like we ask people to resurrect the most, you know, painful, vulnerable experiences of their lives so that we can find a lesson in there, right, for a public.

And so I felt that there were times where I felt, yeah, I felt sort of, I felt guilty and I could hear the pain and sometimes the anger, right?

Like the anger is, you know, as much as we talk about how it's difficult for women to kind of access anger, and I think that is still true in many contexts.

A lot of women were very comfortable in these interviews with getting angry.

They were less comfortable with expressing kind of hurt.

but they would get angry and they would get angry in these conversations.

And I feel like they were angry about what happened to them, but I was there, and so I kind of also would sort of absorb that anger.

And, you know, sometimes as journalists, you make mistakes and you ask questions you should already know the answers to, or, you know, these are very human conversations.

And so sometimes they were tense, because I would fail sometimes, like in those conversations.

So the interviewing was difficult.

I think it was difficult for me, and I think it was difficult, I know it was difficult for the women that I spoke with.

- So Alia, who employs these attacks and what motivates them, and let's talk more, I mean, you're nationally prominent, and so you've already gone into some of that.

But for people who may not have had that prominence, some of the people in your book, who's behind these attacks and why?

- Yes.

- Why?

- Yeah, it's such a fair question.

I will say that so much of my reporting, again, was very focused on the experiences of these women.

It was like, it was less concerned with the antagonist.

But I do think, I think that what's important to stress, and what was evident through these interviews was that a lot of times when we have this conversation sort of, you know, sort of in mainstream discourse, we tend to talk about it like it's a problem of trolls.

So it's just trolls.

These are just, you know, however you wanna define it.

I mean, we define it a little, I define it, you know, in the book through the work of scholar Whitney Phillips.

But there's this effort, I think, to really kind of cognitively contain the problem.

It's just these kinds of people, men, maybe young men, and they're in their basement, and they're just anonymous, and they're firing this stuff off.

Of course, trolls are part of this problem.

They're not the only antagonist.

I mean, so many women who are experiencing this kind of abuse are abused by people they know.

They're abused by people who work in their professions.

They're abused by, you know, the son of a, at the time, former president.

So I think what's actually important to focus on maybe is for people who wanna understand this issue better, is not necessarily the who, but the why.

The what or the why, or the motivating kind of attitudes, right, that are behind it.

Because it's often talked about as a problem of misogyny, but it is absolutely a problem of white supremacy, and it is a problem of white supremacy in all the systems with which that intertwines.

And I think you had Alice Marwick on the show, whose excellent research, you know, talks about this abuse, how so much of this harassment is linked to structures of misogyny, but also racism, and homophobia, and transphobia.

And so, you know, I think it's important to remember that anybody can become susceptible to those kinds of ideologies.

This book talks about absolutely white men in the manosphere coming to abuse me for, you know, my reporting on feminism.

But it also talks about Black men who are, you know, perpetrating abuse, and white women who are perpetrating abuse, and white trans, you know, women who are abusing Black fat trans women on the internet.

So I think it's, again, I think to answer your question, this is a problem that it's more about attitudes and ideologies, and we're all kind of, anybody is susceptible to sort of internalizing that and then acting out.

- You know, it's easy to...

So the book is incredible, but it's easy to find yourself having a very bleak outlook on the state of American society and online society generally in 2025 at the end of this.

You talk about some things that people can have tried to do to resist the damage of these attacks.

There are some who say, "Hey, just block it, ignore it.

You don't have to even acknowledge it."

What's the downfall with that approach?

- Oh my gosh.

That's, yeah, that one is tough.

I mean, I think that I hear kind of two things in that question.

One, I hear this sort of reflexive, well, they're both kind of reflexive responses, but like, one is the like just ignore it response, Which I think sometimes is malicious and sometimes is well-intentioned.

And then there's the like just log off response, which is also sort of problematic.

I think that, I think it shifts the burden, right?

Like it sort of shifts the burden of the problem onto the person who's experiencing this violence.

And that's like, that's a problem, right?

When we make individual women and individual people responsible for dealing with these attacks on their own, everything is going to be somewhat insufficient.

And the response to, and the sort of logging off response is tough, because sometimes you do have to log off.

Sometimes you have to walk away.

I mean, I know when I was kind of at the center of the firestorm with QAnon and Trump Jr. back in 2022, I had a lot of people in my life who said that.

Just log off.

And it feels like a really reasonable response.

But I'll tell you some of the challenges there.

So one is, at that point, I'm so upset.

I'm so despairing, I'm so terrified, and I've lost sense of reality.

There's just something very distorting about these experiences where you do sort, you do lose sense of reality.

And I didn't trust that if I logged off, that somebody would be looking closely enough to make sure that if there was a credible threat, that it would be reported.

I felt like that had to be in my hands.

So sometimes you don't wanna log off because you want to, this situation feels so out of control, and you want to be able to exercise some control.

So one way you can exercise control is by just staying close to what's happening and evaluating like, "How safe am I really?

How unsafe am I?"

So that's one part of it.

But I also think that, I also think that logging off can sometimes, you know, it is sometimes in a bigger sense like useful if you're, for example, in the chapter where I talk about logging off, I interview Rep. Leigh Finke, who's a trans lawmaker.

And she logged off of certain social platforms because she understood that what was more important for her, more effective for her in her work was to do that legislative work that has a bigger impact on trans communities.

So for her logging off of X, it wasn't such a huge, it wasn't the loss that it would've been if she couldn't stay in her job, because she was so traumatized by what was happening on that platform, couldn't stay in that job and do the legislative work that is so important to the trans community.

So it's a very complicated notion.

And I guess I'll just end by saying, yes, like sometimes we need to log off either temporarily or perhaps log off of certain platforms that become so toxic that we cannot do the work that we want to do.

But I also think it can be extremely problematic as a reflexive reaction to a woman saying, "I'm suffering."

Just log off is not a solution.

- So you have in the book a two blocks of things that women victims, female victims can do.

And we'll get to that in a second, but before we do, there's no way to scientifically quantify this, but do you have any estimate of how many women are victims of online abuse?

What would your educated guess be?

- I would say most women have had an experience online that constitute that sort of constitutes harm.

And I think that that's important because as you ask that question, I'm sort of reminded of this sort of early struggle that I had when I was kind of conceiving of the project and trying to define things.

So concrete definitions are so important in so many spaces, right?

Like you need a concrete definition if you're doing research, and in legal context you need concrete definitions.

But I think for this book, I was so wary of having a very firm and concrete definition of what constituted online harassment, online abuse, online violence, because I really wanted women to be able to define for themselves what harm was to them, because there is so much variability.

So if you're thinking about it in the context of harm, sort of broadly, I would say that most women have had a harmful experience online.

I think that, you know, certain women in certain professions for sure start to experience that sort of that cumulative effect, right, of abuse.

Women who publicly think or publicly write, or who make their living online as a creator.

I mean, these women are experiencing almost unfathomable amounts of abuse.

But I would argue, and, you know, Pew is very good on this.

They study this, and I don't remember the statistic for how many women said they had experienced it, but I think there was, it was something like, more than 60% said that this was a major problem worth addressing.

And I think that that's something to really kind of hold onto.

- That's a staggering number.

Well, Wayne mentioned the toolbox, and the book ends with a list of some of the things that you discuss in the book that actually might prove beneficial in pushing back and protecting victims from these kinds of assaults.

So one of those tactics and techniques is counterspeech.

What is it and does it work?

(Alia Laughs) - What a good question.

Counterspeech is any kind of speech that seeks to undermine hate with a different narrative.

It's so interesting.

I'm so glad that you wanna talk about this, because this was a very late stage kind of add.

You know, you're working on a book for a very, very long time, years, and it's interesting because I had written this chapter in this section on counterspeech, but I wasn't calling it counterspeech.

And I kept really grasping for the language.

I was like, "What is this?"

Like what is this that women are doing?

Because it's a lot of different things, right?

So it can look like a woman just sort of...

So there isn't a, I gave you a definition, but there is also a ton of variability in how certain scholars think about what really constitutes counterspeech.

People have different kind of their own kind of considerations about what qualifies.

But in the broadest, you know, in the broadest terms, everything from, you know, to speaking directly back to somebody who has said something abusive to you, to retweeting something and commenting on it can constitute, you know, can be part of counterspeech, can qualify as counterspeech.

And I think it's interesting 'cause I kept calling it, I think at one point I called it exposing.

I kept saying, I was like, "Oh, it's exposing.

What is it?"

Like and then it's just very late, I was doing an interview with someone and they were like, "It's counterspeech."

And I think it's so important, it's such an important sort of response because, you know, I'm not a supreme court expert, but I do know that, you know, we know that in this country we favor counterspeech historically as a remedy to hate speech versus restrictions.

And so, to your point of efficacy, this is what's so interesting and important, and I don't think we've resolved this, which is there are a lot of women that are counterspeaking online against these hateful narratives, against the harassers themselves.

But there's a real question around efficacy that has not been answered.

One of the scholars that I interviewed said this is where we need more research.

We have to understand when it is effective, when it's not, in what context.

Because if it is going to be, you know, the antidote, we have to know in what way can we, you know, in what ways is it most effective.

And we just don't know yet.

So I think that the answer to your question is we don't know, but we should.

This is a place where we just, we need to study this more.

We need more research here.

Because it may be the case that there isn't, that counterspeech works really well for certain situations, and in other situations, restrictions might be necessary.

We just don't have that answer yet.

- Alia, we've got about 30 seconds left here, and there are a lot of other tools in the toolbox as it were.

But talk to us quickly about social support and solidarity.

How important is that?

- Social support and solidarity is the most important, beneficial, you know, evidence-based way of coping with difficulty in any context.

Externalizing experiences of pain and difficulty with like-minded others are essential, I think, to surviving difficulty and certainly violence.

And if you don't mind, I'll share a quick anecdote.

It's maybe a little bit more than 30 seconds.

But I experienced some online abuse last week.

I made a joke about it.

It was insufficient.

I sent it to a WhatsApp group of people who I'm in school with currently, who care about me, love me, respect me, know me.

I sent that message to them just to say, "Hey, look at what I'm dealing with."

And I got not everything I needed, I wanna be able to be in online spaces and not experience these things, but I got as close to, you know, as close to healed as one can be in a situation like that.

I felt so supported.

And so I just encourage every woman, every person who's having an experience of harm to externalize that with people who are safe and who love you and care about you, because it is crucial to also building those solidarity networks that are going to usher in that fair, more just, more equitable world online and off that we all so deeply deserve.

- Alia Dastagir.

The book is "To Those Who Have Confused You to Be a Person."

Thank you so much for spending some time with us and for your work.

That is all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more, find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org.

He's Wayne.

I'm Jim.

Asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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