By Hayley Boxall and Anthony Morgan

  This paper presents the findings from an online survey of 15,000 Australian women about their experience of domestic violence during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the three months prior to the survey, conducted in May 2020, 4.6 percent of women who responded to the survey experienced physical or sexual violence from a current or former cohabiting partner. Almost six percent (5.8%) of women experienced coercive control and 11.6 percent reported experiencing at least one form of emotionally abusive, harassing or controlling behaviour. For many women, the pandemic coincided with the onset or escalation of violence and abuse. Two-thirds of women who experienced physical or sexual violence by a current or former cohabiting partner since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic said the violence had started or escalated in the three months prior to the survey. Many women, particularly those experiencing more serious or complex forms of violence and abuse, reported safety concerns were a barrier to help-seeking.

Statistical Bulletin no. 28

Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, 2020. 19p.

By Marc-André Argentino, Adnan Raja & Aoife Gallagher

Since QAnon’s rise to prominence, several high-profile celebrities have found themselves at the centre of the movement’s conspiratorial narratives, and therefore, the focus of coordinated harassment campaigns, brigading, dogpilling, slander and hate. This has led researchers who examine the digital information ecosystem to ask whether QAnon-coordinated harassment operates like other forms of targeted hate and harassment online, and specifically, whether vulnerable identity groups are faced with particularly egregious experiences. In this report, based on analysis conducted in early 2021, and examining upwards of 9 million posts and mentions across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, we examine the role of gender-based violence against celebrities who were of particular significance to the QAnon community’s conspiracy theories in late 2019 and into the end of 2020: Chrissy Teigen, Tom Hanks, Ellen DeGeneres, Anderson Cooper, Jussie Smollett and Oprah Winfrey. The resulting analysis confirmed the suspicion that the most prominent type of harassment came in the form of brigading individual targets with accusations and slanderous mentions of paedophilia, often with graphic and disturbing language in their accusations.

Amman: Berlin: London: Paris: Washington DC: Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2022. 32p.