The brutality of political life had taken its toll on her, said Nicola Sturgeon as she announced her resignation on Wednesday. That same day, a 42-year-old man was jailed for sending her an email saying she was going to “face a hanging” for treason. Two weeks earlier, a 70-year-old man was found guilty of threatening to assassinate her.
It may come as no surprise, then, that Scotland’s outgoing first minister recently described the environment for women in politics as “much harsher and more hostile” than at any time in her decades-long career.
“Social media provides a vehicle for the most awful abuse of women, misogyny, sexism and threats of violence for women who put their heads above the parapet,” Sturgeon, 52, told the BBC’s Kirsty Wark in a documentary that will air on Tuesday.
This vitriol has left female politicians fearing for their safety. Caroline Nokes, the Conservative chair of parliament’s women and equalities committee, said she had reported death threats to the police. “The worst was from a bloke who said he wanted to rape and torture me until I was dead,” she said.
The former immigration minister turned off her social media notifications after that Facebook message. “But I still know when it gets bad because my daughter will suddenly drop me a text message which just says: ‘I hope you’re OK,’” she said. “People like to dehumanise MPs, but they forget that we’re ordinary people that have families and still have to go home on a Friday night and deal with the cooking, the cleaning, the ironing.”
The Labour MP Diane Abbott said she no longer took public transport to Westminster because of repeated threats. Last year, a man emailed her threats of violence while bringing up the murder of Sir David Amess, who was stabbed to death by a terrorist in his constituency office.
“That made my staff uneasy,” the former shadow home secretary said. “Then he started talking about what time I left my flat to go to work. My staff did report that to the police and I think in the end he was sectioned. It turned out he lived around the corner from me and had been watching me.”
Abbott, who became Britain’s first Black female MP in 1987, said she had come close to quitting because of the abuse, which includes racist attacks. “But it’s definitely about gender as well. Some of the abuse is quite sexualised and reflects stereotypical ideas about women, that we’re stupid and so on,” she said.
Nokes said she found these microaggressions almost more exhausting. “The endless ‘you stupid woman’, where woman is quite definitely directed as an insult; the whole ‘get back in the kitchen’ narrative, which even now, in 2023, is still really common. And although it sounds trivial, it’s also the long-running commentary on your appearance,” she said.
The 50-year-old said whenever she appeared on Channel 4 News, a man emails her saying: “You’re so ugly you’re putting me off my dinner.” She also told how she was surprised to discover that the first result that comes up when you Google her name is “Caroline Nokes weight loss”.
“Judge me for what I say, judge me for what I do, but don’t judge me on whether I’ve managed to lose or put on, in fact, a couple of stone,” Nokes said. “When do you ever read about how a male politician looks? And yet everybody from Nicola Sturgeon to Jacinda Ardern to Margaret Thatcher have had more column inches written about their appearance than their male counterparts ever have.”
The health minister Maria Caulfield said female MPs got a lot more abuse and personal attacks than their male colleagues. Research published last month by the Fawcett Society, a gender equality charity, found that 93% of female MPs said online abuse and harassment had a negative impact on them, compared with 76% of men.
Recalling the abuse she had faced, Caulfield said: “As the minister responsible for vaccines, those who have concerns about Covid vaccination very rarely criticise me about the actual policy. It’s all derogatory, and the threats are of a very sexual nature. I’m sure they wouldn’t say the same thing if I was a male MP.”
She described an email she received in recent weeks, saying: “Someone said there’d be a clear-out of MPs who supported vaccinations and I’d be one of them, and by the time they’d finished with me, people wouldn’t be able to find my corpse, or if they did, they wouldn’t be able to recognise it. And you don’t know who these people are – it could be your next-door neighbour, or they could be on the other side of the world. The police are limited in what they can do because it’s very difficult to track emails and social media locations.”
Anna Soubry, a former minister and Conservative MP until she moved to Change UK in 2019, said she was horrified by the harassment she experienced during her time in office, which resulted in two prosecutions. Her husband and her mother, then 87, were also sent threatening letters for her pro-Europe views. Soubry, 66, said she became so frightened of being assaulted that she walked around Westminster with her back against walls in the same way “mice scuttle along the side of a wall”.
The veteran Labour MP Margaret Hodge, who has spoken out against the antisemitic abuse she has received, said there was a two-month period in 2020 when she was bombarded with 90,000 online messages, most of which were abusive.
But she said the attacks did not influence her decision to stand aside at the next general election. She hopes the abuse will not stop other women from entering public life, saying: “I’ve always thought networking and support is hugely, hugely important. That’s helped me through it.”
On Thursday, the Conservative MP Dehenna Davison said online abuse must be stamped out to ensure talented people are not put off politics. Her comments came after a 42-year-old man was handed a suspended sentence and restraining order for sending her emails calling her a “bitch” and “neo-Nazi”.
She tweeted: “Sadly, receiving vile abuse has just become part of political life, but it doesn’t have to be this way. We need to do all we can to stop the brightest and best being turned off entering politics, or as a society we will all suffer.”
