About one in every 5 Americans who have experienced harassment online claimed it was because of their religion.
Stories about online harassment have been in the headlines for years and a Pew Research Center survey of adults from the USA that was conducted in September 2020 showed that 41% of Americans have personally experienced some form of cyber harassment in at least one of these forms: Physical threats, Stalking, Sustained harassment, Sexual Harassment, Offensive Name-calling, and Purposeful Embarrassment.
Those who have been subjected to these kinds of experiences claimed a number of reasons for why they might be targeted and a notable share believe that the harassment they experienced was due to their religious affiliations, according to the Pew Research Center.
About a fifth of the surveyed Americans who claimed to have experienced online harassment (19%) says that they believe they were the target of harassment due to their religion. This is equivalent to 8% overall population of Americans if the data is taken as a whole and not just those who have been harassed.
Adults were asked in the research if they ever had an experience with any of the six abusive behaviors mentioned above. Those who admitted to having faced at least one of these problems were then asked why they thought they have been targeted by this kind of harassment.
"This study shows there are some groups who are more likely to attribute their harassment to their religious beliefs than others. Of those who say they faced online abuse, 23% of Protestants say they believe they were the target of online harassment because of their religion, compared with 15% of Catholics and one-in-ten of those who are religiously unaffiliated," claimed the Pew Research Center.
Among the Protestants, 29% of the online harassment targets are more likely White evangelicals compared to the 11% White non-evangelicals who said they believe they were targetted because of their religion.
The Research Center also claimed that there are differences among those who described themselves as Atheists or those who do not have a religion.
"For instance, 21% of atheists who have been harassed say they were targeted with abuse online "as a result of their religion," compared with smaller shares of targets who are agnostic (6%) or "nothing in particular" (8%)," they said,
There are not enough Black, Hispanic, Asian, or anyone who is a part of a specific religious group respondents in the survey's sample to be broken out in a separate analysis for this question.
In a different survey in 2014, the research center found out that only one in five Americans share their religious beliefs online.
Aside from asking about religion as a possible reason for the harassment, they asked about four other possible reasons: a person's political views, gender, racial or ethnic background, and sexual orientation. Political views were one of the top reasons cited for why people think they had been targeted for abuse - with half of the adults who've experienced cyber-harassment saying this was the reason for their experience.
These overall studies show that religiously unaffiliated adults were more likely to say they had experienced any form of online harassment.
