New types of violence and hate speech against women in multiplayer on-line games

The main objective of this research is to analyze the perceptions of young people towards online violence to know how and to what extent it manifests itself so that actions can be designed to prevent and mediate it from a gender perspective. The study, of a quantitative nature, analyzes violent and sexist attitudes in the online space towards female multiplayer gamers. The sample (N=738) consisted of young people between 16 and 29 years of age. An ad hoc questionnaire was administered based on The Attitudes toward Online Violence (Melovic et al., 2020) and Santana (2020). The results show that, young female video gamers experience gender-conditioned violent attitudes. In this context, violent attitudes are produced as in other spaces of interaction, warning that they are experienced and reproduced through a sexist tone when directed towards women, with ambivalent approaches of neosexism (Glick & Fiske, 1997). There is a perceived lack of means to act against them and most of the young women consider that they respond to structural beliefs that require educational actions, as well as measures in video game platforms that serve as a tool to address them.