Content overview: “Mary Anne Franks: Sexual Assault Is a Free Speech Issue”. Mary Anne Franks, a law professor and president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, argues that sexual assault and online abuse are fundamentally free speech issues. In her work, Franks has long contended that when women are targeted with threats, doxxing, and nonconsensual pornography, the implicit message is that their voices do not matter.
She points out that the failure to hold abusers accountable sends a chilling signal: “We do not care about women’s voices.” This perspective reframes the debate over online harassment, positioning it not as a conflict between safety and speech, but as a matter of whose speech is protected and whose is silenced. Franks has been a leading advocate for laws against revenge porn and cyberstalking, arguing that without legal consequences, abusers are empowered to drive women out of public discourse. For the complete material, the listing points back to the source inside the network.