by Laura Bates
2. You know they’re only trying to scare you, right?
Probably the most common reaction, but one that completely underestimates the psychological toll of trawling through strangers’ fantasies about what weapons they would use to gut you, and in what order.
Online abuse can have a major psychological impact, whether or not you fear for your immediate physical safety. For many victims, online abuse does indeed spill offline, with their addresses or those of their family members shared widely (a practice known as ‘doxxing’).
If you’re on the receiving end of hundreds of long, detailed, graphic threats, you can’t help wondering whether just one person might follow through. And when you’ve received a detailed rape threat with an exact time and date in it, it’s very hard not to start looking at your watch as the hour draws near, no matter how rational you are.
3. What did you say to annoy them?
People who respond like this imply that online abuse is at least partly the fault of the victim. They assume that it wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t said something inflammatory or provocative. But this plays right into the prejudices of abusers, by casting feminist or anti-racist opinions, for example, as something extreme and challenging. Furthermore, we know that very similar posts made by accounts presenting as male or female get a very different reaction, so it isn’t about what you say, it’s about the prejudices of those responding.
4. Have you thought about shutting down your Twitter account?
Oh, gosh, no, that hadn’t occurred to me, thank you! Silencing is the end goal of the majority of abuse. If you suggest that someone who is experiencing it shuts down their social media accounts or stops speaking out, you’re suggesting their freedom should be curtailed because of someone else’s abusive behaviour. In fact, you are unintentionally helping the abuser.
5. Have you reported it to the police?
The answer is yes, over and over again. In my experience, they are generally kind, supportive and take it seriously – although clearly this is not the case for everyone, as detailed in Lily Allen’s account of harassment, which started on social media. But it takes a long time and a lot of mental energy to go through the process of reporting a crime like this and unfortunately . . .
6. ‘What’s a Twitter handle?’
. . . was one of the first questions a police officer asked me when I was describing a recent spate of abuse and rape threats. Law enforcement has yet to catch up to the Wild West of the internet and we need to see both police and social platforms doing more to protect users.
7. It’s just a sad middle-aged single man/a spotty teenage boy alone in his mum’s basement
First off, this seems fairly offensive to the vast majority of teenage boys/single middle-aged men. Assigning any particular demographic to online abusers risks letting them off the hook, with implied societal reasons (and excuses) for their behaviour. What’s harder, but necessary, to confront is that many of those who abuse online are people within our communities, families and friendship groups, not just ‘weirdos’ or outcasts.
8. Don’t feed the trolls
Notice how many of these responses focus on policing victims’ behaviour? No matter how well-meaning it might be, telling someone how they should respond plays into the idea that they are somehow responsible for provoking, or capable of preventing, the abuse. If you want to engage with so-called Twitter trolls, go for it. As Mary Beard has proved, in some cases, it works very effectively. If you want to switch off, that’s okay, too.
It is tempting to try to respond to online abuse by telling the victim not to worry, or explaining how you think they could solve it. But this can often inadvertently reinforce the very narrative that trolls seek to create. It’s better to respond with support, or to challenge the online harassment. Above all, we should focus on stopping online abuse from happening in the first place.
Originally published 19 April 2016
HOW VIDEO ‘PRANKSTERS’ ARE CASHING IN ON THE ABUSE AND HARASSMENT OF WOMEN
When 22-year-old student and writer Paulina Drėgvaitė headed to Trafalgar Square last week, she was simply planning to meet a friend in central London and enjoy the good weather. As she sat on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields, a young man approached her, told her it was ‘national kiss day’ and asked her to kiss him. She smiled and said, ‘No, sorry, no.’ Instead of accepting her answer, he demanded to know why. She answered: ‘Because I have no desire to kiss you.’ Again, he persisted, asking: ‘What if I show you my nipple?’ At this point, she told him to ‘fuck off’, and asked him what right he thought he had to speak to her in that way. Laughing it off with a sarcastic comment, he walked away.
It wasn’t until the following day when a friend sent her a link to a Facebook video that she realized the man who had approached her was Jack Jones, a self-styled online ‘prankster’ with a Facebook following of almost 3.5 million people. Without her knowledge or consent, he had filmed his interaction with Paulina and used her as the punchline on a video titled ‘National kiss day’.
The video, which ends with Drėgvaitė saying ‘Fuck off’, has since been viewed over 700,000 times and has 12,000 likes, 850 shares and more than 600 comments. To her horror, Drėgvaitė realized that hundreds of the comments focused on her, describing her as ugly, stuffy, stuck up, arrogant and dumb, calling her a snotty cow and a feminazi, and speculating about whether she was on her period.
‘I was physically shaking,’ says Drėgvaitė. ‘I feel sick and violated. The video was put up without my consent and now thousands of people are calling me a fat cow because I refused to kiss a man I had no desire to kiss. Some people have advised me just to let it go, but I feel like this event is so symptomatic of the everyday sexism that women face: getting harassed in a public space and then being bullied because of it.’
Jones is just one of a host of online ‘pranksters’, mostly young men, whose videos often show them approaching, scaring or harassing unsuspecting women in public spaces under the guise of ‘banter’. Often euphemistically described as ‘social experiments’, recent examples to hit the headlines have included YouTuber Sam Pepper’s compilation of grabbing women’s bottoms in the street and Brad Holmes’s video showing his partner Jenny Davies in pain after using a tampon he had rubbed chilli on as a ‘prank’. Though several sites removed the chilli video after campaigners pointed out it normalized relationship abuse, many mainstream media outlets continue to host it.
More and more vloggers are making money and enjoying notoriety built on the harassment or abuse of women. Regardless of whether or not some of the ‘pranks’ are staged, you only have to look at the thousands of comments on the videos to see that they are playing a part in perpetuating misogynistic and abusive attitudes towards women and normalizing harassment. With titles such as ‘How to pick up girls’ and ‘How to get any girl’s number’, the videos often encourage viewers, implicitly or explicitly, to replicate the same tactics themselves. It is not uncommon for sexism and racism to intermingle in the harassment depicted.
Where the videos centre on a female partner, they veer uncomfortably close to the controlling and coercive norms that often mark an abusive relationship. One Brad Holmes video, for example, shows him slashing a piece of clothing he had bought for his partner with a knife in front of her and stamping on a brand-new set of hair straighteners while she begs him not to, because she fails to answer questions about history and football correctly. In another, with 10 million views, he cuts her hair without consent while she sleeps.
Soraya Chemaly, director of the Women’s Media Center Speech Project, says: ‘Pranks and jokes say a lot about what society thinks is acceptable and, unfortunately for girls and women, what’s acceptable is high levels of physical aggression, denigrating humour and non-consent. You see that trifecta not only in the actions of harassers, who are socially supported, for example, by views and likes, but in the institutionalized policies of social media companies, whose policies tend to reflect mainstream
norms.’
In many cases the women involved can be left, like Paulina Drėgvaitė, feeling frustrated and helpless. She reported the video to Facebook and asked for it to be taken down, but received a message in response saying that it did not contravene community guidelines. A spokesperson for Facebook has since said they were investigating both the ‘National kiss day’ and the chilli tampon videos.
While each of these videos is subtly different, as a whole there is something very troubling about the triumphant rise of internet stars who are dealing in the currency of female harassment and humiliation, with sexual success positioned as the ultimate goal. To legions of online fans, the message is clear: any woman is fair game; their presence in public space is an invitation for harassment and you don’t need to take no for an answer.
Originally published 2 June 2016
CELEBRITY CONSENT: STOP BRANDING ATTACKS ON WOMEN AS ‘PRANKS’
Picture the scene: a male celebrity is exiting an event when suddenly someone runs up to him, dodging his security team, and attempts to grab his wallet from his pocket. Reacting instinctively, the celebrity puts up a hand to stop the attacker, perhaps pushing them away or to the ground. Headlines relay the shocking event, many praising the ‘action hero’ for his real-life reflexes.
Yet while our sympathies would likely be firmly aligned with a famous man facing an attempted robbery, the reaction seems to be very different when female celebrities experience what amounts to attempted assault. While exiting a fashion show in Milan last week, model Gigi Hadid obligingly smiled and posed for selfies with a crowd of fans. Suddenly, without warning, a man approached Hadid from behind and grabbed her, physically lifting her off her feet and into the air. Hadid swung her elbow backwards, forcing the man to release her and run away.
It must have been a terrifying moment. But instead of focusing on Hadid’s well-being or praising her for her quick instincts, the international media had another angle in mind. ‘NOT MODEL BEHAVIOUR’ blared one disapproving headline. Another said ‘Furious supermodel . . . lashes out’, emphasizing that she had to be ‘held back by security’, as if she had reacted with undue aggression. While some publications came to her defence, the general consensus was that a highly strung and violent Hadid had overreacted. When Marie Claire ran an article praising Hadid for her actions, the magazine’s Twitter account shared it with the tagline ‘unpopular opinion’. Multiple media outlets suggested that the perpetrator, Vitalii Sediuk, was a ‘fan’ of Hadid’s, subtly implying that she owed him some debt of gratitude.
He is in fact a repeat offender who deliberately targets celebrities. Before the story had died down, Sediuk struck again, this time ambushing Kim Kardashian as she entered a restaurant in Paris. Sediuk lunged at Kardashian, attempting to grab her leg and kiss her bottom, before being pulled to the floor by a security guard. Yet again, the media responded bafflingly. BBC Newsbeat chose to turn the issue into a ‘debate’, tweeting: ‘Is it OK to grab a woman on the street, even if it’s for a “prank”?’ The linked article presents the issue as a dilemma, giving space to Sediuk’s excuses and ‘explanations’, including his claim that he was ‘protesting Kim for using fake butt implants’. Other outlets have also described Sediuk’s actions as a form of protest, and described them as pranks and stunts.
These aren’t jokes, they are scary and unacceptable attacks. It isn’t a coincidence that many of them deliberately target women, nor that the ‘pranks’ are often of a sexual nature and in several cases would clearly constitute a form of assault. In another example, Sediuk famously ambushed actor America Ferrera, trying to crawl underneath her dress on the red carpet at Cannes. This time, he was described in media reports as a ‘pest’ and ‘unwanted guest’.
While the media reaction must be upsetting for the individuals involved (Hadid herself responded by pointing out that she had every right to defend herself), it also has a trickle-down effect for the rest of us. Such attitudes underline the message that women should be gracious and grateful for any male attention, even when it takes an aggressive and unwanted form. They cast men who approach and manhandle women in the street as cheeky chappies and women who object as angry harpies. In short, they only exacerbate the street harassment thousands of women already face on a daily basis. Whether it’s on the red carpet or the pavement, it’s time we started to recognize these assaults for what they really are.
Originally published 1 October 2016
LESLIE JONES’S TWITTER ABUSE PROVES RELYING ON USERS TO REPORT BULLIES ISN’T ENOUGH
Breitbart technology editor Milo Yiannopoulos has been permanently banned from Twitter for breaking its rules against ‘participating in or inciting targeted abuse of individuals’, after he was said to have fanned the flames of sickening abuse directed at Ghostbusters actor Leslie Jones.
Jones quit the platform after a torrent of tweets, from messages comparing her to apes and videos of people screaming racist epithets, to people sending her images of her face covered in semen. On Tuesday evening, she wrote: ‘I leave Twitter tonight with tears and a very sad heart. All this cause I did a movie. You can hate the movie but the shit I got today . . . wrong’.
She hasn’t tweeted since.
In response, Yiannopoulos told Breitbart: ‘With the cowardly suspension of my account, Twitter has confirmed itself as a safe space for Muslim terrorists and Black Lives Matter extremists, but a no-go zone for conservatives. This is the end for Twitter. Anyone who cares about free speech has been sent a clear message: you’re not welcome on Twitter.’
Of course, this is nonsense. Freedom of speech doesn’t include the freedom to abuse or incite racial hatred. And in such tantrums about the right to offend – tantamount to a bully throwing his toys out of the pram – we hear nothing about the silenced free speech of those who, like Jones, are driven off social media platforms because the sheer level of vitriol is just too much to bear.
If Twitter takes effective action against racist and misogynistic bullies, this has the potential to be the beginning, not the end. The beginning of the platform as a space that is open to all to express and debate views, instead of a hate-filled pit where members of minority groups are threatened, abused and taunted.
But banning one high-profile user is nowhere near enough to achieve that reality. The abuse being hurled at Jones has starkly highlighted the fact that despite years of paying lip service to the problem, Twitter and other social media platforms have utterly failed their users over tackling abuse.
On Monday night, Twitter released a statement: ‘This type of abusive behavior is not permitted on Twitter, and we’ve taken action on many of the accounts reported to us by both Leslie and others. We rely on people to report this type of behavior to us but we are continuing to invest heavily in improving our tools and enforcement systems to prevent this kind of abuse. We realize we still have a lot of work in front of us before Twitter is where it should be on how we handle these issues.’
But what became very clear in Jones’s case was that relying on people to report this type of behaviour is completely inadequate in cases where a storm of co-ordinated abuse has been stirred up and deliberately incited against an individual. This is a scenario many women, and in particular women of colour, disabled people and members of the LGBTQIA community will recognize only too well.
These incidents of co-ordinated abuse are often instigated by influential users with thousands of followers, or even planned on a separate website or forum, where the victim is singled out as a target in advance. In these cases, it should be possible for a user simply to report the situation to Twitter. Moderators should monitor the situation and tackle the abusers as a group. There should be no need for the victim to trawl through and report accounts individually. Moderators could easily review each tweet using a particular user’s handle over the past twenty-four hours.
This wouldn’t require any alteration of Twitter’s community guidelines on what is and isn’t acceptable, simply more proactive implementation. This m
ore victim-centred approach seems so mind-blowingly obvious that the fact it doesn’t seem to have been tried before makes Twitter’s claim to be working hard on this issue hard to swallow.
As Ijeoma Oluo points out, the impact of this problem reaches way beyond social media. By effectively denying women of colour access to these spaces, it not only removes their freedom of speech, but also access to vital professional networks, visibility, fan interaction and promotion of their work.
The abuse against Jones comes in the same week that Facebook’s global head of safety admitted the platform is failing to meet its own standards on dealing with rape threats and abuse. And just last year, Twitter’s chief executive acknowledged that the company ‘sucks at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform, and we’ve sucked at it for years’. Against this backdrop, with companies openly conceding that they are failing to protect users, the idea that it’s really bullies such as Yiannopoulos who are being persecuted is laughable.
He claims that his banning signals the end of Twitter, but what might actually bring the platform down is its ongoing failure to tackle online bullying. The success of social media platforms relies entirely upon us, their users. If they can’t take measurable, decisive action to tackle the kind of sickening abuse Jones and others receive, they no longer deserve our membership or support.
Originally published 21 July 2016
WOMEN ARE PEOPLE, TOO
In August 2016, a 64-year-old American woman named Darlene Horton was stabbed to death in Russell Square. Two days later, the BBC news homepage featured the headline: ‘US woman killed in London attack named’. The subheading read: ‘The US citizen killed in a knife attack in Russell Square, central London, is named as an eminent university professor’s wife.’ In June 2017, Page Six ran the headline: ‘T. J. Miller’s wife making a name for herself in New York’ – prompting tweeter Ari Fishbein to comment drily, ‘I’ve never seen a one-sentence headline contradict itself.’ When acclaimed fashion designer L’Wren Scott died in 2014, headlines on her passing ranged from ‘Mick Jagger’s girlfriend found dead’ to ‘Rolling Stones cancel Perth concert’.