TLDR. Here’s some holiday news who can bank on, After a brief hiatus, our podcast spinoff TLDR is back. Meredith Haggerty explores a novel way to chasten the trolls.
As Jane Austen so aptly put it: it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of an online profile must be in want of harassment. Well, something close to that. Here’s Buzzfeed's Gaby Dunn;
DUNN: If I tweet about something that a guy doesn't agree with, instead of being like, 'I kindly disagree,' the next at-reply is, 'You should get raped to death...”
HAGGERTY: Women are hounded on - and in some cases, off the internet. Remember Shoshana Roberts who walked around New York for 10 hours, filmed by a hidden camera which caught every leering look and cat call?
[SOUND FROM VIDEO]
The video got over a million views - and Roberts got a shed load of rape threats. Comedian Lindy West, got rape threats after she had the nerve to debate the role that rape jokes play in comedy. Gaming blogger Anita Sarkeesian had to call the police and leave her home after getting a death threat from someone who had found her address, and that of her parents. Journalist Amanda Hess wrote about a man who created a twitter account just to harass her sending messages that said things like: “Happy to say we live in the same state. I’m looking you up, and when I find you, I’m going to rape you and remove your head."
[Tape of Alana's doing a game review]
HAGGERTY: Alanah Pearce is a popular video game reviewer from Brisbane, Australia. And she has the scars to prove it.
PEARCE: I started getting sexual harassment or rape threats as soon as I started reviewing games vaguely in the public eye, which was about 3 years ago.
HAGGERTY: Like most other women online Alanah knows the old canard: don’t feed the trolls.
PEARCE: I know that replying to people who do this kind of stuff to you isn't a proactive solution. They really just wanna get you riled up.
HAGGERTY: But that wasn’t good enough.
PEARCE: It got to a point that I was kind of just frustrated with letting them win.
HAGGERTY: So Alanah took a deep dive into some of the online profiles of her harassers and her search turned up something she hadn’t expected: the issuers of some of the most vile messages looked really, really young. Like prepubescent young. Like maybe they didn’t even know what a rape threat was, young. It totally changed the game for Alanah.
PEARCE: : So I got a message from this boy. It says that it was sent at about 5 am and he basically said that he would rape me if he ever saw me. So I went to his profile, I actually found his mother.
HAGGERTY: Yep. She told his mom. Her name is Anna and after finding her by going through comments on the kid’s Facebook page Alanah sent her a message.
PEARCE: hi anna, I don't know you but I was wondering if this person is your son," and then she said yes he is, why?" because I didn't wanna just open with a screencap of something someone had said in case he wasn't. So then I said "I've never spoken to him before, but he sent a concerning message to my public Facebook page today that I was wondering if you might be interested in discussing with him.
HAGGERTY: Could you maybe tell me exactly what she said? It's fine if you swear.
PEARCE: It's only the c-word that I don't wanna say, so as long as I don't have to read out what he said. So she replied to me and actually said "Oh my god, little shit" in reference to him. And then said "I'm so sorry, yes I will talk to him." And I was absolutely satisfied with that response and the fact that she swore and the exact phrase that she said, I totally agree with, but I wasn't gonna say anything.
HAGGERTY: It was the perfect language.
PEARCE: Ah it was. Ya, she's actually a lovely person as well, and I think that she's handled it really well.
HAGGERTY: Has she, has she talked to you at all about his reaction to her speaking to him about it.
PEARCE: Ya, so she's actually gotten him to hand write me a letter which she's going to mail to me, because I blocked him off of everything before I even contacted her, which is crazy to me. But she's also made him profusely apologize to his 2 younger sisters who've seen stuff about this on facebook and they know that it's him and are really uncomfortable with the fact that he's said that.
HAGGERTY: After this heartening interaction, Alanah tweeted an image of their conversation, saying “Sometimes young boys on Facebook send me rape threats, so I've started telling their mothers.” The tweet went ultra-viral. So far, it has been retweeted over 44,000 times and received upwards of 69,000 faves. The Twitterverse was delighted.As for the trolls, after her ‘mom’ tweet exploded, Alanah estimates she took in over a thousand rape threats in 3 days, but the overwhelming response has been positive.
PEARCE: This whole ordeal, has made me realize how supportive the rest of the world actually is. Like there are so many people who are on my side and this has really made me feel a lot more comfortable being online and knowing that people support me and that majority of people don't think this is okay where I actually originally thought that most people would tell me that I was overreacting or to get over it because he didn't mean it.
HAGGERTY: It turns out that this young man, unsurprisingly, wasn’t alone when he threatened Alanah. Its the pack mentality that encourages boys to believe they can speak hatefully to women with impunity. Left alone to defend himself however...
PEARCE: Apparently he's just really, really embarrassed and has reiterated a thousand times that he didn't actually wanna rape me, he just thought it would be funny, so I think that he's definitely learned a lesson here.
HAGGERTY: Despite approaching mothers exclusively, Alanah doesn’t place the blame entirely on parents.
PEARCE: I absolutely don't think that is related to the mother raising her son badly. I think this is just related to social media raising children not to realize what they're saying.
HAGGERTY: And if Alanah were to find herself in Anna’s shoes, what would she do?
I feel like I would take the exact approach that Anna has where I would talk to other parents to make sure that they'r e aware of what their kids say online. And I think that I would probably be the kind of parent who would do the whole no internet for a month thing. As much as my kid would hate me, I think that I would totally do that.
HAGGERTY: If you’re a woman and you’re online, you will probably, at some point, come across one of these little shits, and when you do, take heed of Alanah Pearce and don’t feed the trolls… but do tell their mommies.
