For the past two weeks, campaigner and Mumsnet blogger Caroline Criado-Perez has been the target of a sustained campaign of misogynist abuse on Twitter, following her successful fight to ensure a woman was represented on Britain's banknotes.
Here, she tells fellow MN blogger and novelist Rosie Fiore about the impact of the abuse - and why she won't be ignoring threats of violence, as some have suggested she should.
Read the post, and tell us what you think about the issue of online abuse, here on the thread. And if you blog about it, don't forget to leave your URL.
"Yesterday afternoon, when Caroline Criado-Perez took her dog for a walk in the park, she received a Twitter notification. The message, from a user called @youredead3, said, 'FIRST WE WILL MUTILATE YOUR GENITALS WITH SCISSORS THEN SET YOUR HOUSE ON FIRE WHILE YOU BEG TO DIE. TONIGHT. 23.00.' With admirable calmness, Criado-Perez retweeted the threat, together with the comment, 'Oh for f**k's sake. Change the bloody record.'
Journalist Caitlin Moran received an identical threat, which she also retweeted, adding the comment , and playwright Dan Rebellato was quick to point out: 'Hold on. They're supposed to be doing @caitlinmoran this evening. I hope they haven't double booked.' The responses are amusing and make light of the threats, but Criado-Perez admits the tweet cast a dark shadow over her happy afternoon. 'It's been around 40 hours since the last one,' she told me, 'I was beginning to believe it might have stopped. I know it's probably just some sad git who I should block and try to forget,' she continued, 'But a tiny part of me can't help wondering - what if they've found out where I live?'
There have been thousands of words written about the online abuse Criado-Perez has faced, which then spread into attacks on other prominent women: MP Stella Creasy, historian Mary Beard and several well-known female journalists. Several arrests have been made, Twitter has agreed to address issues with reporting abuse and suspending the accounts of users issuing threats, and the Daily Mail in a rare piece of fierce investigative journalism, identified, named and shamed some of the more virulent trolls.
However, no matter how much I read about this issue, I can't get my head around motivations of the people who actually do the trolling. Academic Claire Hardaker wrote an excellent piece in The Observer, in which she made some educated guesses. With more kindness than I feel capable of, she suggested 'We might start with considering how much trolling is symptomatic of social injustice, economic disadvantage, and political disenfranchisement.' Criado-Perez has her own thesis. She thinks the perceived anonymity of the internet frees people from their inhibitions, and that their sense that they are faceless allows them to act fearlessly, expressing their darkest thoughts, believing that there will be no comeback. When John Nimmo, who has been arrested on suspicion of many of the early and most aggressive tweets sent to Criado-Perez, was confronted by a Newsnight journalist, he claimed someone had hacked into his many accounts to send the 'rape' tweets.
At least in part, Criado-Perez rejects Claire Hardaker's analysis of trolls as disenfranchised, emasculated men - the Daily Mail exposé showed that several of the men who have trolled prominent women have tertiary education, are employed, are in relationships and have children. They don't fit the traditional profile of the loner teenager or, as Criado-Perez puts it, 'the sad angry man sitting home alone in his pants.' Rather, she feels, the trolls are a symptom of a wider misogyny - a sense among some men (and sadly, also, some women), that women who are vocal and argumentative and who are in the public eye, must be shamed, frightened and silenced.
Of course, the fact that Criado-Perez and others have refused to keep quiet has escalated the abuse. It's also become an opportunity for those women who disagree with her response (or the responses of other affected women) to attack one another - witness the very vocal attacks by many feminists on Caitlin Moran's proposed #twittersilence on Sunday. Criado-Perez and other women have been told that by bringing the threats into the public domain that they are 'attention-seeking', and that they would do better just to ignore the abuse. Criado-Perez is understandably angry about this. 'People are policing my reaction to the threats,' she says, 'Telling me how I should think and act about it, instead of taking those threatening me to task.'
The abuse and the reaction to it have understandably raised issues about freedom of speech, and our ability to express ourselves critically on the Internet. To me, it seems pretty straightforward. There should always be room for robust debate and criticism, and there always will be. But threatening someone online remains a criminal act, as it should. It is no different from any other kind of threat. Threats to kill, however they are issued, carry a sentence of up to ten years' imprisonment.
It's also worth considering the role of impulsive behaviour in this trend. The very immediate nature of the Internet carries its own inherent risks. We can now type and send a message in seconds. In times gone by, we would have had to contact someone directly, by phone, or have written a letter, which would need to be posted or delivered. The immediacy of the first or the inherent delays of the second might make many people pause before they take drastic action. A letter can be burned, a conversation, unless recorded, is only hearsay. But something posted online exists forever and can be tracked to your IP address and therefore your computer, even if you delete the message and your account. Even if you're using services like Tor, which is designed to protect online anonymity, recent reports show your actions can still be traced.
There is no doubt that the horrors she has endured in recent days have massively raised Criado-Perez's public profile, and she has no intention whatsoever of keeping quiet on issues she finds important. After the week she's had, she would be forgiven for lying low for a while, but she's spending the better part of her day today campaigning about Neil Wilson, a man who admitted in court to having sex with a 13-year-old girl and possessing a range of child pornography. He walked free with a suspended sentence, because the judge agreed that the girl in question, who was just 13 years old, 'looked older, at least 14 or 15', and was 'sexually predatory'. Caroline and other activists, including some MNers, went online to protest: the suspended sentence is now under review, and the issue of victim-blaming is being widely debated in the news.
As we conclude our phone chat, she sounds almost cheery, admitting that today is the first day she has been able to eat and sleep properly. 'The trolls haven't silenced me,' she says. 'If anything they have made me speak out more. Ultimately, they're a bunch of gutless little idiots who have no impact on me whatsoever.' "
Guest posts
Guest blog: Caroline Criado-Perez, on 'the gutless idiots' online who threatened her with sexual violence
KateMumsnet · 07/08/2013 11:47
I think online abuse isn't treated with as much seriousness as it might be; certainly the Police's comments in relation to my ongoing case so far suggests they think Twitter and Facebook are slow to respond to requests for user account details.
I have to make a statement at the end of this week following rape threats made to me and worse, to my daughter 
.
So far it seems like its low priority, a bit like DV, in that it's a crime against mainly women, where very little resource is allocated.
I agree with CC-P in that I think the trolls are made bolder as they are hiding behind "the Internet" with a made up picture and username. Bet they wouldn't post half that stuff in their real names/with their real pictures.
Saying those sorts of things online should be as unacceptable as saying them in real life.
There are some really vile men out there. The level of "hidden" misogyny reflected in the posts is just hideous.
It is 100% true that trolls are made braver by their anonymity - problem there is, the only cure for that is to make people use their real names for everything and that is both impossible to regulate and would cause such a backlash that the entire internet would collapse. Ditto attempts to regulate the internet. It wouldn't be the amazing place it is if it weren't free enough to let the crap stuff through too, sadly.
I've had arguments with trolls before - most recently I was defending a man who had dared to say that a piece of media was unacceptably sexist. Other men jumped on him, calling him a "fag" and accusing him of white-knighting to get sex from women 
TBH engaging with them does nothing. Generally they are men who believe, at the deepest core of their being, that they are superior to all women just because they have a penis.
The idea of a woman who is articulate, independent and willing to stand up for herself terrifies them. So they lash out, letting out all their mysogyny in one go - attacking appearance is often top of their list, which says everything you need to know about their attitude to women, no?
When you start turning over stones as regards internet bullying you'll find an awful lot of girls and women underneath them too I fear
Thanks 
darkesteyes YY I have support 
and I am very much of the view that such idiocy needs tackling head on and people making those sorts of comments need to face the consequences.
I am not clicking the DM link but it sounds like the most useful thing they've written in years 
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