I’ve been online since 1993. Through it all, I’ve used my real name, and I’ve never tried to hide my gender. I’ve taken part in various online communities, mostly geek and music. One of my earliest lessons in being online is that being female makes you a target for threats. I’ve received rape threats, most notably after I’ve mentioned that I financially support RAINN. I’ve received death threats. The threat that bothered me the most was a threat from a rather unhinged music fan against my beloved cat, since said music fan lived in the same city that I did and so I felt like there was a chance of him actually trying to do something.
Threats are the reason why I moderate comments here. When I first started blogging, I didn’t bother. Spam was my only concern, when I first started blogging, and modern spam filters do a reasonable job of managing it. I started moderating comments when I got one particular commenter who saw it as his mission to threaten to rape me. At first, moderation didn’t change his comments, but it did keep an echo chamber from forming. Finally, he got bored, and stopped posting. Maybe he’s still reading, I don’t know, but he’s not making the threats any longer. I still get threats on occasion, most often if I’ve seen an uptick in traffic because I’ve gotten linked elsewhere.
Sadly, it came as no surprise to me today when I saw another female blogger say that she’s gone into hiding as a result of death threats:
I got a death threat.
I got another death threat.
And then I got one telling me that if I went to a popular blogger’s conference in November, they would find me, they would kill me, and they would kill everyone around me.
[…]
As a reasonably prominent female face on the internet, I always knew the day would come when it would get very, very ugly.
I don’t know why being female online sparks this kind of response. I don’t know why there’s an echo chamber that creates an ever-escalating environment.
And I don’t really know what to do about it, other than continue to be myself. Yes, I’m female. Yes, I’m a software engineer. Yes, I have opinions, and I share them unapologetically.
Quite simply, some people are deranged. Far more deeply deranged than you can hope to understand. I would however add that internet footprints are deep and the Police have computers too.
Drawing fire from said lunatics by not only posting about it [which i don’t think is a bad thing at all], but to me it would most certainly attract “them”, but also reposting the organisation you believe got you into this in the first place must surely only be asking for more. Rainn is a fantastic organisation and shining light on the darkness of those forms of abuse is the absolute best way to keep vigilant about them. If you are ever threatened – contact the Police and allow them to follow up the IP.
A friend of mine has been harassed, stalked, and threatened online for years by the same person. He’s reported it to the police. The police have done nothing to protect him.
the number of deranged people on the internet who are actual threats to you aren’t really greater than the number of same you’d meet in person. The actual real risk factor is about the same as if you struck up a convo with a random person in a bar.
However, as a mutual acquaintance indicated on twitter, the number of fucknuts on the internet is huge, and move at high speeds. They also know that for better or worse, women and men tend to have different reactions. Someone threatens to beat my ass online, my first reaction is to post their threat with as much attribution as possible. I find the bright light of day and the mean motherfuckers hanging out on my site make much of that go away.
But, as you’ve seen, a lot of women react, well, as you’ve seen. They go into hiding, because they are scared. I’m not going to bag on them for being scared, but at the same time, I wish they were a bit more stubborn, I wish they were more agressive about their own personal safety, and I wish they had a cadre of what I call “Big Scary Friends”, or BSFs. BSFs are damned handy, because when someone threatens someone with BSFs, the threatener soon realizes that not only is their victim quite probably letting the authorities know about their dear little missives, but that their “victim” is perfectly willing to turn them into the fucking elephant man, *and will have lots of help doing so*.
For the true psychopath/sociopath, that won’t matter. But for the rest of the “I’ve got GREAT HUGE INTERNET BALLS” crowd, the idea that they may have to deal with rather a lot more than they bargained on makes them back off at high speeds.
But I think that’s part of why the fuckwit community goes after women: because they can, unfortunately, assume the majority responses will be weak protest at best, but usually silence or retreat. There are a lot of people out there who, while meaning well, act as though women are completely helpless when it comes to defending themselves, online or in person, and sadly, there are too many women willing to prove them right.
Seriously. If someone threatened to pull something like that at macworld, (given my sparkling personality, not an impossibility), my first reaction would be “O Rly???”, followed by:
1) notify authorities. Motherfucker just threatened to kill a bunch of people in a public gathering. That’s DHS material there, and believe me, I’ll let them root through my fucking blog server as much as they like.
2) Publish the complete text of their threats including all identifying information. (assuming the nice people from 1) don’t tell me to not do that.) Asshole wants to play, he can just play with ALL my friends.
3) Go anyway. Shit like that is not keeping me from doing what I want when I want.
That makes me a rather uninviting target, because cross certain lines with me, and I will take the time to, in a completely legal way, make their lives suck for years. It’ll be my pet project.
But if they know that a few obscene & threatening posts, and I’ll run and hide, I guarantee you that they’ll crank that shit up any time I show my face. Because people are jerks like that.
But to deal with these assclowns, you have to not retreat from them. It sucks, and it means you wade through a lot of shit you shouldn’t have to. But if someone isn’t going to defend themselves, how can anyone else?
I think that it’s hard to assess “aggressive about their own personal safety” without knowing the person in question. I also think that we can’t assume that your method for being aggressive is the only one.
That said, I’ve thus far not published any threats to me for a few reasons. One is that I haven’t had one lately (err, knock on wood), so this is somewhat of an academic exercise. Another is that, when I had the one mentioned above, I was advised not to say anything in public by the legal team at my former employer, and they seemed to know what they were talking about.
I have to admit that I have a bit of a concern about being the girl who cried wolf. There’s the question of whether the threat is a credible one, which I’ve noticed as a theme in several twitter comments to this post. If I post a threat that someone else decides isn’t credible, have I just made myself appear too scared? Have I just made the problem worse? Will I not have anyone of those BSFs available to help me if I complain too frequently?
And frankly, when I live in a world where women still have to justify that they didn’t do something to deserve a rape or other personal physical attack, I’m not always prepared to set myself up to have to justify something that some wanker is going to tell me is *just* an online comment (or, more annoyingly, “free speech”). Sometimes it is just easier to delete it and move on, even though I am fully aware that I’m not necessarily making it easy to defend myself later.
The timing on this is funny. I had lunch with a friend a couple of days ago. She’s also a researcher, and has just started a new job at an employer where online community feedback is extremely important. She asked how I’ve dealt with community feedback before, both in terms of research and in personal attacks. For the latter, she cited a couple of examples of posts that were at least borderline personally-threatening. We talked for awhile about it, and she clearly was uncomfortable with the whole thing. The comments that she has received didn’t strike me as too bad, although I certainly understood her discomfort.
Well, you can’t do anything about people dismissing something. Some folks, there’s never enough proof. Look at R. Kelly.
But I find that most internet assholes rely on never being exposed and outed. Once they realize that email carries no guarantee of not being outed, quite a few of them move on to other targets. It’s like blackmail, it only has real effectiveness if it stays hidden.
When it comes to assault and rape, unfortunately, our society hasn’t learned any sensible reaction, (okay, that applies to almost everything.) We either disbelieve without ridiculous amounts of proof, or we assume the accusation = proof. Neither is a particularly healthy reaction, but humans, we loves our extremes.
🙁
Oy. I am so sorry you’ve had to deal with this.
My approach to threats, as many have suggested, has been to document it and report it to the police. Most aggressors get quiet pretty quickly when they realize there are real-life consequences to their online actions. And for the ones who don’t, there are restraining orders.
Do we have online restraining orders though? The problem with the threats is that you don’t always know the true identity of the “cyberterrorist” (Yes, I’m going to use that term.) and you don’t know when, where, or if he/she will strike. We cannot live in fear, but we do need to protect ourselves and our families and friends. I don’t think the authorities really feel like they have much authority in cyberspace, but the threats are very real. Thanks for posting this.
Relatedly, someone that I follow on Twitter (who uses a pseudonym) posted this link: female-name chat users get 25 times more malicious messages.