Caroline Criado-Perez and the Twitter trolls: rape threats or teenage taunts?

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me...

So we were told as children when we finally plucked up the courage to tell Mum why we had come home sullen and tearful.

'Mary said something horrid.'

'What did she say?'

We'd mutter and stammer and fiddle with our hair; anything rather than repeat the hurtful words. We knew our mums loved us and that they'd be on our side. But it was still difficult to come out with it. The insults reflected on us, not on Mary or whoever else had uttered them. There must be something wrong with us that our best friends found us so repugnant.

We have a name for it now: victim blaming. Most of us realise that someone who is beaten, raped or stabbed probably wasn't 'asking for it' or 'deserved it'.

But words are trickier.

The notion that the pen is mightier than the sword has been expressed in one form or another by great writers and leaders for five centuries. Words can liberate. They can imprison. They can delight. They can wound.

If it is hard to repeat an insult to our mother in the kitchen at home, how much harder is it to put it out there in public view for millions to see?

We therefore have cause to admire and be grateful to Caroline Criado-Perez for her courage in standing up to the Twitter trolls.

Criado-Perez had for three months been running a high-profile campaign to have a woman on a banknote. Some agreed with her that it was an important issue, others - including feminists and this blog - that it didn't matter much. Criado-Perez was not particularly welcoming of the contrary view, but she didn't declare war on those who disagreed with her.

Last Wednesday afternoon she told the Twitter world

Amazing announcement from @bankofengland: Jane Austen to be on the tenner from 2017 & decision making process to be reviewed. WE WON!!
— CarolineCriado-Perez (@CCriadoPerez) July 24, 2013

New Jane Austen note just been unveiled at Chawton House & looks fantastic :)
— CarolineCriado-Perez (@CCriadoPerez) July 24, 2013

She was  showered in congratulations from her many followers and tweeted 'thank you, thank you, thank you..' dozens of times. All seemed well.

But then appeared a tweet asking if she was the 'sad bitch' behind the campaign. She did not respond until the next morning, but when she did, the tone became decidedly darker:

Looking closely at her Twitter timeline, it seems that at first she joked about it with friends. But then she became fierce. She was not going to block offenders and pretend they weren't there. Nor was she going to change her account or leave Twitter to avoid the attacks. She was going to speak up - or rather shout the **** back. Forget the advice not to 'feed the trolls', she was going to ram the food down their necks as though they were foie gras geese.

Take yr patronising advice on how to deal with 10 hrs of rape threats elsewhere. We are #shoutingback here @MichaelJRWhite @HannahsRhapsody
— CarolineCriado-Perez (@CCriadoPerez) July 26, 2013

She was also going to get the police involved and to urge Twitter to do something to protect users from  'rape threats'. Many twinkling stars of the Twitterati - including Stephen Fry, Dara O Briain, Caitlin Moran and fellow columnists Suzanne Moore, India Knight and Gaby Hinsliff - cheered her on and offered support. John Prescott and the Labour MP Stella Creasy also piled in, as did the historian Mary Beard, who has had more than her fair share of antisocial media insults.

@CCriadoPerez so very glad you didn't keep silent. We've shut up and put up too damn long
— mary beard (@wmarybeard) July 27, 2013

Professor Beard was,of course, the Twitter star of the weekend with this little enterprise:

Twitter's head of news and journalism was bombarded with demands that the trolls be silenced  and when he locked down his account the chorus of dissent grew louder.  The mechanisms for reporting abuse on Twitter were too complicated - and too hidden.

A petition was set up to demand a simple 'report abuse' button and for changes to the definitions of violent language. It had a thousand signatures within an hour, ten thousand overnight and now stands at about sixty-five thousand. Within a day, the UK head of Twitter had set up a makeshift button for mobile apps and promised further investigation.

Meanwhile, Criado-Perez was tweeting incessantly, barely pausing to appear on radio and television, write for the New Statesman and the Independent, and give an interview to the Huffington Post, to which she contributes.

She described a 'tidal wave' of abuse and her tweets counted off the hours of her ordeal: 'ten hours of rape threats' turned into eleven, twenty-four, thirty-six, forty-eight hours and, today,  into 'the 6th day of rape threats'.

This is a taste of what has been thrown at her:

                                                                                               
 

In spite of all she had had to put up with, she was gracious and grateful to supporters, and encouraging to other women who said that she had inspired them to fight back rather than turn away from the trolls.

Some pretty hair-raising stories emerged, as did some robust discussions, notably between EK McAlpine (@whatkatie_did) and the Independent columnist Owen Jones (@owenjones84), about whether people were taking notice only because Criado-Perez was white Oxbridge and apparently middle-class.

Moran, who suggested that all the pleasant people' should boycott Twitter next Sunday and play with Google instead, drew on her experience to emphasise the scale of the abuse that could be encountered on Twitter:

For those who say "Why complain - just block?" - on a big troll day, it can be 50 violent/rape messages an hour. exhausting and upsetting.
July 27, 2013

A couple of hours later Jones weighed in:

After @CCriadoPerez has been targeted with rape and death threats, think as many men need to express our solidarity. I stand by you Caroline
— Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) July 27, 2013

Death threats? Where did they come from? Criado-Perez, who had been urging supporters to take screen shots of tweets that she might have missed,  was brought up short.

Apparently I've also received death threats. They must be buried amongst the supportive tweets. If any of u have screencaps pls send me them
— CarolineCriado-Perez (@CCriadoPerez) July 27, 2013

On Monday this appeared:

It was by then common currency that she was receiving 50 rape and death threats an hour.

@juliahobsbawm No comparable real-life incident to 50 men an hour, in masks, threatening to rape you.
— Caitlin Moran (@caitlinmoran) July 27, 2013

Masked? Well, given the avatars of some of the trolls, she may have had a point. Criedo-Perez was by now talking about the threats coming in 'every second'. It probably felt like that, though the volume is not clear from her timeline,  especially as much (and probably the worst) of the abuse has doubtless been taken down.

The trolling tweets that remain are deeply unpleasant, some are obscene, but whether they constitute serious physical threats is debatable. Criado-Perez clearly thinks that they do - they would certainly unnerve me - and she is impatient with those who suggest otherwise.

 

Nor does she have much time for men who try to point out that they aren't all rapist trolls.

What a lovely load of mentions I have! (Apart from obligatory man whining about *some* men - *eye roll*) thank you all so much - men & women

— CarolineCriado-Perez (@CCriadoPerez) July 26, 2013

Anyone, male or female, who dares to suggest that Criado-Perez is taking it all  too seriously or too personally is swatted away with a brisk 'you're blocked'. The women supporting her are fervid and uncompromising, giving short shrift to anyone who comes up with what looks like a dumb question. You can only feel for Alice in this little scene:

                  

Criado-Perez is seen by some as self-serving and attention-seeking. Hardly self-serving but, as we saw in the banknote campaign, she doesn't shun the limelight. There's no sin in that - especially if it benefits a wider cause. And that is what we must hope for next.

There is a radical feminist feel to the tweets around her and in one exchange she describes herself (ironically, i hope) as a misandrist. But she does recognise male support and also that she has found herself fighting not just against misogyny but against all kinds of abuse.

Others have taken up the cudgel for free speech, and this is the issue that needs wider examination. Indeed, the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee intends to invite Criedo-Perez to give evidence to its inquiry into social media after the summer recess.

Have the petitioners considered the consequences of a 'report abuse' button that could bring the suspension or exclusion of more people from Twitter or other such sites? Criado-Perez and her entourage, for example,  could collude to blackball gainsayers. But so, too, could  misogynists, racists, Eurosceptics, unicycle artistes, Arsenal fans.  Debate on all aspects of life on social media sites could be stifled and possibly snuffed out; no one would be able to speak up or out.

Do we want Twitter and Facebook et al to decide what can or can't be said, any more than we want Parliament to control what we print? There are laws to deal with excessive behaviour and we shall in time discover whether the tweets to Criado-Perez were so egregious as to warrant criminal charges. She will doubtless have been frightened, but has she ever been in real danger of rape or murder? We must be careful not to muddle these cyber attacks with the real violence suffered by real women in the real world every day.

Two men have been arrested, one on suspicion of threatening Criado-Perez and the other in connection with tweets to the Walthamstow MP Stella Creasy, who has been vocal in her support of Criado-Perez.

Reading Creasy's timeline is harrowing; the threats are explicit and numerous. The Tory MP Clare Perry has also reportedly been threatened because of her stance on internet pornography. The vile tweets directed at Laura Bates of Everyday Sexism were unambiguous. Abuse is now being directed at dozens, scores, if not hundreds of people - though it's not clear whether this is copycat activity or stuff that has always been going on and has only now come to light.

So has this Twitter storm blown in benefits or just more misery? Is it a real story at all or just a bit of start-of-the-silly-season nonsense? At the moment it doesn't look promising. Middle-class journalists fretting because some oiks have invaded their playground, MPs jumping on the bandwagon. There are genuine public interest issues here, but whether they will survive the sunshine and rain through to October depends on how seriously and strongly the mainstream media and the third sector take this problem. The last thing we need at the moment is David Cameron pontificating.

Caroline Criado-Perez had around 20,000 followers last week; she now has nearly 24,000.  But that is tiny compared with the Morans, the Moores, the India Knights, the Owen Joneses. These are columnists whose stock in trade is to air controversial opinions. They all know about the trolls and the hurt they can cause - as Moran says, there can be 50 tweets an hour on a bad day. Take that up through the celestial hierarchy to the likes of Stephen Fry with his six million followers and you can imagine how much bile and vitriol there is out there.

Yet none of those people, with their ready-made platforms, had stood up and said 'Enough. I'm fighting back.' None of them had seen the connection between the abuse they suffer and the cyber-bullying that drives vulnerable teenagers to suicide and proclaimed: 'We should stop this.'

No,  it is just an occupational hazard,  a matter of professional pride to put up with it and say nothing. They are as polite as they can manage before they reach for the blocking button, sigh and carry on tweeting. Any one of the footballers, pop stars, politicians and pundits could have brought the virulance and the volume of this behaviour out into the open. But they didn't.

Caroline Criado-Perez did. Her stand has made it possible for others less driven and less articulate to have their voices heard.

Sometimes it is right to raise your head and say ‘I’m a victim.’

Please check out these previous SubSist posts:

Women of Note
Three modern heroines of third-generation feminism
Twitter tigress takes on the trolls

Worth a read on this subject

http://martinbelam.com/2013/bbcextraghost/

Jem has also written a thoughtful piece on men's rights on his Quite Irregular blog (www.quiteirregular.wordpress.com).

• Flashboy
• What counts as abuse or harassment? Is it direct threats of violence only, or more general cruelty and unpleasantness? How will this be determined? What’s the boundary for legitimate argument and criticism? How should Twitter’s policies work in relation to legal frameworks; and which legal frameworks? Will moderation policies be different in different jurisdictions? Which jurisdiction has precedence when users live in different countries?
• http://flashboy.tumblr.com

More links to follow later...