I reported my cyber-bullying. And this was the response
IF my experience in reporting my cyber-bullying is anything to go by, it’s no wonder this has become such a major issue for teens around Australia, writes Jill Poulsen.
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I WENT from starting high school in Cloncurry to finishing it on the Sunshine Coast.
It wasn’t an entirely seamless transition and some of the school fashionistas took exception to me wearing shorts to school when everyone else wore skirts.
Kids in Cloncurry wouldn’t be caught dead wearing skirts to school back then because we were busy playing footy and handball at lunch. Not to mention Cloncurry gives the Sun a run for its money when it comes to being hot, obviously chafing had to be taken into account.
So when I rocked up to Summer Bay High let’s say I was by no means the new chick on the block that the River Boys would be sniffing around, but I wasn’t bullied.
In fact, apart from those few cutting comments on my Curry Chic style, I’ve been extremely lucky to make it through life untouched by the harms of bullying.
That was up until last year when I decided to write a column about how we needed to change the date of Australia Day.
It garnered a lot of attention and earnt me mountains of abuse — mostly with racist and misogynistic overtones. In response I upped the ante and followed up the next week with a column titled: Dear Average Australian Racist.
The thing about racists, I’ve learned, is there’s only one thing they hate more than people being different to them and that’s being called a racist.
I brushed most of it off and thought I was coping pretty well until I got a call from a friend asking if I was okay.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Some people are just so sick,” he responded and told me to check my Twitter.
To say that seeing your face photoshopped on to a porn image, without having the hefty bank balance you’d expect from appearing in such a film, was a shock is an understatement.
Someone, with impeccable spelling and grammar, had created a fake Twitter account for me called Slut Poulsen.
I won’t go too much into the gory details but the bio included the words “feminazi”, “social justice warrior” and what my proclivities in the bedroom were — which, for the record, they got wrong.
Anyway they started tweeting people and just making a general nuisance of themselves but it was the X-rated photo, which included a swastika on my forehead that I was most bothered by.
I reported Slut Poulsen to Twitter and in 24 hours they took it down.
Twenty four hours doesn’t seem long but when your mum is copping phone calls from family friends asking if you’ve left journalism for a more lucrative career as an adult entertainer, it feels like an eternity.
Not that it was all bad. I got see my face on a size eight body for the first time ever so that was a thrill.
After a few days one of my friends convinced me to report it to police. He made the point that unless this person was stopped they could target others who might not find it as amusing as me.
I researched the law and found that a crime had been committed so got in touch with ACORN — a division of the Australian Federal Police tasked with fighting cyber crime.
That was 12 months ago and in that time the only update I’ve had was to tell me my complaint wasn’t serious enough.
Here’s their email: “We are still waiting on the information from Twitter, I have confirmed with the Attorney-General’s Department that this matter is not of sufficient seriousness to sustain a formal International request through the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) process and we are constrained to the request method that we have already submitted.
“In any case we will check again on the status of the current requests and advise when the information is available.
“Sorry about the delay but unfortunately this is how it is with International requests.”
Meanwhile one in four Australia kids reports being frequently bullied at school and tragic stories of teens, and adults, taking their own lives after relentless bullying is never far from the headlines.
I’m not mad at the police. If Twitter won’t play ball there’s not a lot they can do.
I agreed with social media giants Facebook and Instagram when they told a parliamentary inquiry last year that prevention was better than cure when it comes to cyber bullying.
The same as cancer: wear a hat, don’t smoke, do all of those things but you might still end up with cancer and when you do, you want treatment.
In the same submission the companies said they were strongly opposed to any tightening of the laws on cyber bullying.
That’s where I don’t agree with them.
It’s not enough for these companies to create a platform ideal for cowardly bullies to hide on and terrorise others and then just wash their hands of it.
When it takes them more than a year to respond to police about which IP address was responsible for using a carriage service to menace or harass maybe we should just charge them instead?
Slut Poulsen, signing off.
Jill Poulsen is a senior reporter at The Courier-Mail.
If you are experiencing depression or are suicidal, or know someone who is, help is available.
Lifeline: 13 11 44
Beyond Blue: 1300 224 636
Originally published as I reported my cyber-bullying. And this was the response