‘Sexual Violence Won’t Be Silenced’ group fight back against online harassers

OPINION: When Chris Hall posted a stranger’s Tinder profile to his Facebook page, he couldn’t possibly know it would cost him his job. Warning: Graphic content

WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT

Sexual Violence Won’t Be Silenced (SVWBS) is a group of Sydney women campaigning for greater awareness and stronger policing of online abuse.

Here, they explain how one screenshot of a Tinder profile lost a man his job.

Last month, a man named Chris Hall publicly shared a screenshot of our friend Olivia’s Tinder profile on Facebook.

Olivia’s Tinder bio references a lyric from Canadian singer Drake’s hit song Only. “Type of girl that will suck you dry and then eat some lunch with you,” her bio reads.

Chris posted this on Facebook with the caption, “Stay classy ladies. I’m surprised she’d still be hungry for lunch.”

Chris Hall’s post on his Facebook page.

Chris and his friends then publicly humiliated Olivia, describing her as a “grubby b*tch” and a “sl**”.

A mutual friend told Olivia what Chris had posted, and she defended herself on her own Facebook page. We supported our friend by defending her comments on the post.

It was then that the torrent of explicit rape and death threats from a Facebook user named Zane Alchin began. [News.com.au has chosen not to republish these comments due to their extremely graphic and offensive nature].

Currently, our social media policies and cybercrime laws don’t protect women from online abuse.

When we reported Olivia’s incident to the police, they did not have adequate training or education to efficiently deal with this sort of crime. Victims are often told that the best course of action is to report perpetrators to the relevant social media platform, to stay offline, and to ‘not feed the trolls’.

In Olivia’s case, the feedback we received from Facebook was:

“We reviewed your report of Zane Alchin’s comment. Thank you for taking the time to report something that you feel may violate our Community Standards.

“Reports like yours are an important part of making Facebook a safe and welcoming environment. We reviewed the comment you reported for containing hate speech or symbols and found it doesn’t violate our Community Standards.”

Olivia’s Tinder bio references a lyric from Canadian singer Drake’s hit song Only. Photo: Kevin Winter.

Unfortunately, it isn’t unusual to see comments like those made by Chris and Zane on social media. It’s a method used time and time again to make women stop talking. Most of the time, it works.

In 2012, Icelandic woman Thorlaug Agustsdottir complained about a Facebook page titled ‘Men are better than women’, which featured graphic images of sexual assault against women. She was sent an image of her own face bloodied and bruised and told “you just need to get raped”.

In 2013, Jezebel journalist Lindy West spoke out about rape ‘jokes’ and received a number of threats telling her “no need for you to worry about rape uggo”.

British writer Caroline Criado-Perez complained about the fact that the Queen was the only woman on a British banknote. She received up to 50 abusive tweets an hour, with content including “you better watch your back … I’m gonna rape you’re a** at 8pm and put the video all over the internet”.

After complaining about sexism in video games, Anita Sarkessian was the subject of graphic video game called Beat Up Anita Sarkessian, which invited users to punch and bloody a representation of her face.

Closer to home, Talitha Stone complained about the violent lyrics of Tyler the Creator and received an onslaught of tweets telling her to “shut up u dumb a** whore” and “Tyler is the f***ing man b***h suck d***”.

In all of these cases, the women who spoke out had their faces circulated online alongside remarks about their ‘rape-ability’ (or lack thereof). These are not isolated incidents perpetrated by one man. This is a systematic way of talking to women online.

Five members of the Sexual Violence Won’t Be Silenced group.

In the aftermath, Chris Hall lost his job for breaching his workplace social media policy and Zane Alchin has gone incognito. SVWBS has not contacted any employers or family members.

We don’t advocate any online vigilantism. As far as we’re concerned, it’s not really about Chris or Zane anymore.

One in five young women experience sexual harassment online. We believe that people who abuse and harass others online need to be held accountable for their actions, as they would be offline.

We believe that telling victims of online harassment to report the perpetrators or “take a break from the internet” is not good enough. It ignores the real issue at hand, and makes victims feel helpless and invalidated.

They are silenced twice: first by the actual harassment, and second by the devaluation of the incident. The focus needs to shift away from asking the victim to resolve the situation to holding people accountable for what they say and do online. This victim-blaming that we so often see needs to end.

Our story is simply a way to raise awareness about behaviour that is far too common online. It’s time to stop dismissing this as “just the internet”. It’s time to start taking online harassment seriously.

We want to empower young people to know their rights online, so they feel confident to speak out. We want the authorities to be equipped with the skills to act in accordance with the law, whether be simply the proper support of victims of online harassment or prosecution.

Ultimately, we hope that our efforts will contribute to a growing international movement to end the normalisation of violence online.

Clearly, there is a long way to go, but it’s heartening to know that there are so many people behind our cause.

Follow Sexual Violence Won’t Be Silenced on Facebook.