Why is it so hard for women to get justice for online threats?

By Erin Stewart.

Late last year, two young women went to their local police station in Sydney after they were threatened with rape. The police didn’t know what to do.

“We’re not sure we know how to prosecute this,” officers reportedly told them. “These cases are hard.”

It was “hard” because the abuse perpetrated against these women had happened online. A 25-year-old man, Zane Alchin, is accused of posting a screenshot of a woman’s Tinder account alongside a derogatory caption.

When other, female users called him out on his cruelty, he allegedly responded with explicit and violent remarks, allegedly calling them “sluts” and referring to “the best thing about raping feminists”.

But this event is not an isolated one.

According to a report by the UN Broadband Commission for Digital Development Working Group on Broadband and Gender, 73 per cent of women globally have already experienced online violence.

Cases of perpetrators facing the justice system, however, are rare. Only 5 per cent report harassment to the law enforcement system, and as internet culture writer Amanda Hess has noted, cases of online harassment against women are rarely pursued further.

Women are not taken seriously, abuse online is not seen as “real”, and the path to justice is muddy within existing legislative frameworks.

‘Sexual Violence Won’t Be Silenced’.

One of the women who went to police, along with others, have formed advocacy group Sexual Violence Won’t Be Silenced (SVWBS), started a petition against harmful comments allegedly made by Alchin and the reams of similar cyberhate.

When the campaign launched and received media attention, “the responding officer was suddenly very well versed” in procedure, advocate Mariko Takedomi Karlsson said.

Alchin was later charged under the Commonwealth Criminal Code Act of the offence of using a carriage service to menace, harass or cause offence (a crime which carries a maximum sentence of three years’ imprisonment) after making rape threats to several women on Facebook.

When his case goes to court on March 1, the outcome could be a turning point for how instances of online harassment of women are addressed.

One of the first Australian cases which successfully prosecuted an online troll was in 2010, when a man was jailed for posting child pornography on Facebook tribute pages of dead children.

But while the law is clear on the penalties for posting such reprehensible materials online, getting justice isn’t straightforward. Prosecuting online abusers is certainly an option under the Commonwealth Criminal Code Act.

Reporting, prosecuting online harassment is ‘incredibly difficult’.

But as SVWBS points out, the lack of guidelines and procedures makes reporting, charging, and convicting online harassment incredibly difficult.

In the US, after having endured years of relentless slander and harassment online, 28-year-old video game developer Zoe Quinn recently dropped harassment charges made against the instigator, her ex-boyfriend.

Quinn was bombarded with malicious abuse, rape and death threats simply because she was a woman in a predominantly male gaming community.

But in February she dropped the charges because, she explained, it was too easy for the defence to argue she “deserved it” and that what she suffered “wasn’t that bad”.

Said Ms Quinn: “It’s not time yet. I’m not the right person to win this fight or set this precedent… It’s been a really, really long two years and I am more than a little tired.”

Ms Quinn now lives with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result of the harassment she endured, which included a foot-high “stack of threats and photos of me that people had printed out”, performed lewd acts with, “and sent to my family”.

Ms Quinn’s story points to the difficulties of getting justice for online harassment, as well as the increasing toxicity of many internet subcultures.

Dr Emma Jane, a senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales, is conducting a long-term study into gendered cyberhate.

She’s found the rate of online abuse against women in her studies is increasing, and is often fuelled by internet subcultures.

On anonymous bulletin boards like 4chan, misogyny is a game.

“You can watch rapey dudes competing to see who can break the largest number of taboos, elicit the largest emotional response in targets,” Dr Jane told the ABC.

Many Australian women, particularly those visible in the media through their professions, live through daily threats of violence.

Last year, over 1,200 of those women spoke out by naming and shaming their trolls under the hashtag #EndViolenceAgainstWomen.

Some participants reported feeling “intimidated” or “silenced” by threats. But these feelings only emphasised the importance of finding better solutions to stamp out the abuse, and in some cases prosecute it.

In New Zealand, a ‘promising response’ to trolling.

New Zealand has developed a promising response to the problem. Last year, the Government passed the Harmful Digital Communications Act, making it an offence to “send messages and post material online that deliberately cause serious emotional distress”.

It is punishable with fines of up to $NZ50,000 ($46,000) for individuals.

Among a range of other stipulations, the Act defines an online incitement to commit suicide as an offence, as “kill yourself” and its variations are common, and dangerous, refrains from trolls. The procedures on seeking justice are swift and clear.

Campaigners hope the Alchin’s case, if proven, would set the kind of precedent women need for safer internet use.

If he is not convicted, however, the awareness the case raises may point to solutions for managing online abuse outside the legal system.

Social media platforms, for instance, could be doing more to curb online harassment — a fact the former Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo, has acknowledged himself.

“We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years,” Mr Costolo wrote in an internal memo to staff last year.

Still Twitter recently pledged to do more to tackle abuse in its network, announcing a new safety council made up of harassment experts, specialist charities and reporting features to be introduced in 2016.

Ultimately, Dr Jane says, the broader culture of misogyny needs to be addressed if we’re to make the world safer for women, both online and off.

Part of this responsibility lies with men.

“I suspect that gendered cyberhate is offering us a window into the sorts of conversations men have been having about women in private for a very long time,” Dr Jane says.

“Men need to call each other out on this sort of attitude.”

But while increased public awareness of and advocacy for this complex issue is growing, and globally changes are afoot, Dr Jane is under no illusion that it will be an easy process, and warns women are in for a hard fight.

“This is going to be a long and difficult struggle.”

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