Since the Bank of England announced the presence of Jane
Austen on the new £10 note, Caroline Criado-Perez, who spearheaded the campaign
to put more women on UK money, has been subjected to a well-documented and
much-discussed barrage of abuse via Twitter and her personal email. It’s been
described as trolling, but the difference between trolls and Caroline’s
aggressors is palpable. Trolling is the act of being deliberately provocative
to elicit an angry response; a threat of rape is a criminal act. There exists a
gulf of meaning between trolling and threatening violence against someone whose
opinions you disagree with. It’s the difference between playing devil’s
advocate and leading a targeted campaign of aggression and hate.
In addition to this, Caroline, her supporters, and other
prominent feminists including two female MPs have been subject to bomb threats
and racist abuse on the site. Twitter’s response to the tweets has grown
sterner and faster over the week, but still the threats keep coming. The senders
are quick to reiterate their numbers and resilience against banning, but
Caroline and the others continue to pass each new tweet onto the police.
At the time of writing, two men have been arrested; the
first aged 25, the second just 21. Their youth is striking – born well after
the advent of the feminist movement, these young men won’t even remember a time
before the UK’s female Prime Minister, much less a time when women weren’t
welcome in workplaces or universities. For a generation who take women’s rights
almost for granted, for those who have never had to afford it much thought,
it’s a startling deviation from the party line.
For these men, the threat of violence is a means of control.
Like the cases of ‘corrective’ rape seen in South Africa, the threats are a way
to assert dominance over a woman who challenges their fragile, crumbling
masculinity. Regardless of whether they would actually act on their threats or
not, their weak self-concept and chauvinistic protection of outmoded gender
relations reveals a complicated and defensive psychology.
They system they know how to operate in has failed, and the
world has changed around them. Like a small child denied their own way, the
aggressors respond by lashing out – in short, they throw a tantrum. Unlike a
small child, though, they have sufficient knowledge of social convention to
channel their rage into the most effective form and target it at the most
vulnerable area. While they deny that they would actually commit rape, the
threat of sexual violence is still powerfully intimidating; fortunately, the
women in question refuse to be intimidated.
In response to the story, print and broadcast journalist Emma
Barnett gave the aggressors the right to reply on her radio show. Her callers
provided a telling insight into their mindset: they insist “she was asking for
it... if you put your head above the parapet, like she has, then you deserve
this type of abuse. It’s what you get when you are a woman shouting about
something,” that “feminists like Caroline are undermining what it is to be a
man” and subsequently require “sorting out”. They justify their actions by
claiming “men are predators... and this is what we do... these men
wouldn’t actually come and rape her. They don’t mean it. Rape is a metaphor.”
Rape isn’t a metaphor. Rape is a tool of domination, of
control, of power. Rape is a taboo that these individuals have exploited to
intimidate a woman who, in their eyes, has developed ideas beyond her station
and must be brought back into line. As journalists, as activists, as feminists,
we must resist the fear forced upon us. These threats are an attempt to control
a woman who, in their eyes, has too much to say and too big a platform from
which to say it. They insist feminism will change nothing, has changed nothing,
but their fear is visible behind their anger and spite; in time the mask of
anonymity will slip and Caroline’s opponents will stand exposed for all to see.
Behind the explicit threats and creeping menace lies another
wave of attempts to discredit; the commentators, both journalists and private
citizens, who insist that retweeting threats is ‘attention-seeking’ and that
ignoring the problem will make it go away. Chiming in with these are the men
who write long articles and aggressive tweets claiming that feminism is no
threat - if this were the case, there would be no need to confront it or
publicly mock it. Ignore it and it’ll go away, right?
Those with a vested interest in maintaining the patriarchal
status quo have been ignoring feminism since its first faltering steps. It’s
100 years since Emily Wilding Davison fell under the King’s horse, 95 years
since women were given the vote, 48 years since the UK gained its first female
MP, 38 years since the Sex Discrimination Act, 19 years since rape within
marriage became a crime, two years since changes to the law of succession
allowed a Princess to take the British throne. Campaigners have achieved all
this with tenacity, patient effort, and a refusal to remain silent. We did not
submit to ignorance then, and we must not submit to it now.
