One video games journalist has found a rather clever way of calling out the harassers who find their way to her social media accounts. She goes to their families. She goes to their moms.Â
Alanah Pearce is a media and communications student who also works as a video game journo and a gaming Youtuber. This, deep sigh, of course means she is subject to a lot of pure awfulness on the Internet, likely always but especially in the wake of Gamergate. And the way Pearce is dealing with it is pretty satisfying (NSFW language):
Sometimes young boys on Facebook send me rape threats, so I’ve started telling their mothers. pic.twitter.com/0Cbs81eXiE
— Alanah Pearce (@Charalanahzard) November 28, 2014
My personal favorite bit: When his mom’s first response is to call him a “little sh*t.” Mm. Yes. Catharsis.
One hugely important step in fighting rape culture lies in going straight to, in a word, the source — in other words, this is pretty much in line with the philosophy that we shouldn’t have to teach people how to avoid harassment and assault, we should be teaching people not to harass and assault people. Pearce going to these boys’ parents when she found out they were still so young (and already acting like jerks) could maybe, just maybe, actually help some things get drilled into these boys’ heads before things progress for the worst.
A while ago, I realised that a lot of the people who send disgusting or overly sexual comments to me over the internet aren’t adult males. It turns out that mostly they’re young boys and the problem is they don’t know any better, so responding to them rationally didn’t resolve the situation. And it got to the point where their comments were starting to make me feel really uncomfortable.
Given that many of these boys were contacting Pearce through Facebook, it was “shockingly easy to find out who their families are.”
It was just a way to try to reach a resolution, to productively teach young boys it’s not okay to be sexist to women, even if they’re on the internet. That they are real people and that there should be actual consequences for that.
Sometimes those consequences involve getting majorly grounded.
- Some Twitter Users Are Mad About Gamergate Block Bots. Too Bad We Can’t Hear Them
- Adam Savage Talks Privilege, Women in STEM, and Gamergate
- Blizzard CEO Opens BlizzCon 2014 By Condemning Gamergaters Like A BAMF
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