This past August, Olivia Melville faced an onslaught of harassment when another Facebook user shared a screen-capture of her Tinder profile, mocking Melville’s inclusion of a quote from Drake’s verse in the Nicki Minaj song “Only.” What began as one person’s cruel mockery spun outward into a viral harassment campaign, with threats of violence and rape sent to Melville’s account.

Melville’s experience shows us, once again, that there are apparently a lot of people online who hate the idea of women having sexual agency. The original BuzzFeed coverage from last August includes screenshots of further responses that Melville received when the post about her Tinder profile went viral. Today, BuzzFeed reports that at least one man who allegedly sent explicit threats to Melville and several of her friends via Facebook message will go to court this Thursday.

After Melville began to receive the threats last August, she and her friends co-founded an organization called Sexual Violence Won’t Be Silenced, complete with its own Facebook page, as a form of solidarity. Melville’s friends’ participation in the group meant that they also began to receive harassing messages, but they continued to use their group to spread awareness about cyber-bullying and harassment by starting a petition and speaking out about their experiences. Their efforts to gain the attention of local law enforcement seem to have been effective, given that one of the men involved will be taken to court under Australia’s cyber-crime legislation: “using a carriage service to menace, harass or cause offence.”

Cyber-crime legislation is still fairly new across the world. I have written before about how this type of crime gets legislated in Canada and the UK; here in the States, cyber-crime legislation is less common. (In North Carolina, one of the few states to legislate cyber-crime, it’s still very difficult to get a conviction.) Although this story is happening in Australia, it could become yet another example for the rest of the world when it comes to the difficult prospect of legislating online threats.

(via BuzzFeed)

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