(Picture: Liberty Antonia Sadler for Metro.co.uk)

In 2014, a tweet of mine happened to go viral.

The tweet – which was entirely spurious and fired off without thinking – racked up more than 2,000 retweets and 1,250 likes in a few days.

But because the content was implicitly, subtextually feminist, my mentions slowly started to fill with misogyny.

It was fairly innocuous at first, but the language quickly became more and more aggressive.


The tweet had been shared in some dark corner of the internet where men gather to sneer at feminists, and they were completely unafraid to direct their ire at me.

In case you missed his hastily deleted tweet, here is Ricky Gervais blaming the violation of a woman's body on her. pic.twitter.com/Uck6krEGVd — Emily Reynolds (@rey_z) September 1, 2014

My Twitter account became unuseable.

At its peak, I received several rape threats.



A genuinely horrifying – and sexually explicit – death threat hit my Facebook inbox at the same time. I called the police.

I’m not alone in my experience.

Recent research from security firm Norton found that 76 percent of women under the age of 30 had experienced some form of online harassment, and a 2014 study from think tank Demos – which described misogyny online as an ‘increasing worry’ – found that 12 percent of tweets containing the word ‘rape’ were direct threats.

But what happens when one of that 12 percent is directed at you?

(Picture: Liberty Antonia Sadler for Metro.co.uk)

Reporting a digital crime like a rape threat should, in practice, be no different to reporting what the police class as ‘traditional crime’, and when I spoke to the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), a spokesperson stressed that reporting online crime should be ‘no less convenient’ than reporting any other kind of crime.

The reality is not always this straightforward, however.

When I reported the threats I received, the process was indeed the same as reporting any other crime.

I called a non-emergency hotline and was given a crime reference number. A police officer was assigned my case and took all the details.

But despite the fact I knew the name of the person who had sent the threats and had found, with a single Google and Facebook search, where he worked, where he had attended school and the names of his parents, I was told the case would be closed without investigation.

The police officer suggested that, in the future, I should ‘expect’ things like this to happen – I was a prominent feminist writer online, he said, so it was par for the course.

I spoke to another journalist (who wanted to remain anonymous), who’s had similar experiences.

She’s been subject to a gargantuan amount of online abuse; sexual threats and imagery sent to her every day, constant harassment.

But despite well documented battles with trolls, she told me that her experiences with the police ‘basically got nowhere’.

‘I’ve spoken to the police about it, but never got as far as actually filing a report,’ she told me.

‘They basically just said if I didn’t know who was behind it in real life, they couldn’t do anything, so I gave up.’

‘And in one other case, I had the person’s IP address and ISP, but the police said they couldn’t do anything about identifying the person unless I took it to court and subpoenaed the ISP.’

(Picture: Liberty Antonia Sadler for Metro.co.uk)

With this case, as in mine and the cases of other women I spoke to, there was the sense that the police weren’t taking online crimes as seriously as offline.



Laws are changing – in March this year, the Crown Prosecution Service announced it would be updating its social media guidelines so that trolls using fake profiles to harass others can be investigated and prosecuted, and in 2015 an amendment to the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill sought to give more protection to victims of revenge porn.

But many police forces have not caught up, and there’s no specific online legislation that covers online threats in the UK – the NPCC spokesperson said that ‘there’s virtually universal acceptance that the legislative framework around online crime is fragmented and not adequate’.

‘It’s vital that however you choose to report online crime, even if that’s by walking into a police station, you’re met with someone who has an understanding of how to help you,’ the spokesperson told me.

‘Every new intake of rookie officers means more digital natives enter police forces, but it’s crucial that training on how to deal with online crime spans the entire force.

‘Police use the laws available to them to tackle crimes committed online, but the framework at present promotes ambiguity in terms of police response.’

The NPCC says that it’s ‘clear’ that police forces need to be better at supporting victims, which it thinks will increase confidence in police action.

It’s also working to increase the level of knowledge around social media hate crimes, particularly around women, so that officers can better understand ‘how to secure the evidence and what they need to do to investigate’.

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Steve Kavanagh, the National Police Chiefs’ Council Lead for digital policing, told me that the police are ‘committed’ to improving the way the police respond to online crime.


‘At the national level, we’ve set a digital policing board to coordinate the changes needed to address digital crime,’ he said.

‘And the College Of Policing has trained a significant number of digital media investigators who now advise and support investigations.

‘Forces are working to give their officers the knowledge, skills and equipment to investigate these crimes.’

Kavanagh also pointed out a number of examples across the country where police forces are working to improve their digital policing – the Metropolitan Police, for example, are ‘mainstreaming their digital forensics’, which enables them to capture digital evidence.

And police in Gloucestershire and Derbyshire have established teams that work with digital communities to ‘support investigations’ and ‘prevent crime online’.

This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a long way to go, though.

Many of the women I spoke to found themselves unable to even report the crimes, with police officers either failing to understand the severity of the situations or simply stating that there was ‘nothing they could do’.

Kavanagh agrees.

‘We are committed to improving our response to victims of digital crime. We know it is not consistently good enough at the moment.’

It’s heartening that the police seem to be taking steps to combat this kind of situation – my own experience with this kind of threat, and with the police, left me scared, stressed and disempowered.

But Kavanagh is right – currently, not enough is being done.

It’s time women’s voices were finally heard.

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