Earlier this week, a member of the Calgary Police Service visited my home to do a security assessment. The evaluation was strongly recommended to me by officers within the behavioural sciences unit of the CPS after I received a written threat from a man with a long criminal record. The reason for the threat was simply that this man didn’t like something I wrote as part of my job as a columnist. The opening line of his e-mail was civil, for the most part, which is why I continued reading it. This man, called Michael, started off writing: “As a recovering heroin addict ...” but quickly morphed into what, sadly, has become all too common online and is something all people who write opinion are subjected to — particularly women — on a regular basis. “You need to shut your dumb f---ing mouth. You dumb ho! Stupid b----.” Pretty unimaginative, vulgar, regular fare, unfortunately. But it was the following sentence that had me call the police: “You better get fired for this or I am getting street justice myself.” There is ambiguity in that statement, but it is definitely a threat issued in the first person and it was one the police took seriously. Two uniformed police officers showed up at his apartment door that same day to question him about his intent. His reason for uttering his threat? He told the officers he hit the send button on his computer before thinking. There’s certainly a lot of that going on. Not much thinking, lots of insults and threats and far too many fingers hitting the send button. “You should just kill yourself, you f — ing ugly b—,” was sent by Yashmol. “I hope u get raped, u ugly cow,” was another. These are just a few of the hundreds of distasteful e-mails and online comments received recently. It made me think of Rehtaeh Parsons and Amanda Todd — two Canadian teens who committed suicide after relentless online bullying. It made me glad I didn’t grow up in the Internet age. After all, after years of abuse in the media, I have developed a hippo-like hide, but the sheer volume of the comments indicates it’s getting worse — a kind of mass hysteria and piling on — and I guess the question really should be, why should any person putting forward an opinion or working in a public role, have to grow the skin of a crocodile to get through the day? If the saying “manners maketh man” is true, is our growing use of so-called social media and the accompanying comfort of the anonymity it provides dehumanizing us into uncivilized beasts? On Thursday, two young men in Halifax were arrested by police in the case of 17-year-old Rehtaeh Parsons, who died following a suicide attempt in April after suffering months of cyberbullying in which photos of an alleged November 2011 sexual assault of her were posted on the Internet. The arrests on child porn charges came one day after Nova Scotia’s Cyber-Safety Act was enacted, making it possible for victims to sue those people who attack them on the Internet and giving police the right to seize computers and wireless devices of those suspected.

Last week, Twitter vowed to add an abuse button on its micro blogging site after British Labour MP Stella Creasy and feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez received threats of rape and death via Twitter for successfully campaigning to have the image of author Jane Austen appear on the 10-pound banknote in 2017. So far, two people have been arrested by police in Britain in connection with the abuse, including one man who sent a photo of himself via Twitter dressed up like a horror-movie figure holding a meat cleaver, writing, “I’m gonna be the first thing u see when u wake up.” And last week, three female British journalists — two columnists and an editor — received bomb threats. Mary Beard, a Cambridge classics professor, named and shamed one man’s Twitter threat and someone who knew him threatened to tell his mother. That’s when he apologized. In other words, if you wouldn’t want your mom to see what you wrote, you probably shouldn’t post it for all the world to see. My friend and colleague, Naomi Lakritz, has recently been inundated with hateful e-mails for a column she wrote. The e-mails have called her “fat and ugly” and a “thing.” One e-mail told her to go crawl under a rock and die, and another, in response to a different column, called her a “f---ing Jewish bitch.” Like me, Naomi says she has grown somewhat desensitized to the name calling and threats, but they have escalated to the point that she has cancelled her Twitter account altogether. Rona Ambrose, Canada’s new minister of Health and the MP for Edmonton-Spruce Grove, says she told her staff in December that she had to take a break from her Twitter account as she found the relentless misogynist attacks too distracting and upsetting. Back then, Ambrose was the minister of the Status of Women. She’d post something innocuous about really enjoying a luncheon with a particular women’s group, for instance, and some person actually responded by saying: “You should be raped repeatedly and pissed on.” After being called the C-word on Twitter, Ambrose says for the first time she “engaged the person” by retweeting his words and he was rightly lambasted for his inappropriate verbal attack by others on Twitter. “It’s one thing to say I disagree with you, but saying nasty sexual things that are violent in nature is inhumane,” said Ambrose, who was judged to be the most civil MP by McMaster University, which studied the words used by MPs in the House of Commons. Michelle Rempel, Calgary-Centre MP and minister of state for Western Economic Diversification, says tweets and e-mails that are abusive seem to be increasing. She has been called the C-word and been accused of performing fellatio on the prime minister on Twitter. “I can handle it if someone does not like my politics or how I voted, or my party. I can handle that, but when it’s constant attacks and positionless derogatory statements based on my gender, it does get to you — there’s a cumulative impact on you — and it’s not right,” said Rempel. “It’s sexism, it’s misogyny and it’s abuse.”