Tips from women who have been there
While I have included a lot of information on surviving online and in public life, different women use different strategies. I hope the real-life examples below, as told to me, will show you that women of different backgrounds and different circumstances receive abuse, and that different choices work for different women.
Van Badham, columnist, author, playwright
‘I found myself targeted for abuse from the moment I started tweeting on political subjects and when I was employed to write my column for The Guardian, it intensified. In the beginning I treated it as a word-game – the nastiness were just words on a screen, after all – and I engaged and responded with repartee in the way that I would if heckled at a stand up comedy gig . . . The abuse [ended up being] much darker than I realised . . . the real-world physical threats and the stalking that resulted from what was happening online took me completely by surprise. When the first threat turned up it took me a whole hour to call the police because I just couldn’t believe these people were really out there.’
Why did the barrage of harassment and threats come once Van was speaking out on political topics?
‘The issue is, of course, that social institutions were once male preserves, and the discussion of politics, economy and society was one made by men to men,’ Van says.
‘Feminism has shattered this paradigm by legislating opportunities for women to participate in education, institutions and employment on an equal basis, and social media has also allowed women to engage in public conversation at their own instigation, rather than at institutional generosity . . . The minority of men whose sense of self is based on myths of male superiority are terrified by women like me; we’re avatars of a new world in which they can no longer assume dominance over 51% of the population merely by virtue of waking up in the morning. Their fear manifests in hateful abuse . . . It reverts to name-calling, harassment, threats of violence, attempts at sexual violence and, at its worst, physical threat.
‘Now, I block. I block without hesitation.’
Rosie Batty, domestic violence campaigner and Australian of the Year 2015
In 2014, Rosie’s son, Luke, 11, was murdered at cricket practice by his estranged father, Greg Anderson, in front of shocked onlookers. Greg had a history of domestic abuse, had several criminal charges against him and was the subject of four arrest warrants due to breach of bail conditions and failure to attend court. He was shot by officers at the scene when he lunged at them. During the hearing into the case, Senior Constable Topham told the court, ‘I was astounded that he still got bail based on the information that we had.’1
Despite the fact that Rosie had done everything in her power to protect her son from his father, after Luke’s death she received some of the most vicious victim-blaming hate mail and messages I have personally seen. Some members of the public – a minority, but nonetheless a vocal one – blamed the bereaved mother for her ex-partner’s deadly violence. ‘For me, I think it’s the victim-blaming that hurts the most,’ Rosie explains.
Every person can be subjected to abuse online or in other ways by members of the public, but when it relates to the tragic death of your own child, it can also be triggering. As mentioned previously, Rosie took the step of largely retreating from social media and not reading comments about her and her murdered son. But by focusing her efforts on working with experts to prevent violence against women and children, and not on negative commentary by uninformed strangers, Rosie has become a powerful advocate and agent for change.
‘I became quickly linked with some very trustworthy, supportive people who were my mentors,’ she explains. ‘They had the expertise and could support me with my messaging. I knew they always had my best interests at heart. I built a small network of people I could trust, with the professional information I needed [relating to domestic violence and family violence rates, statistics, programs and available services], but the emotional support as well. I don’t think I would have been as confident, and I don’t think I would have been able to be as informed without that support. To continue, I need to have that around me. I’ve always chosen to work inclusively and collaboratively.’
Carly Findlay, blogger and appearance activist
‘I speak up about ableism, othering [to view or treat a person or group as intrinsically different from and alien to oneself] and discrimination,’ Carly says. ‘I organised Australia’s first ichthyosis meet in 2014 – bringing together 75 people from Australia and New Zealand, fundraising and working with the venue, medical professionals and sponsors.’ Ichthyosis is a rare, severe genetic skin condition, and something Carly suffers from. ‘I had a little help, but it was mostly done on my own. It was an amazing day and I was very proud. For many attendees, it was the first time they’d met someone else with the skin condition.’
Unfortunately, being an organiser sometimes means getting negative feedback, even if you are doing it on your own, unpaid. As Carly explains, ‘A few people told me I excluded them because they didn’t know about the meet, and I was accused of being too proud. Despite the enormous positive feedback, I was devastated at the nasty stuff said.’
One of the biggest challenges was when her image was appropriated online. ‘In December 2013 my photo was misused on Reddit.2 I woke up to thousands of hits on my blog, because someone had shared my photo on the “What the F*ck?” forum, ridiculing it. People asked what my vagina looked like, told me I looked like something their dog vomited and said I should be killed with fire. I could have curled up in a ball and cried, but I responded to the hate, calmly and articulately. I linked to my blog so people could see the real me.
‘Within minutes, I had turned that hateful thread around. People defended me, got to know me, apologised even. After writing about it on my blog, I made Australian and international news.
‘I fought back with awesome after one of my worst fears came true. It helped to have amazing support around me. This hate speech is so damaging – especially to those without immediate support.’
Carly continues: ‘I’ve made sure I talk to people who understand online writing when I am feeling a bit down or on the receiving end of nasty comments. Writer friends have been invaluable for advice and support. Sure I can tell my mum and get a hug, but she’ll tell me to switch off the computer, and it’s not that easy.’
What does Carly do to negotiate her self-care in the face of hate speech and other challenges she comes up against?
‘I take time out. I couldn’t write about appearance diversity and disability issues all the time – I’d burn out and also seem constantly angry to my readers – which I am not. So at times, I don’t blog, and I don’t apologise for it.’
Amy Gray, writer
Amy is a writer for publications such as The Guardian and The Age. She writes on tech, politics and gender issues and can get hundreds of comments on her pieces in a given day, many of them vitriolic. ‘Writing opinion editorial as a vaguely public woman can be tiring in the face of a system that will exert enormous energy in an effort to try to silence and discredit you,’ she explains. ‘It’s not necessarily the writing that is draining, it’s just the expectation you will be instantly available to wear people’s tired rhetoric and anger.
‘When that gets too much, you need to find something that will fill up what’s been taken. Now, this is where I would differ from most because I think filling up isn’t about short pleasures, I think it’s about action. So that could be exploring an issue that’s blown up and seeing what you can do that will create lasting change or striking back somehow. That really fills you up and helps you cope because you can see that you can change things, you can help others and yourself. That’s how I’ve ended up on advisory boards, emailed newspaper editors to discuss how they report on violence against women, removed sponsors from offensive events or connected with damn smart people. You learn to cope by seeing the change you make.’
‘But we can’t always do that,’ Amy concedes. ‘If I’m feeling more introverted and unable to work or fill myself up, though, I normally escape into music or film for a few hours and take the day off . . . The other thing you should always remember is that you can control your environment. Twitter mentions blowing up? Switch it to mentions from only people you follow. Still not working? Delete that f**ker and every other social media foghorn off your phone and block it momentarily from your computer. Someone’s being annoying? Block them. Don’t want to deal with blog noise? Turn off comments. No one is paying you to be abused and they aren’t entitled to your time . . . I’m pretty strategic about my work. I know that I will get far more blowback from work published online than printed. Sometimes I just focus on getting published in print instead of digital publications if it all gets too much. However, there’s a natural tension there because your work will always get more widely-read and discussed if you get published online so you need to balance your need to work with your need to give yourself space from abuse.’
Amanda Palmer, artist, rock star, crowd-funding pioneer
‘I’ve been through so many internet controversies, and the biggest thing I’ve learned is that there’s always some hidden flower that grows out of the dung-heap. [For example] my kickstarter controversy led to my TED talk, which led to my book [The Art Of Asking] . . . Things happen, things suck, and then other things happen in the sand left behind in the waves of those awful moments . . . you just need to be looking and open. I have a real philosophical policy of no regrets, and I struggle with it all the time.’
Amanda is very public about trolls and negative comments about her. ‘One thing I try to do is to air out all the troll-garbage publicly,’ she says. ‘There’s a real art to doing this, and social media is so tricky. But usually just pointing to negative things and saying: “wow, this person said something awful about me and it’s making me depressed and kinda insecure” can feel empowering. It also humanises you: whoever the critic or troll is has to confront the fact that they’ve hurt a fellow human being. And it feels a lot more honest than saying “LA LA LA YOU CAN’T HURT ME!!”, because often that’s just bullsh*t. Things do hurt, and you can acknowledge that hurt without giving it too much mind or power. It’s also important not to use your reach, power, or influence to keep the cycle of nastiness going. Acceptable is: “I feel this. This felt sh*tty. Reading this feels devastating.” Unacceptable is: “Look at what this a**hole wrote about me. Everybody tell them to f*ck off.” Public life means that you have power, and if you want good karma, you have to make sure you never use your power to hurt. I used to have an entire section of my website dedicated to the “hate mail” my band got. It was one of the most popular pages. And I loved it.’
Karen Pickering, feminist organiser and educator
Karen says, ‘I used to write op ed [opinion pieces] and I actually stopped because it was so taxing. Filing a story within hours of a pitch being accepted, and then spending days dealing with the fallout of sexist abuse was simply not worth the $100 pay cheque and sense of civic participation.’ (See Will you be paid? on pages 159 to 161 for more on this issue.)
‘I concentrate on other ways of organising feminists and reaching my community now, like events and online networks, as well as presenting workshops and speaking engagements. I’m also working on two books, which is an immense privilege, and a kind of writing that makes you a smaller target for harassment and abuse. I just had to find other ways of doing the same job, which is always: reach people, communicate and converse with them, help create spaces for reflection and change, and in my case, bring people into the cause of feminism or help them feel positive and hopeful within it.’
Karen acknowledges, ‘All types of activism can be emotionally draining and the demands of public feminism can be particularly exhausting. The single biggest factor in my ability to cope is other women, without doubt. Other women are endlessly inspirational to me. Remembering I’m in a community with other strong, powerful, empathetic and supportive women is sometimes enough to pull me through a difficult time, but I’ve also learned to ask for help. It’s a movement of many so it’s fine to take a day off, seek solace, find out who can talk you through something or just hang out.’
Natasha Stott Despoja, AM, Australian Ambassador for Women and Girls, Chair of Our Watch and former leader of the Australian Democrats
‘I believe that elected representatives and public figures should be multi-faceted: I don’t have a problem with seeing different dimensions of a person’s life. I think reflections on their family, or other interests, are not bad things when we look at and understand the people who reflect and represent our interests. I find, however, that politics encourages a homogenised version of a female politician. Female MPs often fear doing something different or challenging the norm, be it with appearance or lifestyle or political viewpoint, lest they suffer media and political retaliation. Women have learnt to be wary of standing out too much.’
‘Visceral criticism is nothing new,’ Natasha explains, ‘especially of women in high profile roles, and I am not sure if the criticism is worse but the anonymity of social media commentary when directed at women in violent and sexist ways can still shock me – and I thought nothing could these days! – I feel for some of the high-profile women in parliamentary life who withstand such onslaughts on a daily basis and then, ’twas ever thus, we’re always told ‘to get over it’ or ‘not take things so seriously’ or ‘to move on’.
Like a lot of prominent women speaking out against violence against women, she gets violent personal threats. ‘I do get threats and criticisms including violent criticisms from men around the world. The volume of it doesn’t surprise me and I am buoyed occasionally by the fact that the mainstream population seems to be increasing its understanding about the nature of causes of men’s violence against women so we are having an impact.’
Support networks are key. ‘I have always found support networks to be crucial for women in any sphere, especially this one. I try and provide support to other women wherever I can which gives me faith that the movements keep on going and progressing. This is one way of finding some sustenance. But I do not underestimate the importance of good mental, emotional and physical health. I guess there is so much to do that I fear taking any time out from the work ahead but I am also convinced that women can share this load, we’ve been at this for many decades without a rest.’
Miranda Tapsell, actor
‘I decided to speak out about the experiences of Indigenous Australians and women of colour because I don’t believe it to be an even playing ground in terms of how much of a voice women from minority groups have in the media. I know that my great-grandmother, my grandmother and my mother weren’t given that opportunity and made it so that I could. It would be remiss of me to not take it.’
For Miranda, speaking out brought a lot of attention, much of it positive, but also some of it critical, including racist comments. ‘There were varied responses particularly to whether I identified myself as “an Australian”. I tended to focus on the people that responded positively.’ As for the rest? ‘I muted or blocked the negative people and chose not to read it. Being an actor and experiencing what it’s like to change negative perceptions towards a person of colour because of the roles I’ve played has been so exciting. I want to continue playing roles that challenge tired stereotypes and show young women from many different backgrounds what they can become.’
Saba Vasefi, Iranian political refugee, feminist film-maker
‘I think I was 12 years when for the first time, by shaving my hair, I stood up to my society and the ways that it manipulated me and my body. From the age of seven, Iranian girls have to wear a hijab to go to school, and in my town, from the age of 12, as well as the hijab we had to wear the Chador. So when the time came for me to wear the Chador, I shaved my head and said to my teachers, “I have no hair to hide, so why should I wear a Chador?” They suspended me from school until my mother, who was also a school teacher, assured them her daughter would wear the Chador.’
Many years passed and Saba became a lecturer at the prestigious Shahid Beheshti University in Iran, but after four years was banned from teaching due to her activism against capital punishment. Eventually she ended up having to flee Iran with her young daughter as a political refugee. Saba’s experiences and studies ‘opened her eyes’. ‘I saw how rebellious women were marginalised and stigmatised by dominant cultures,’ she says. ‘Women like Tahereh Ghoratolein, an Iranian poet, who left her conservative and religious family in Iran to join the Baha’i faith, and appeared in society unveiled. For this offence she was buried alive. I saw how in Iran, and later when I fled and settled in Australia, neither I nor any woman could escape the hypocrisy of the dominant culture . . . Power only works when citizens submit to it; a culture only has the power we concede. So I learned that overt protest was not always the best way to resist the power of the state, to expose hypocrisy and make change. Sometimes the long way round is the shortest way home. In Iran, the issue for women and all free-thinking people is the lack of almost any freedom of action, speech, and choice. In Australia, I discovered, although there were more freedoms – of speech and protest and employment and belief – the dominant culture marginalised minorities, including especially immigrant groups and women, by discriminating, sometimes consciously, between racial groups, when it came to access to power and resources.’
Now Saba is a powerful agent for change in Australia. ‘My studies and my own activism showed me that major social change can be wrought by resistance. Sometimes soft resistance, through storytelling; sometimes hard resistance, like protest. Always doing what you can. Never giving up. Whenever I face, or observe other women facing bullying (online or in the physical world), I realise it is just a modern manifestation of historical abuse.’
Mariam Veiszadeh, lawyer and writer
‘For too long, Australian Muslim women were the topic of political controversy – much was said about them but we rarely heard from them,’ says Mariam. ‘The one-dimensional voiceless image of the typical Muslim woman portrayed by mainstream media didn’t represent me or anyone I knew for that matter . . . Social media offered me an opportunity to speak directly to the masses, bypassing the media and any potential sensationalising or editorialising of my views.
‘Speaking out as an Australian Muslim woman does come with a high personal cost however,’ Mariam told me. This has included sustained cyberbullying campaigns against her, and even suspicious packages being sent to her home, including one that prompted the bomb squad to come.
‘The death threats in the virtual world meant that I had to worry about my safety in the real one . . . I know that I am stronger than the sum of all of the hate directed at me. I know this because I am my mother’s daughter – resilient, tenacious and strong. I am also human, vulnerable, sensitive and not immune to the physiological effects and mental strain that cyber-bullying has placed on me.’
She wrote this in November 2015, after a sustained bullying campaign against her that included the publication of an article by a US-based Neo-Nazi and White Supremacist group, ‘falsely claiming that I got a woman “arrested” for “hurting my feelings” and openly urged their alleged “5000+” . . . followers to “flood” my Twitter account with as “much racial and religious abuse as they possibly can”.3
‘The months of cyber bullying that I endured [were] incredibly harrowing – the impact extending to my family, friends and my work,’ she says. ‘I suffered from prolonged anxiety that manifested itself in several physical illnesses that lasted approximately six weeks. It had a disabling effect on my life. To this day, I still suffer from periods of anxiety.’
How does she go on? What helps her to get through? ‘Breaks from social media and counselling help get me through it. I block, report, ignore and where I think it’s appropriate, call it out.’
Karen Willis, Executive Officer of Rape & Domestic Violence Services Australia
‘With social media I don’t engage personally,’ Karen explains. ‘Email keeps me busy enough. We have started on Twitter this year (2015) and will be launching a Full Stop Facebook page that others cannot post to this week. [The Full Stop Foundation is the foundation set up by Rape & Domestic Violence Services Australia, which I launched for them in 2015, and remain patron of. The Facebook page launched in Dec 2015.] A number of other services have had their Facebook pages badly trolled and we want to avoid that.’
In terms of emails sent to Rape & Domestic Violence Services, she says, ‘My first line of defence is “delete”. It doesn’t get to me much. It’s different for people who have experienced violence and who are then attacked in this way, as it is very personal and targets the impacts of trauma they are already experiencing. For me, I know those idiots are out there . . . there is a good chance they are themselves offenders, but their views and words are not personal, just to the ideas I am promoting.’
There are times when reporting these offenders is important. ‘There are a couple we have reported to police. For example, when the emails or phone calls are constant and continue over a period of time, or when they indicate they have [planned] or are planning an act of violence. A visit by police explaining that their behaviour is unacceptable usually results in silence. For the second lot [those indicating they are planning violence], this info adds to police intelligence, and there have been a couple where an arrest has been made – not solely because of our info but we have assisted.’
Discover what works for you
No two women are the same, nor will they face precisely the same circumstances, or want to respond in precisely the same way, but by retelling triumphs and failures, and the responses we got along the way, we get a greater sense of strength. By comparing notes, we learn to recognise and differentiate constructive criticism from the diversions, the silencing and the trolling, and most importantly of all know we are human and in this together.
Thank you to each of the women who agreed to share their story of survival.
Get support and don’t be afraid to report abuse
Every person speaking out has to find their own strategies for coping, their own methods for dealing with online and offline abuse, and their own ways of feeling safe in the world, for the circumstances they find themselves in. There is no single ‘correct’ answer for everyone.
Knowing your rights, knowing you can delete, block, ban and report abuse, finding support networks, and doing what you personally need to continue speaking out are keys to many women’s survival in public spaces and online. I hope some of these strategies work for you so you can speak out and continue to speak out.
Online resources for reporting abuse or getting support:
www.acorn.gov.au
(Australian Cybercrime Online Reporting Network)
www.beyondblue.org.au (mental health support)
www.eheadspace.org.au (free online and telephone mental health support for Australians aged 12 to 25)
1800 RESPECT and www.1800respect.org.au
(for those who are experiencing sexual or domestic violence which can also involve online abuse and harassment, and for those wanting to support people who are experiencing such violence)