report abuse. or not.

This is a half thought-out blog about something that came across my desk today, which is on the back of a discussion I had yesterday, which is something I heard about the day before but didn't surprise me because I have heard it a thousand times before.

The Rape Tweet.

God help us if in 50 years time, we talk about these times as those of The Rape Tweet.

Fuck. me. How to minimise the mess of this situation into a crass phrase and an easy sound bite.

see also The Report Abuse button.


I could be and probably am wrong about my opinion about this, but i'm not going to sign the change.org petition for twitter to have a Report Abuse button. Not yet.

And the reason why is that with the Report Abuse button and its clicking comes the simplistic, throwaway, ill-thought-out group mentality that comes with a Rape Tweet to begin with.

Fuck, i'm going to stop reducing all these complex contemporary occurrences to headlines, product names or album titles.



I'm not shocked anymore that Caroline Criado-Perez, a white feminist is undergoing a barrage of abuse for her attempt to champion the cause of a smart, intelligent and literary female figure that represents great chunks of Englishness to appear on the currency of the Bank of England.

I reserve that shock for the Marion Bartoli barrage last month and the bile that Ava Vidal cops everytime she appears in mainstream media.

I'm also not shocked that she's so shocked and wants it all to stop. It's fucking tiring seeing this reams of shit spewing forth from the mouths of the immature, repressed, ill-educated and confused of the world.

Most women I know have been spat on, called slut, butana, whore, dyke, fuckin' cunt, shamuta/sharmouta/sharmoota, fine piece of pussy... in public. usually from a car. or behind a pack.

Most women I know have also been raped, molested, sexually abused or bashed - or their sisters, friends and mothers have.

The abuse is fucking boring. And so are the words that come with it.



And despite that, and although I know it to be not entirely true, Twitter, for me is still a corner of a simulation of free speech across the technological age, that loads of people have access to (not just white middle class educated types either, as I implored to Mr White yesterday). It is the platform that those same women need to say 'excuse me, fuckwit, I am a person and these are *my* words.

Yes, it's full of cack. Trust me, I have seen the rise of cack since I started receiveing toilet tweets as SMSed from one Marcus Brown back in 2007, and it's immense. But it's everyone's cack.
It is as transparent as I can imagine a public place can possibly be, whilst still serving the anonymity required for vile behaviour and beautiful self expression. A bit like a blog, right. ahem.


When a stack of people act like cunts en masse, there are still laws that are in place and discussions that can be had across the platform to deal with it openly.

However, a Report Abuse button hands all that power of that offensive bile back to Twitter and for a small group of people to 'deal with it' - keep your dirt off my hands, thank you very much. It also does nothing to see the real consequences of what those words do to people, how society responds to them and to exercise our legal rights to not be threatened (especially with rape).

Of course I'm not suggesting that freedom of expression gives you the right to be a dangerous and malevolent twat about other people, or to hide behind the pack when verbally giving people a good kicking.

But a simple click-reporting system also denies that person the opportunity to suffer real consequences (ie prosecution and/or the ear bashing of his mother) from the rest of society. Having a stack of people telling him/her that it's not on. Having women standing up for themselves and saying, behind the same wall of privacy, that is NOT on. It keeps victims victimised.

And it prevents us, as a billion users (or however many there actually are),  to delve in behind the behaviour that has people believing that a Rape Tweet (sorry, I promised, didn't I) is a valid action.


Like I said, I could be wrong. I could be perpetuating the idea with my liberal 'rehabilitate them' ethos, and not shutting it down because 'exposure to more of this stuff is damaging to us all'. I can relate to being tired of seeing it. It's fucking exhausting.


But for fuck's sake, let's not just sweep it under the carpet and have Twitter policing this shit, because it hasn't worked over on Facebook (which, as a feminist, Caroline probably knows that garbage that goes on about pics of breastfeeding mothers, etc), so let's keep the discussion open.