Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Keyboard warriors using social media to silence women

CCTV image showing Wayne Couzens speaking to Sarah Everard by the side of the road in Poynders Court, south London. The police officer was given a whole-life sentence for her murder.
CCTV image showing Wayne Couzens speaking to Sarah Everard by the side of the road in Poynders Court, south London. The police officer was given a whole-life sentence for her murder. CCTV image showing Wayne Couzens speaking to Sarah Everard by the side of the road in Poynders Court, south London. The police officer was given a whole-life sentence for her murder.

On a bright evening in a quiet London suburb a bus passenger sees a young woman at the side of the road.

Back to the bus, facing a policeman wearing one of those standout high-vis vests. As she looks the policeman handcuffs the young woman, urges her into a car - though maybe the bus had passed by then - and drives her away. To murder her, as it turns out. The passenger of course did not know something was horribly wrong with what she saw and said nothing at the time. What was she to do? Shout ‘stop the bus’? Phone 999?

It might have made no difference. Noting a car registration accurately is not that easily done. All the same, the ‘if only’ and the glimpse of a life being stolen are like flashbacks from a nightmare. About the only thing we can say in favour of a shared northern attitude to police and a kind of lowest common denominator civic sense, is that it probably couldn’t have happened here.

Perhaps handed down fears about murderous intentions would tip the balance. Maybe a benighted and contested state has from the start had too much of uniforms that always lent some unearned authority. Some men, that is.

There have been cases of women who kill their partners but this is a much shorter list than that of the women and girls killed every month of every year by men they know. Since Covid began, court cases have revealed hideous injuries while a number of northern women have died in violent domestic incidents.

This past weekend there was the makings of a panic about evil creatures sticking needles into girls, ‘spiking’ them as well as drinks. Right on cue, as nightclubs doggedly open up despite an upsurge in Covid infections. This might seem in danger of turning into a sensationalist litany but laying out the evidence is necessary before calm analysis.

Physical hatred towards women from men is old as time. The new element is the viciousness of the internet. Almost entirely anonymous ‘keyboard warriors’ try to silence women by sickening them off social media. They fear feminist views, intelligence. What triggers them most, perhaps, is prominence.

A revelation of how squalid minds work, their commonest ‘technique’ - though what a grand name for something a seven year old might do until sent to bed for it - is to insult in the grossest way they can imagine a woman’s appearance, personality, physicality. It can be anything; shape, age, colour, disability. Nationality and religion, of course. Accent. All grist to the troll-mill.

In a pandemic-time zoom discussion on a feminist website, a young woman marvelled how instantaneous the hating is. Her troll-trigger (at an educated guess) is that she works with women ‘across community divides’ on education programmes, including on relationships, sexual health, consent to sex and what that means. She does some radio, less television and makes sure her young children miss her performances. After a current affairs programme she had just got into a waiting taxi when the insults poured into her phone; ‘about my voice, hair, teeth. My shirt!’ And she smiled, with undaunted good humour.

The virtue of social media is that it broadens access to public attention. The horror is that it gives a platform without penalty or discipline, to people who cannot bear that women, so long suppressed, have moved into the light and will not easily give it up.

It would be good to list the valiant who refuse to be cowed, take court cases and win them. But women working for charities lack resources to fight libels. Naming names attracts more bile.

The ‘spiking’ panic urged some to say boycott nightclubs. Instead, how about putting down the phones. Let Twitter lie fallow and haters' hate unnoticed.