Ça fait du bien de lire ses commentaires sur Amanda Todd, l’adolescente de 15 ans qui s’est pendue après avoir été harcelée pendant des mois par des prédateurs en ligne.
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« It has somehow become axiomatic that if a woman has the temerity to exist in the public space, particularly as a sexual being, then she is fair game. She deserves to be bullied. She has asked for it. The sexual harassment of women online is a way of punishing women for being in the public space just as surely as catcalls and the threat of sexual violence punish women when they walk the streets alone. The internet just makes this sort of bullying much, much easier and – up until now – practically consequence-free for men like Michael Brutsch who like to sit down after work and comment on crotch-shots of unwitting pre-teens, while telling themselves, as Brutsch wrote in a blog post this week, that it’s “only on the internet”. “It’s how I relaxed in the evening,” an unapologetic Brutsch told CNN. Well, if that’s what we’re calling it now.
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Freedom of speech is not the same as freedom to abuse – and posting “creepshots” or sharing explicit photographs without the subjects’ permission is abuse, whether or not the laws of various nations yet acknowledge it as such. What is happening now in response is the digital age’s equivalent of vigilante justice. Vigilante justice is brutal and unreliable and sometimes it misfires, and it’s what happens when every other sort of justice is lacking.
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Of course, the problem is far bigger than a few isolated creeps. The problem is a culture that persecutes women and girls for being visible online and in the physical world. Until bullies everywhere, in schools, on the internet and in positions of power, get the message that sexual abuse and harassment of women and girls has real, tangible consequences for them as well as for their victims, vigilante  e-justice will remain the only effective way for women and their supporters to hit back. »