What women-hating trolls really believe

Every week I block and report 10 to 15 people on Twitter for being abusive. The malicious messages range from comments about my looks to full on threats – which aren’t suitable for printing on a family newspaper site.

The number of trolls I block definitely increases disproportionately if I happen to have appeared on TV – and these creatures happen to have caught physical sight of me.

Blocking and reporting scumbags has become a digital rite of passage in the five years I’ve been on Twitter. However, I have thankfully never been subjected to a total tidal wave of abuse on the same level as women’s rights campaigner, Caroline Criado-Perez, who received some 50 rape and murder threats every hour for two days.

While the debate rages on about how best to tackle such incidents, I turned my attention yesterday to actually trying to talk to some of these trolls that lurk anonymously online.

I challenged any trolls listening to my weekly LBC 97.3 radio show to call me. I know for sure that a minority of my listeners sadly are trolls – as I do most of my blocking and reporting after I come off air each week.

After interviewing Criado-Perez, who voiced her fear for other victims without a high profile to get help from the authorities, I didn’t have to wait long for the first digital ogre to call in.

Troll number 1

First troll up was Peter from Whitechapel. He was quick to deliver some clichés - such as if Criado-Perez can’t stand the heat on Twitter, then she should get out of the kitchen.

But not content with his trite and quite frankly misplaced advice, I pushed harder and whoah – then the real Peter emerged.

“She was asking for it,” he told me. According to this nitwit, if you campaign about issues such as keeping a woman on English banknotes, you should “expect to receive rape threats”. I delved further.

“If you put your head above the parapet, like she has, then you deserve this type of abuse. It’s what you get when you are a woman shouting about something,” Peter told me, starting to get a little irate.

I then asked if he went online and what he did when he graced the web with his presence.

Dear reader, you will be happy to hear Peter does use the internet, when he’s not calling radio shows. “I email, play games and go on forums,” he told me.

When I asked what he did on those forums and whether he was nasty to people, he explained that he did post offensive comments and was horrible to people who “deserved it”.

Caroline Criado-Perez: the abuse was so extreme she has reported it to police

And that was where I decided to leave that particular call – safe in the knowledge that trolls are not a figment of my digital imagination. They do exist and fully believe it is their right to abuse people who have opinions. They see online as war.

Troll number 2

Then Gary from Birmingham decided to call in – and while the experience was quite vile, I can only thank him for his horrible honesty. Because while Peter was a good starter troll – Gary provided the full-fat version of what it is to be a woman-hating internet troll.

Gary, a deep-voiced menacing-sounding man, sat in an eerily quiet home, told me in no uncertain terms that “feminists like Caroline were undermining what it is to be a man” and needed “sorting out”.

“Men are predators,” he explained calmly. “And this [rape threats] is what we do.” I was almost stunned into silence – which is after all what blokes like Gary get off on.

Regrouping, I then asked him how he would feel if, like Criado-Perez, his mother (you hope the one woman he may respect for creating him, so he could you know, fulfil his male predatory purpose on earth and all that) received 50 rape threats an hour?

His first answer was genius: “She wouldn’t because my mum’s not a feminist.” Right.

I asked the question again and his reply defied belief: “She would know these men wouldn’t actually come and rape her. They don’t mean it. Rape is a metaphor.”

No Gary, rape ain’t a metaphor mate. Metaphor for what exactly, I asked.

Gary, I think a little trolled out by himself, couldn’t even answer that one and I duly decided airtime needed to go back to the majority of mankind, who deplore this kind of mentality.

Brilliantly, as if on cue, a great bloke, Abbas from Redbridge, rang in just to remind me that “real men don’t think threatening women with rape is a metaphor or ever ok, online or off”, and my Twitter feed began fizzing in time with the non-stop ringing of the studio phones.

They do exist and need shaming

But while it isn’t pleasant talking to the likes of Peter and Gary, I am happy two trolls took some time out of abusing people online, to come on air and voice their “justifications” for such behaviour.

It’s too easy to write these people off as “digital fakes” and “weirdos” we will never meet – without actually ever confronting and shaming them. But they are real. These trolls live amongst us and believe posting rape threats, illegal in the real world, is acceptable online. Moreover, they believe, like both Gary and Peter, women who put their head above the parapet, even over benign issues such as keeping a woman’s face on English banknotes, “deserve” rape threats. Last night I felt like I shone a torch on the underside of the internet and felt a bit sick at what I found lurking there.

Scary Gary may have been adamant in his views, but I’m hopeful that the huge reaction his unfathomable comments provoked will have shamed him into realising how awful his approach is.

I am also hopeful that women don’t listen to Peter, and think this sort of abuse means they should leave Twitter. As Criado-Perez said herself to me, trolling people on sites like Twitter is designed expressly to make women leave public spaces. This sort of behaviour has been happening for centuries – except it’s now happening virtually.

However, women’s reaction to it must be to stay online, stay visible and stay shaming these trolls into oblivion. After all, they're asking for it.