Gamer Alanah Pearce Responds To Online Rape Threats In The Perfect Way
An Australian gaming journalist who received multiple online rape threats decided to take action against her tormenters by reaching out to their mothers, revealing to them the disturbing messages she endured at the hands of their sons.
As the Guardian reports, 21-year-old Alanah Pearce is a media and communications student from Brisbane, as well as a video game journalist, reviewing for television and radio stations. She believes her YouTube channel was the prompt for a recent flurry of abusive threats she received online.
Though Pearce assumed that the threats originated from middle aged men, she quickly realized that her abusers were actually much younger.
“It turns out that mostly they’re young boys and the problem is they don’t know any better, so responding to them rationally didn’t resolve the situation. And it got to the point where their comments were starting to make me feel really uncomfortable.”
Determining how to best respond to the threats, Pearce decided to contact the parents of the boys directly, revealing the horrific threats some of them had leveled against her. According to Pearce, the process of contacting her abusers’ mothers was hardly difficult.
“Especially as most of them write to me through their personal Facebook pages. It’s shockingly easy to find out who their families are,” she noted.
Tech blogger Alanah Pearce turns tables on trolls by contacting their mothers http://t.co/lqaEjlXGZU pic.twitter.com/OvwPOFfebY
— The Advertiser (@theTiser) November 29, 2014
As the Daily Mail observes, Pearce has so far sent four messages, getting a reply from only one person. The boy’s mother responded to her son’s threats in almost exactly the manner that Pearce had hoped.
Pearce posted the results of the conversation on Twitter, as she thought her friends would find her handling of the threats amusing. The tweet has since been favorited over 45,000 times, and retweeted over 28,000 times.
How to deal with rape threats on #Facebook: Tell mum #AlanahPearce #gamergate http://t.co/cTW6LDZMIg pic.twitter.com/aF5jsutsPc
— #GamerGate Trends (@Gamergatolizer) November 29, 2014
Pearce isn’t the first woman in the gaming community to face online threats of rape. As the Inquisitr previously noted, actress Felicia Day had her personal information released online earlier this year, after she stood up for women in gaming. Last year, Pearce herself documented the most offensive and sexist comments that were left on her online videos in a piece for Kotaku, 30 Days Of Sexism.
After the positive response from her first attempts, Pearce contends that she will continue to contact the mothers of any young boys that level rape threats against her, though she won’t necessarily post the results online.
[Image: Facebook via the Daily Mail]
