When gaming journalist Alanah Pearce received rape threats, she was naturally dismayed, but not surprised in the aftermath of Gamergate. Alanah Pearce is a media and communications student. She reviews video games for radio and television stations in Australia.
She also has her own YouTube channel. Then she discovered the threats and vulgar comments were coming from boys, not men. “I realized that a lot of the people who send disgusting or overly sexual comments to me over the internet aren’t adult males,” said Pearce.
So she handled the problem in the most logical way: she informed their mothers. Since the boys were using their own Facebook pages, Pearce found it simple to track them down and contact their mothers. She contacted four mothers. One responded. She showed the woman a copy of the message her son had sent, a threat to rape Pearce as well as an epithet too foul to repeat here.
The mother referred to her own son by a four-letter word, apologized, and promised to talk to him. Pearce posted the conversation to Twitter, and it went viral. It was retweeted and favorited by thousands of people.
She has pledged to keep fighting back against threats and insults by continuing to inform the parents of these cyber-vandals. She won’t post all of the rest of them to Twitter, but she will do her best to inform these young louts that “it’s not okay to be sexist to women, even if they’re on the internet.”
