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Why Are Women Under Attack Online?

Why women are under attack online? Photo: ThinkStock

It was 7am on a chilly morning in late July when Coralie Alison reached for her phone to see what the world had been up to overnight.

Within seconds she was fully awake. Her phone shuddered with notifications. Dozens and dozens poured in from Twitter, from Facebook and Instagram.

The messages that were filling her screen and forcing their way into her Melbourne home were some of the vilest a person could concoct.

"F&*king kill yourself you worthless piece of f#^king s%*t."

"Hey girl, let me know [when] you want me to f^&k you and lick my d#%k."

"I want you to put a toothpick in your vagina, then thrust a wall as hard as you can."

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Also flooding her phone were worried messages from friends and family. "Are you OK?" her sister asked. "Let us know if any of this starts getting to you," texted a colleague.

On it went for three days solid.

A relentless torrent of the purest venom: death threats, rape threats, threats against family.

"They’d even found an old photo of my niece – someone had scrolled through my Instagram feed and written, 'I hope she dies,'" says Alison, 34.

Another threatened to rape her while her father watched.

What had caused this frenzied attack?

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Six weeks earlier Alison, who heads up operations at social change organisation Collective Shout, had spearheaded a campaign to keep rap artist Tyler Okonma aka Tyler, The Creator – a man famous for his woman-hating lyrics – from touring Australia.

Before the Department of Immigration and Border Protection had made a decision on his visa application, Okonma caught wind of the campaign and took to Twitter to express his resentment.

""[Tyler] is now banned from Australia,"" Okonma (or one of his spokespeople) wrote at around 4am on July 28, Australian time. "You won @CoralieAlison. Im [sic] happy for you <3."

Instantly hundreds of thousands of his followers – and a fair few hangers-on who simply piled on for the thrill of it – erupted, spewing abuse at Alison via social media.

Okonma’s post was also retweeted more than 4000 times and favourited by more than 6000 people.

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While Alison says she took the messages in her stride, "if I was a person who had a mental illness or depression or had suicidal feelings or anything like that, those tweets would have been the final straw that broke the camel’s back."

This sort of barrage of abuse is far from a rare occurrence. Alison is just one of what’s believed to be millions of women who are threatened and tormented online every day.

In September, the UN Broadband Commission released a report called "Cyber Violence Against Women: A World-Wide Wake-Up Call", dubbing the issue “"a problem of pandemic proportion".

They also estimated that a staggering 73 per cent of women across the globe have been exposed to or experienced online abuse.

In Australia, while sexual harassment has largely been weeded out of offices, pubs, TV shows and newspaper cartoons over the past few decades – courtesy of groundbreaking legislation – it is flourishing in the most horrifying and archaic way on the internet.

To read the full story, pick up this month's issue of marie claire magazine, on sale now