Between the Lines: Violence Against Women is Kinda a Crime

Earlier this year, when Georgia’s Ebony Monique Dickens posted that “all black people should rise up and shoot at every white cop in the nation starting right now,” she got arrested.

When Jeremiah Perez of Colorado wrote in the comment of a YouTube video in December that “for every innocent citizen that cops kill we, veterans will kill retired helpless cops,” he came under federal investigation.

And in that same month, when Chicopee resident Charlie DiRosa posted “Put Wings on Pigs” to Facebook, he was summonsed to court on a charge of threatening to commit a crime. He wound up having to do some community service.

But when Zoe Quinn of Massachusetts became the target of #GamerGate, hatemongers who sent her, and continue to send her, hundreds of messages a day like this one: “Im not only a pedophile, ive raped countless teens, this zoe bitch is my next victim, im coming slut,” nothing happened.

Each of these incidents — with the possible exception of DiRosa (more on that in a minute) — are foul examples of vicious cowards threatening the lives of innocent people. Each of these incidents should be investigated. But one wasn’t, and that’s apparently because repeatedly threatening to rape and murder a woman is only kinda a crime.

It’s true there are barriers to invesgitating online threats, the anonymity of people being the biggest, but the volume of complaints also stymies investigation, according to former FBI cybercrime investigator Tim Ryan, interviewed for a 2014 Slate artilce.

The Internet is littered with examples of women being harassed by mobs of rabid losers, often because the woman deigned to write about gender inequality. The wrath is doubled for women who attempt to discuss gender in video games or comic books, i.e. Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu. That’s where Quinn ran afoul of the Internet. A video game developer, Quinn designed a game called Depression Quest and broke up with her boyfriend. Quinn began seeing a freelance video game reporter and her jealous ex posted an online screed claiming Quinn slept with reporters for good game reviews.

That was enough to rally a bunch of sad-sack crusaders to come up with the hashtag #GamerGate and unite delusional angry men in a war against women in gaming.

But nothing happens. Of the estimated 2.5 million cases of cyberstalking that occurred in the U.S. between 2010 and 2013, federal prosecutors pursued only 10 cases, according to Bay State Congresswoman Katherine Clark.

This is shocking because harassing people is a crime in the U.S. In fact, threatening people online has been a specific federal crime since 1999. States, including Massachusetts, also have their own anti-online harassment and stalking laws.

So why haven’t the punks scaring women out of their wits with gross murder and rape threats been punished?

Why are there hundreds of thousands of rape kits waiting to be tested on backlog?

Why is gender-based pay inequality hard to prosecute?

In the U.S., women are still second class citizens.

Before I start getting hate mail, I’ll add that despite the insufficient concern for female life, things have gotten better. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 was signed into law by President Obama, and anti-domestic violence and stalking groups like the Northwestern DA’s High-Risk Domestic Violence Task Force are forming all over the nation to add safeguards that protect women.

But harassment is still an epidemic affecting women in the U.S. A 2014 survey by the Pew Research Center found that online harassment affects young women most. Of this group, 26 percent of respondents reported being stalked online, 25 percent said they had been sexually harassed via the Internet, and 18 percent said the online harassment was sustained long-term. It’s so common that investigating each incident would overwhelm public safety services. That sounds hard and expensive. Is it really cheaper and easier to kinda ignore the problem?

Fortunately, there are a lot of people working to change this situation. In particular, Congresswoman Clark, has taken Quinn’s situation to D.C., where she is lobbying to get online harassment of women taken seriously. In May she convinced the House to add language to the Department of Justice funding legislation stating the department will “intensify its efforts to combat this destructive abuse,” and “increase investigations and prosecutions of these crimes.” A small victory.

This summer, the Supreme Court is going to rule on Elonis v. the United States, a case that stems from violent rape and murder messages left by a soon-to-be ex-husband on his wife’s Facebook page. She reported it to police, but the husband claimed the words weren’t threats, just rap lyrics. Elonis will essentially define threat: Does a threat occur when someone feels threatened or only if a threat was intended? The decision will illuminate whether DiRosa’s Facebook post should have earned him community service.

It’s infuriating that so much progress is still necessary. I understand public safety departments aren’t necessarily well-funded and officials sometimes have to chose how limited resources are deployed to investigate crime. But the fact that over the last couple years, only 0.0004 percent of reported cyberstalking incidents were prosecuted by the feds says that the onslaught of violence against women is far down on the list of priorities.

Lax enforcement of laws makes the harassment, threatening, and rape of women only kinda a crime — and that’s a real crime.•

Kristin Palpini can be contacted at editor@valleyadvocate.com