A British academic whose new book is about why women are blamed for crimes committed against them has been subjected to thousands of coordinated attacks from alt-right trolls over the last week, culminating in her personal computer being hacked.
Dr Jessica Taylor, a senior lecturer in forensic and criminal psychology, is due to publish her exploration of victim blaming, Why Women are Blamed for Everything, on 27 April. Looking into what causes society to blame women who have been abused, raped, trafficked, assaulted or harassed by men, the book has drawn increasing publicity, including an appearance on Woman’s Hour.
But since 17 April, Taylor has been targeted by what she describes as a “group of organised trolls” who align themselves with the “alt-right”, men’s rights activists, incel (involuntary celibates) and Mgtow (men going their own way) movements, who have posted thousands of messages on her public Facebook page, including rape and death threats. On 21 April, Taylor contacted police when the screen on her laptop was remotely accessed. The investigation is ongoing.
“They had total control of my keyboard and mouse. I tried to stop them … after about 30 seconds of this, I realised how serious it was and I shut my laptop down and ran inside to turn my wifi off and shut all other devices down,” Taylor told the Guardian on Friday.
For five days, she was receiving 100 comments every few minutes, “everything from telling me to die, kill myself, messages saying ‘I will rape you’, messages saying I am not a real psychologist or PhD, that I’m fat, ugly, disgusting, dyke, ugly lesbian, barren, infertile, will die alone, that my parents hate me etc … When we started banning and blocking, they really ramped it up and it became violent and abusive.”
By Friday, more than 2,000 accounts had been blocked from her Facebook page.
Taylor is the founder of VictimFocus, an international research, teaching and consultancy organisation which aims to challenge the victim blaming of women subjected to violence and abuse. Her book is based on her doctoral research and on her 10 years of practice with women and girls, including interviews with women who were blamed for being raped, and the professionals who supported them.
“I knew the book needed to be written – but I didn’t know it needed to be written this badly. The targeted attacks from men in the last week have been appalling. I will always centre women in my work and I will keep making misogynists uncomfortable. Abuse and trolling is scary and it’s exhausting, but it’s never going to get me to a point where I say, ‘I will just stop talking about the abuse of women and girls,’” said Taylor.
She said the book was “written for every single woman and girl who has been told that she had to do something differently, change something about herself or make her life smaller so she isn’t subjected to male violence. I’ve had enough and millions of other women have had enough, too … [This book] has made a lot of men angry. You have to ask why that is. What are they frightened of?”
