Unable to simply ignore the barrage of obscenity any longer, Laura and Emily have chosen to forward the messages on to the offenders’ partners.
Emily posted a tweet showing how she responds. This was the attached image:
Laura finds it unacceptable that there are zero consequences for online sexual harassment and that “men can get away with absolutely no ramifications, so they simply don’t care”.
Emily describes these messages as “confronting”, “appalling” and “shocking”.
Emily has 2.3 million Instagram followers, but stressed to The Huffington Post that this happens to many women, not just models with a big fan base.
She revealed that the responses from the girlfriends of the offenders have ranged from “ignoring to heartfelt gratitude”.
Emily admits that there has been a lot of backlash to their retaliatory tactics, mostly along the lines that because the women take ‘sexy selfies’ they were somehow deserving of these messages.
But Emily, above, doesn’t buy that argument for a second.
“It’s about time we start taking the focus off teaching women not to ‘ask for’ this type of abuse and start to hold the men who do this accountable and teach them to respect women.”
“I don’t think a lot of people are aware of the frequency at which this actually happens,” adds Laura.
She says that despite having been called every disgusting, degrading obscenity under the sun for taking a stand against this behaviour, there are many women “thanking us for using our platform to speak out and that is what really matters”.
Both agreed that the problem is an ongoing one, and that there’s been a dialogue surrounding the issue for a number of years now.
But they believe it’s important for them to do their bit to stamp out online harassment .
“We just want to remind people to take accountability for their actions online, and stop saying and doing things online that you wouldn’t do in person,” says Emily.
