Member-only story
Jessica Valenti
Online Sexism and Racism Leads to Real Violence
It’s time to take online harassers to task
When Koeberle Bull received a hateful Facebook message last week from a man who lived more than 500 miles away, she called the police. Dylan Jarrell in Kentucky, who had sent the New Jersey mom of three a violent and racist Facebook message directed at her children, was pulling out of his driveway with hundreds of rounds of ammunition and a plan to commit a school shooting when the local cops stopped him.
Because Bull took Jarrell’s violent racism and online harassment seriously — unwilling to brush it off as a remote threat — she likely saved lives. It’s a good lesson for us all and a reminder of that violent expressions of racism and sexism online can be harbingers of violence committed in the flesh. Unfortunately, how things went with Jarrell is the exception rather than the rule.
Instead, acts of online hate get brushed off as a heated political discourse, leaving victims of harassment (usually women and people from otherwise marginalized groups) to be canaries in the coal mine — people whose warning cries go ignored.
It’s now common to perform a kind of online psychological forensics search after horrible crimes are committed. That’s how we learned that, a few…
