If You Have Been Harassed Online:
What to Do
1. Determine if the behavior is really harassment. Someone disagreeing with you is NOT harassment. Even if they disagree with you strongly. It is also usually not harassment if a person contacts you or posts about you once. Harassment consists of the intentional crossing of your emotional or physical safety boundaries. You must have boundaries set in place clearly in order for that to apply.
Here is the legal definition of harassment according to Black's Law Dictionary: "a course of conduct directed at a specific person that causes substantial emotional distress in such person and serves no legitimate purpose" or "words, gestures, and actions which tend to annoy, alarm and abuse (verbally) another person."
This is of course a very broad definition which
state and federal legislation and common law have narrowed and refined in various
ways. However, for our purposes, we will define online harassment as any actions
that meet the qualifications of the above definition after the harasser has been
told to cease. This definition, due to its broadness, is useful in that it fails to
put value judgements on the complaints of individuals.
2. Tell the harasser to STOP! Clearly tell the perpetrator that his/her email,
posts, comments, IRC or ICQ communications are unwanted and that you want an immediate end
to them. Sometimes the best approach to this is a simple, rational "I am sorry
that you feel that way, but I really feel that you are crossing some boundaries for
me here and I would prefer it if we ended our communication here."
3. Contact the site administrator. If the behavior persists, you may
want to contact the administrator responsible for the site. Who is the site
administrator and how do you locate them? S/he is the operator of the BBS, the
sysadmin of the system on which the web-based chat or other server is placed, or in
the case of email the sysadmin of the system that the person harassing you is
mailing from.
Most often, sites have an address called postmaster@[that site].com or webmaster@[that site] that you can use to report problems. If that fails, you can usually find contact addresses at web sites , which you can find by looking up the host name in a search engine like Alta Vista or Lycos (to name just a couple) or you can look them up through the internic. Searching for sites in the USA [.com, .mil, .org, .edu, .us and .gov] will give you the full contact information including names and addresses. The site is... http://rs.internic.net/cgi-bin/whois . Just type in the address after the "@" symbol.
4. Determine your desired result. What do you want to see happen in this
situation? Try to think of this more rationally than emotionally, and try to be
realistic about what you can expect.
Some very
reasonable and realistic goals might be :
Stop the harasser from contacting you
Convince the site administrator to ban the harasser if s/he is doing this to many people
or has a history of it.
Improve the climate at this site by raising
awareness of harassment issues and convincing the site administrator to employ and enforce
some anti-harassment policies.
Protect yourself emotionally and physically from the harasser
Some unrealistic goals
might be:
Solicit an apology from the harasser. He/she obviously doesn't have the social
skills necessary to do something this mature if he/she is harassing you to begin with.
Shut down the system completely. You might really be angry at the whole thing and
want to do this, but unless there is a culture of harassment on that system, or unless the
administrator has an itchy trigger finger, this is not so easy to do. It isn't
impossible however in extreme cases.
Harass the harasser until he/she is sorry. This is possible in some cases, but it is not
in keeping with rational thinking. Of course you are angry, and you want to
see the person who is hurting you hurt as well. This is a natural human reaction.
But take a step back and think about what that would really accomplish. It
would only perpetuate a culture of harassment, and this is the exact thing we want to stop
so that others do not have to feel as hurt and upset as you do right now.
5. Take care of you first. In spite of what some people may say to you,
words can hurt a lot. No matter what decisions you make about dealing with
harassment, put your own emotional needs first. Sometimes you may want to simply walk
away, and that's alright. There are times that we are too vulnerable to fight a battle.
Get yourself into some safe places, talk it out with friends or ask me for a
referral to organizations and/or professionals that can help you work through this.
6. Decide how you want to proceed. If you feel that no progress
has been made after attempts to contact and educate the site administrator, you may feel
that you want to pursue the matter in some other way. I can make suggestions and refer you
to other sources if that is your desire at that time.
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