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Meet the journalist who reports people who threaten to rape her - to their mothers

Alanah Pearce, a gaming journalist from Australia, has been tracking down young people who have sent her vile abuse on Twitter and shown the evidence to their mothers.

The journalist, who hosts a radio show and runs a popular YouTube channel, had been receiving rape threats and had been subjected to sexist name-calling, but had assumed that most of the diatribe was coming from middle-aged men.

"A while ago, I realised that a lot of the people who send disgusting or overly sexual comments to me over the internet aren’t adult males," she told the Guardian.

Because a lot of the messages have been written on Facebook, Pearce said she found it quite easy to track down the culprits.

It turns out that mostly they’re young boys and the problem is they don’t know any better, so responding to them rationally didn’t resolve the situation.

And it got to the point where their comments were starting to make me feel really uncomfortable.

  • Alanah Pearce

Pearce says she has managed to track down four parents with one of them responding to her message (see above).

It was just a way to try to reach a resolution, to productively teach young boys it’s not okay to be sexist to women, even if they’re on the internet that they are real people and that there should be actual consequences for that.

  • Alanah Pearce

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