Opinion
Global warming: Not reversible, but stoppable
Let's start with two skill-testing questions: 1. If we stop greenhouse gas emissions, won't the climate naturally go back to the way it was before? 2. Isn't there "warming in the pipeline" that will continue to heat up the planet no matter what we do? The correct…
To protect our children, we must talk to them about rape
Desmond Tutu, Jacob Lief and Sohaila Abdulali: Yes, governments should step up, but so should we. We must not be squeamish about bringing this issue to the dinner table.
What will you discuss with your children this evening? Sports, the weather, celebrity gossip, rape?
We are from three generations (aged 81, 50 and 36), three faiths (Christian, Muslim, Jewish) and three continents (Africa, Asia, North America). One of us is a religious leader, one a writer and rape survivor and one the CEO of a non-profit organisation. We come together in the wake of the recent upheaval around rape in India, South Africa, the US and the UK, because we share a passionate conviction: we must bring the discourse home to the next generation on every continent.
Why did the men in the recent India and South Africa crimes rape, torture, and murder their victims? How could Jimmy Savile of the BBC molest hundreds of people and still die a hero? Why did the gang rapists in Ohio feel safe boasting on camera about what they had done? Why do too many Indians dehumanise women, and too many South Africans believe that men are just intrinsically badly behaved and programmed to rape? Who do we think these sub-human women and out-of-control men are?
They are us and, if we are not careful, they will be our children. We do not have the answers, but we should all be asking the questions, and we should include our sons, daughters and all the young people in our lives in our discussions. We need to stop behaving as if it's all a terrible problem out there, and start talking about it with each other and with our children.
So much ink has been spilt in the media over the past few weeks. Rape has become a ubiquitous global topic, and that is encouraging since it is a global blot on our collective humanity. But hardly anyone has paid attention to how this affects the most important group of all: the next generation, which is poised to inherit our poisonous baggage.
The fact is, rape is utterly commonplace in all our cultures. It is part of the fabric of everyday life, yet we all act as if it's something shocking and extraordinary whenever it hits the headlines. We remain silent, and so we condone it. The three of us deal with this issue in different ways every day of our lives, yet we too are guilty of protesting articulately outside but leaving it on the other side of the door when we sit down to dinner with our families. Until rape, and the structures – sexism, inequality, tradition – that make it possible, are part of our dinner-table conversation with the next generation, it will continue. Is it polite and comfortable to talk about it? No. Must we anyway? Yes.
It seems daunting. But which is more painful: talking sensibly with young people about this issue, the same way we might talk with them about drugs, guns or bullying, or waiting for something terrible to happen so close to home that you have to address it in a time of turmoil?
Children can seem fragile, and adults often have the mistaken notion that telling children about harsh realities will destroy their innocence. But you do not lose innocence when you learn about terrible acts; you lose your innocence when you commit them. An open culture of tolerance, honesty and discussion is the best way to safeguard innocence, not destroy it.
Changing rape culture is family work, but it cannot be only family work. It is a public health issue of gravest concern. The statistics are everywhere, but the evidence is weirdly shadowy: like the one in four girls abused in South Africa, by the one in four men who admit to having raped someone. (But who are these girls, and where are these men? Hardly anyone is talking.) The cost in human suffering, lives decimated, families destroyed, mental anguish, physical trauma … the cost of rape is probably bigger than any of us can comprehend. Rape is expensive. Not just families from China to Canada, but also all the important institutions in young people's lives everywhere – schools from Finland to the Philippines, youth programmes from London to Laos – should spend less energy ignoring the issue and more energy helping children understand the basic concepts of respect and choice.
Yes, governments must step up. But so should we all. Why shouldn't rape be dinner-table conversation? We talk about war, we talk about death, we discuss values with our children. But on the subject of sexual assault, we remain silent and squeamish. We leave them ill-prepared, with whispers of untold horrors and no guidance for our sons on how they should behave if one day they should find themselves in a group of boys with a girl in their power.
Rape does not exist in a vacuum, and we cannot talk about it as if it is removed from the rest of our lives. Let's teach our children that they don't need to live in little boxes defined by their gender or culture. Let's teach them that they are all of equal worth. Let's not favour our boys over our girls. Let's not tolerate bullying or stereotyping. Let's reject utterly the notion that boys will be boys and girls must work around this assumption or pay the price.
Yes, policies should change, laws should be just. But if we want to make a fundamental difference, all of us must bring the conversation home. It is our opportunity to start to create true change. It might not be polite and comfortable, but it is essential. We owe it to our children.
Politico's wholly sexist narrative of the 'woman in power' at the New York Times
The New York Times executive editor is apparently stubborn and snappy. Why must we focus on women's character traits?
Happy newsrooms are all alike. Every unhappy newsroom is unhappy in its own way. The New York Times newsroom is unhappy because its editor is not very nice. Allegedly. This startling revelation comes from a piece posted on Politico yesterday that instantly lost the internet but gained fans at the NYT.
The litany of complaints against Jill Abramson, the Times's executive editor, is indeed jaw-dropping.
She is apparently, on occasion, stubborn and condescending. She snaps at people in meetings (sometimes). Once, she asked why an editor was still in a meeting instead of leaving to fix a problem that had been identified. Worst of all, she had such a strong disagreement with her managing editor over the direction of the news pages that he slapped the wall and walked out. The fact that he was allowed to walk back in again might mean that the tirelessly unpleasant Abramson was having an off day.
Dean Baquet, the managing editor in question, does admit in the piece that walking out was not perhaps the best thing for a senior editor like him to do. The very popular Baquet also admits to a history of wall-punching. Abramson, though apparently non-violent, is judged "impossible", according to the unsourced Politico hatchet job. Impossible, stubborn, condescending, snappy. Yes, it is undoubtedly the case that Jill Abramson is a newspaper editor. Not just any newspaper editor – a female newspaper editor.
The lame nature of the reporting suggests it might be better just to ignore the piece entirely, but it deserves attention, as it fuels an exasperating and wholly sexist narrative about women in power. The souls of the New York Times who found themselves describing Abramson's shortcomings in terms of her manner and mood should be sentenced to read Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In as punishment. As we know, this manifesto for women in the boardroom tells us that the correlation between women being judged 'likeable' and their position in a hierarchy are inversely proportionate.
For a news organization such as Politico to run a piece focused so tightly on Abramson's personality is disappointing. It might have highlighted the fact she has just had the most successful week of her professional life. Her news organization picked up four Pulitzer Prizes, the third highest haul in the Times's history, and the coverage of the Boston bombings was, by wide acknowledgment, exceptionally good, when others were rocky and error-strewn.
For every anonymous source anxious to talk about Abramson's mood swings, and absences, there could have been a counterbalancing one to talk about how Abramson is more present on the news floor than a number of her predecessors. For every person who talks about the exhausting nature of her management style, there is another who might point out that the news operation is the strongest it has been for a long time. You might even find people who think there is more than a whiff of sexism apparent in the building, and the critiques. None of this, however, feeds the story of a woman in charge who tells people what to do in a manner they don't like.
If one redacts 'Jill' from Politico's piece and replaces it with 'Jack', the absurdity and sexism becomes all the more obvious:
"It's frustrating because he is such a smart person. When Jack is on his game, he is one of the smartest people I've ever met," one staffer said. "But he's not a naturally charismatic person — he's not approachable." You see? When was the last time the approachability of a male editor made for copy?
The issue is not what is going on in the New York Times newsroom, but how we choose to talk and write about it. In Sandberg's book, she references the Howard-Heidi experiment, where students rate a description of a person's accomplishments. When the piece is read with the name of the real author attached (Heidi Roizen), she is described as being 'selfish' and not the kind of person you would want to work for. When a false identity 'Howard' was attached to the piece, students rated him as 'likeable'.
What Byers did not cover was the sense that there is widespread and ingrained sexism in journalism, where a woman's character traits are central to a critique of she does the job. Men, who are equally awful in just as many ways, are judged more on output and success. At no point are we asked to stop and consider whether Abramson's abrasive attitude has actually led to the Times becoming a better newspaper, even though the subjective view suggests it has.
Nice people do not necessarily make good editors, whatever their gender. In fact, the opposite might be true. But fewer women will want to even try if the expectations of them in power are so completely different from men in the same jobs and the public judgment so arbitrary and misogynistic.
Atrocities such as the Boston bombing are hard to tackle, but gun crime isn't
The greatest threat to US citizens is not one-off terror attacks, but the menace that comes with mass gun-ownership
Nobody knows why he did it. But that hasn't stopped them speculating. In retrospect, from the testimony of those who knew him, there were signs. But nobody could have predicted anything on this scale. What influences came to bear? What motives could there be? What would drive a young man to wilfully murder as many innocents as possible, leaving the country both vulnerable and mournful?
I pose these questions not of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old chief surviving suspect in the Boston bombing saga that left three dead and injured more than 170 last week, but of Adam Lanza, who shot 20 children and six teachers in Newtown, Connecticut in December. The contradictions in the political responses to the two tragedies and the issues they raise could not be more glaring or obscene.
On Monday the Boston Marathon was bombed. Within a day of suspects being identified, politicians who defended the status quo on guns were calling for "increased surveillance of Muslims" and addressing "loopholes in the immigration system" (Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlan, who was killed in a firefight, grew up in Kyrgyzstan).
On Wednesday the Senate declined to pass even the most anaemic gun control measures in response to the Newtown shootings. Twenty children, aged between six and seven, are slaughtered in school and the American polity takes five months to decide do nothing. Unable to break the filibuster limit, it didn't even come to a vote. Hiding behind the National Rifle Association's (NRA) talking points, gun rights senators cloaked themselves in the constitution, insisting support for gun control would violate the second amendment "right to bear arms".
While the authorities denied the still unconscious Dzhokhar his Miranda rights (informing him that he has the right to remain silent), some Republicans insisted he be tried as "an enemy combatant" – the legal aberration and moral abomination that paved the way to Guantánamo Bay. Their devotion to constitutional rights, it turns out, is partial; their embrace of guns is complete. The NRA even opposes legislation banning gun sales to people on the terrorist watchlist, meaning those who can't board a flight can still lock and load.
As John Oliver, a UK comedian on the Daily Show, noted: "One failed attempt at a shoe bomb and we all have to take off our shoes at the airport. Thirty one school shootings since Columbine and no change in the regulation of guns."
The ramifications of this neglect cannot be overstated. More than 85 people – including eight children – are killed with guns on an average day in America and more than twice that number are injured. Even taking into account the fact that most gun deaths are suicides, that's still several times the death toll of 9/11 every year.
Numbers alone, however, don't quite do the cognitive dissonance justice. The effect of a terrorist attack such as Boston cannot be measured in the number of slain alone. Terrorism creates a culture of fear and suspicion that spreads beyond those immediately affected and impacts upon our understanding of risk. It means no one feels safe, anyone is a potential suspect and danger could be anywhere. "Terror is first of all the terror of the next attack," writes Arjun Appadurai in Fear of Small Numbers. "Terror … opens the possibility that anyone may be a soldier in disguise, a sleeper among us, waiting to strike at the heart of our social slumber."
The trouble is this is precisely the culture that many Americans have lived in for years. It's estimated that in Chicago 20-30% of the children have witnessed a school shooting. Carolyn Murray, whose son was shot dead on his grandmother's lawn in a Chicago suburb, does not enjoy much in the way of "social slumber". She has become so accustomed to gunfire at the weekends she could call the police and tell them what calibre was used and the direction of the shooting, just by listening in bed. Put bluntly, a significant section of America lives in constant terror and Congress just decided they should continue to do so.
In the hierarchy of suffering and security in America there are, in short, places where you are supposed to be safe – marathons, suburban schools, cinemas – and places where you are apparently entitled to no such expectation: particularly poor black and Latino neighbourhoods. Only in a handful of exceptions – when the killers are white, American-born Christians (the media has developed no default anxiety about them), the dead mostly white and the murders in large numbers – do shootings stand a chance of attracting mainstream political attention. Even then, only rarely, and even then, as last week proved, to little tangible effect.
The uncomfortable reality is that there is precious little that can be done to prevent an atrocity such as that in Boston. "We've had a lot of successes in degrading the ability of al-Qaida to launch massive attacks," Democratic congressman Adam Schiff, a former federal prosecutor and member of the house intelligence committee, told the Washington Post. "But we've had a proliferation of one-off, foreign-born plots and self-radicalised individuals … We're going to have to recognise a certain vulnerability, and adopt a determined view that we will go on as we have, taking prudent precautions, but not changing the way we live."
Conversely there is a great deal that can be done to change the way Americans die daily. Gun rights advocates insist the gun-control measure that had the best chance last week, which demanded background checks for guns sold online and at gun shows, would not have prevented Lanza's crime. He used his mother's gun, which had been purchased legally. That's true, although since 90% of Americans and even 74% of gun-owning members of the NRA agreed with it, they should have passed it anyway. But the reason the compromise proposal was so tepid is because they scuppered efforts to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, which enabled Lanza to kill far more children far more quickly.
Expressing frustration at the failure to pass anything, Andrew Goddard, whose son Colin was injured during the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech, told the New York Times: "It's almost like you can see the finish line, but you just can't get there. It's more annoying to be able to see it and not get to it."
There's many a Boston marathon runner who knows exactly how that feels.
5 ways to stay sane during cable TV's coverage of a tragedy
It's been a big news week – and a long one for ill-served viewers. Here's a survival guide from one weathered veteran
The marathon coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing has set into motion the all-too-familiar. When something awful happens, the human impulse is get informed instantly. That often means rushing to a TV and gaping at the unfolding drama. It's an understandable reflex, but usually, a self-defeating one, like scratching a sore or drinking sea water.
It may satisfy the immediate urge, but beware the consequences. CNN's false report about arrests was as predictable as it was irresponsible; live TV coverage is a world of blunder. So, if you must tune into 24-hour cable news for the latest, there a few things always to bear in mind:
A watched pot never boils. Following violent crimes and disasters, the intensity of the coverage is inversely correlated with the prospects for advancing the story. Incidents last as long as they last – usually, seconds – then they are over. The "when" and "where" and some of the "who" (victims) are immediately obvious. The rest of the "who" (the culprits, the missing), plus the "why" and the "how", can take days or weeks or months to unravel.
The latest developments usually aren't. Desperate to add to the endlessly repeated basic facts, reporters will breathlessly pass along tiny bits of detail gleaned from authorities speaking unofficially, possible witnesses and cousins of possible witnesses. Do not be fooled by the urgency in the journalists' voices. The details are second or third hand and usually wrong. "Unconfirmed report" means "not true". "Confirmed report" means "probably not true".
Get your brain a screen saver. That's what computers use to keep a single image from being etched into the screen. If a tragic news event is caught on video, TV will show you again and again what happened until it is forever burned into your consciousness. Eventually, this denudes even the most shocking footage of any informational or emotional clout – not to mention, meaning – and turns it into little more than a GIF. If you absolutely must hang on to every word, consider switching to the radio.
If you knew what went on in the kitchen, you might not eat at the restaurant. The cable channels have a handful of anchors and a handful of reporters. They may look authoritative, but they don't constitute anything remotely like a robust news-gathering machine. The channels do employ a whole mess of producers, but their principal job is to book experts and pundits, who may have credentials and make-up, but are basically just guessing.
Bad news does not necessarily have larger significance. When calamity erupts, your favorite network will be live on the scene for hours or days. Logos will be designed. Concern will be etched on the anchors' faces. Thoughts and prayers will be expressed for victims and their kin. But neither the amount of airtime nor even the body count are reliable measures of intrinsic importance. A fatal spasm of violence (in the west only), or a mass shooting, or even a missing blond person (if cute), will always trump, for instance, a budget vote or telecom lobbying or other events lacking yellow police tape that affect a large percentage of the population every day. As the saying goes: if it bleeds it leads. The corollary is: Citizens United – the supreme court ruling that fundamentally altered the scale and transparency of US political campaign funding – didn't get a logo.
They shoot horses, don't they? You've seen film of the dance marathons from the 1930s – those desperate people circling the floor for hour on end, day and night, in the hopes of winning some pitiful prize. When you tune into 24-hour cable after a tragedy, ask yourself the question: "There is nothing being accomplished through this awful spectacle, so why am I watching?"
Let's be honest about Kermit Gosnell's abortion 'house of horrors'
The only cover up happening about Gosnell's abortions is how pro-life activists deserve some of the blame
By now you've hopefully heard about the trial of Kermit Gosnell, a Pennsylvania doctor who allegedly ran a filthy health clinic where he performed illegal abortion procedures. Gosnell is accused of killing seven premature babies and one woman, among other crimes. Pro-choice and lefty journalists covered Gosnell years ago, when the grand jury report detailing the allegations was initially filed. Now the trial is under way, and anti-abortion activists are insisting there's been a cover up by ideologues intent on averting honest discussion about the case in order to suit a cynical politics agenda.
They're right. But the ideologues doing the cover up are on the pro-life side.
Coverage of shocking crimes often plays out the same way: there's a lot of coverage when charges are first filed or an arrest is made, and then again when a verdict comes down. While Nancy Grace and cable news may offer wall-to-wall coverage of a handful of trials every year, for the most part, reputable national publications cover news when it happens, which isn't in a state court trial play-by-play. Local media does that.
That's exactly what's happened during the Gosnell trial. When the grand jury report was first filed, it got attention from almost every major writer who covers reproductive rights and gender issues – Amanda Marcotte at Slate, Michelle Goldberg at the Daily Beast, Katha Pollitt at the Nation, Kate Harding at Salon, Lori Adelman at the Grio. Mainstream media, too covered it: the New York Times, CNN, NPR, CBS, the Washington Post, Time magazine. That was in 2011. Now that the trial is underway, local Pennsylvania media has covered it, with reporter Tara Murtha doing a particularly thorough job. When a verdict is handed down, it will undoubtedly be in the national spotlight again.
So why are anti-abortion activists claiming that no one is covering the trial? And why are usually reputable, fairly moderate male writers believing them?
The goal of "pro-life" activists isn't to draw attention to an illegal butcher in order to protect women and babies. The braying about Gosnell is a ploy to shame the media into covering the issue from the anti-abortion perspective, conflating the illegal procedures performed by Gosnell with safe, legal abortion. That conflation is necessary for the pro-life side to use the media coverage to promote unnecessary regulations of clinics, purposed solely to make abortion less accessible, and advocate for the very things that allowed Gosnell's clinic to exist in the first place.
Understanding why women went to Gosnell requires understanding just how inaccessible abortion is for low-income women, who are disproportionately women of color, and for rural women. The most common reason women give for terminating a pregnancy is economic: they can't afford a child. A majority of women seeking abortions already have at least one child, and know exactly how difficult and rewarding parenthood can be. Forty-two percent of women who terminate pregnancies live under the poverty line, and another 27% live close to it, meaning nearly 70% of women who have abortions are already living in financially perilous circumstances.
Low-income women who rely on mediciad and Title X for their health care aren't able to use federal funds to pay for abortion, thanks to the anti-choice Hyde Amendment, which segregates abortion out into a unique category of medical procedures that poor women must fund out of pocket. Things aren't necessarily better for women with private insurance: eight states have laws on the books that prevent private insurance companies from covering elective abortions. Ongoing attacks on Planned Parenthood and funding for contraception have also made it more difficult for low-income women to prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place.
Anti-abortion terrorists have succeeded in scaring a good number of doctors, nurses and staff out of working at abortion clinics, either by flat-out shooting doctors and bombing facilities or by engaging in extended harassment and intimidation campaigns. Ninety percent of abortion clinics report experiencing some type of harassment. Without employees willing to risk their lives, clinics close, and women have to travel farther – and spend more money – for care. Eighty-seven percent of US counties have no abortion clinic, and women in vast swaths of the country have to travel hundreds of miles in order to obtain an abortion. Once they get to the clinic, they can at times be greeted by a crowd of aggressive protestors. At least one woman said she went to Gosnell's clinic to avoid the anti-abortion mobs outside a more reputable one.
Anti-abortion ideologues have also succeeded in passing laws that require doctors to tell women outright lies about abortion that no reputable medical organizations back – for example, that abortion causes breast cancer, that fetuses feel pain or that women who terminate pregnancies have long-term mental health problems.
Twenty-six states have mandatory waiting periods, where women are treated like incompetent children and forced to go home and think about their requested abortion for 24 or 48 hours. Since patients are required to have the initial consultation in person, that means that a woman traveling for an abortion either has to make the trip twice in a few days or stay for multiple nights in a hotel. For low-income women, those added costs for gas, the bus, childcare and housing, in addition to the cost of the abortion procedure itself and lost wages from a day or three off of work, can be prohibitive.
Scraping together several hundred dollars or more, when several hundred dollars is more disposable income than you usually see all year, takes weeks or months. It requires borrowing money from friends, pawning jewelry or unnecessary items, working overtime, scrimping on food, or doing whatever necessary to put aside a few dollars at a time. While a woman is desperately trying to save up money to end a pregnancy, the pregnancy progresses, and abortion gets both more complicated and more expensive. Impediments to abortion don't actually decrease the abortion rate, but they do increase the late-term abortion rate, and they do make things more difficult, shameful and expensive for women seeking to terminate pregnancies.
One in three American women will terminate a pregnancy in her life. Many of these women could be helped by universal health care, contraception coverage, sexual health education, affordable daycare and a variety of other policies routinely promoted by feminists and opposed by pro-life Republicans. But instead of giving women the tools to both prevent unintended pregnancy and care for wanted children, the "pro-life" right dedicates its money and effort making abortion more difficult and more dangerous. The goal isn't the promote life, it's to punish women.
That's where the Gosnell case comes in. Troy Newman, a pro-life leader and the president of Operation Rescue, is among the loudest voices sounding the Gosnell alarm. He's also talking about how Gosnell is a gift from God to the pro-life movement. What Gosnell is accused of doing in his clinic is horrifying and illegal, which is why he's on trial. His illegal acts are no more an indictment of safe, legal abortion than one child-molesting doctor is an indictment of all pediatricians. But pro-lifers like Newman are glad Gosnell exists, because they can use him to tar all abortion providers. These are the folks who want abortion to be dangerous, gruesome and unregulated. Of course they're thrilled that they finally found a real villain. The senior policy advisor of Newman's organization, by the way, is a "pro-life" activist who served two years in federal prison after pleading guilty to conspiring to bomb an abortion clinic. That woman, Cheryl Sullenger, is also a regular contributor to LifeSite News, a leading anti-abortion website. It's not that there are bad apples in the anti-abortion movement; the bad apples are the movement.
We shouldn't be covering Gosnell just because a handful of anti-abortion loudmouths demand we do. We should cover Gosnell because the case is newsworthy, which is why so many media outlets did cover it when the grand jury report was filed. In covering the case, we should also look at how to prevent future Gosnells. The pro-choice movement has an answer: remove the barriers that made vulnerable women go to Gosnell in the first place. Make safe, early abortion accessible and affordable, and help women prevent pregnancy in the first place. The pro-life answer is to double down on abortion restrictions and outlaw the procedure wholesale, a move that would do little more than create many more Gosnell-style houses of horror.
The Gosnell case is a story precisely because it is unusual. Before abortion was legal across the country, women dying from botched abortions wasn't particularly newsworthy. Legal abortion in the United States is today one of the safest medical procedures around. It becomes dangerous when it's outlawed or functionally illegal, and when women are desperate and shamed.
Widespread adoption of pro-life laws created one Gosnell. We shouldn't make more.
How Anonymous have become digital culture's protest heroes
The hacktivist collective's justice campaign for internet bullying victim Rehtaeh Parsons, shows how they've made online protest mainstream
In 2007, the hacktivist collective Anonymous was dubbed the "internet hate machine" by Fox News for their trolling campaigns. Six years later, they are the white knights of the digital realm, seeking justice for the now deceased 17-year-old Rehtaeh Parsons, an alleged gang rape victim who killed herself after bullying by her Nova Scotian classmates. This is just one of the collective's high profile causes in the past week, but in terms of good PR and an agency for change, it compares to their actions on Steubenville.
They call it #OpJustice4Rehtaeh on Twitter, and all types of people – from journalists and teens to women who normally wouldn't associate with Anonymous – have been spreading Anonymous' related material in the name of Parsons since Tuesday, after news of her mother turning off her daughter's life support made global headlines.
The concerned non-Canadians and feminists in faraway places that joined in the online protest don't consider themselves "hacktivists", nor are they afraid of the FBI or their peers labeling them as terrorist sympathisers. The spooky criminal portrayal of Anonymous has melted from the public consciousness, to be replaced with an image of strangers in pale masks passionate about improving society, one cause at a time. Since Anonymous causes are varied and inspired by current events, jumping on this form of vigilante-motivated activism – or what some would call clicktivism – has never been more popular. Or as in Parsons' case, as effective.
The goal of #OpJustice4Rehtaeh was to seek justice primarily by getting the Canadian justice and police department to review her case. None of the four teen assailants were convicted despite capturing, and then spreading photographic evidence of their alleged crime at Parsons' school.
A Change.org petition by Parsons' mother was heavily circulated, and it hit 100,000 signatures within days. "For the love of God do something", wrote Parsons' father on Wednesday in a personal blogpost addressing the justice minister of Nova Scotia. His words validated #OpJustice4Rehtaeh, launched the day before.
Anonymous' successful leveraging of the press and social media helped them identify the four rapists in just a few hours, which they then threatened to disclose unless their demands were met. No hacking was involved as this time, Anonymous was apparently a friendly tip line.
They were able to get this information so quickly, wrote an Anon on Pastebin, because "dozens of emails were sent to us by kids and adults alike, most of whom had personal relationships with the alleged rapists. Many recalled public confessions made blatantly by these boys in public where they detailed the rape of an inebriated 15-year-old girl." Why this same information was not sent to the police at the time of the investigation over a year ago is not apparent, though Anonymous hinted it sent this information to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in a more recent release.
Despite a Canadian minister previously telling the media the case was closed and would not be reopened, by Thursday the tune had changed, proving the collective's efforts were not in vain. In addition to submitting new evidence to the RCMP and putting pressure on the Canadian Department of Justice, Anonymous organised a rally outside the Halifax police department on Sunday. Roughly 100 people attended, including Parsons' mother. Speaking on her behalf as her partner, Jason Barnes told Canada's Herald News in an interview, "Leah's been… very happy with the things that Anonymous has done for us and really stepped forward and made this a large enough issue to make people think, and see it." Out of all the operations recently carried out by Anonymous, #OpJustice4Rehtaeh has had an incredibly high "effect real change" rate of just a few days.
Before you scoff at Anonymous expertly using PR and social media to change the world, consider this: Obama's technical team for his re-election campaign in 2012 took measures to DDoS-proof their websites as well as avoid Anonymous' attention at all costs. Anonymous expert and author Gabriella Coleman shared with me a forthcoming report for the Centre for International Governance Innovation which states:
"Anonymous was treated as (potentially) even more of a nuisance than, say, the foreign state hackers who infiltrated the McCain and Obama campaigns in 2008. Had Anonymous successfully accessed servers or DDoS the campaign website, it would likely have ignited colossal media attention and potentially battered the campaign's reputation. Although this alone would likely not put Obama's chances for re-election at risk (the team was confident there was no controversial information to leak), a visit from Anonymous was treated as a real possibility and liability."
Anonymous' core strength lies in its PR tactics, not its boots-on-the-ground protests or actual hacking skills. Besides #OpJustice4Rehtaeh, in the last week Anonymous attacked North Korean social media accounts, then Israeli websites in solidarity with the Palestinians. While both operations apparently caused no substantial impact (North Korea is still a dictatorship, and Israel hasn't changed its stance on Palestine), they were both highly publicised, which is enough of a win for the group now primarily concerned with mobilising activists through the spread of information. If fact, Anonymous has been making headlines on an almost weekly basis for over a year now.
Australian security expert Stilgherrian calls this adoption of multiple causes, going beyond Anonymous's initial defence of internet freedoms, as proof they have become the "Hello Kitty of activism," but Coleman likens Anonymous's current, accepting form to something more organic: a fungus. "They refuse to die and they seem to bud in new places and situations," she explains. "They spore and spread" around the globe because clicktivism is easy and fitting with our already established digital habits.
There isn't enough bleach on the internet to kill the spread, but it looks like we web citizens wouldn't want to even if we had enough chemicals. We've all been infected in one way or another now, and our participation, however small, has evolved the fungus into something more manageable. Regarding the Parsons case, Anonymous is now withholding the names of the minors involved "out of respect for Rehtaeh's mother." The internet's love machine is a more fitting nickname.
25 ways the Internet is making you fat, stupid and poor
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