Alanah Pearce, 21, decided to take matters into her own hands after being subjected to a number of threats
A gaming journalist who was sent violent rape threats on Facebook has hit back by telling the teenage abusers’ mums.
Alanah Pearce, 21, who reviews computer games on Australian TV, says she is regularly subjected to vile messages on social media.
But this time she decided to take matters into her own hands by tracking the trolls down and letting their mothers know exactly what they've been up to.
She told the Guardian: “I realised that a lot of the people who send disgusting or overly sexual comments to me over the internet aren’t adult males.
“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.
Through Facebook she found it “shockingly easy” to track the teens down and wrote to four of their mothers, but so far has only received one reply.
“She responded in almost exactly the way I wanted her to,” said Pearce.
“The fact she called him a little s**t I found funny as well because I thought that but I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“I wasn’t going to post it on Twitter but I was just so excited. And I thought some of my friends would find it amusing.”
Ms Pearce’s Tweet has gone viral, with 43,000 favourites and 27,000 retweets so far.
She said: “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.
It’s not the first time the journalist, who runs a popular Youtube channel, has tried to battle discrimination in the gaming industry.
Last year she wrote a blog for the Kokatu website, listing some of the sexist Tweets she had received in relation to her Youtube clips.
They included the messages “all this video is missing is boobs” and “why can’t I see her cleavage”.
