Return to sender: This artist is archiving online rape threats

Isha Yadav’s new project invites women to send in screenshots of rape and other violent threats they receive online. She plans to display the posts in an exhibition next month too.

There’s an endless list of “reasons” women have received rape threats online: they posted a picture, they posted an opinion, they posted frequently, they responded to a post, they didn’t respond to a post, they have a new haircut, they bought a pair of shoes.

(HT Illustration: Malay Karmakar)

Rape is used online, quite simply, as a tool to shut women up, says Isha Yadav, 30, a visual artist and doctoral student of women’s and gender studies at Ambedkar University in Delhi, who is documenting online rape threats and extreme sexism as part of a new project. “On social media, a rape threat acts as a warning given to a woman every time she doesn’t behave herself, or is too outspoken, too opinionated, too liberal, or is sharing pictures of herself.”

Just as in the offline world, the onus is on the woman to “take precautions”: think about how visible, vocal or political she wants to be; take special steps to protect her privacy; police her appearance. (A straight white man, meanwhile, has to be fairly controversial, think Piers Morgan-level controversial, to get a stream of hate flow his way online, and even then it’s mainly commentary and far less threat.)

Yadav’s project, Museum of Rape Threats and Sexism (@museumofrapethreats), invites women to send in screenshots of threats of sexual and physical violence they have received online (the archiving effort is ongoing, so submissions are, well, welcome). “I aim to record this structural violence and rape culture, and the responses of women, many of whom have internalised this as the new normal,” she says. “The anger towards how normalised this all is sparked the idea.”

Yadav has received multiple rape threats herself, including in response to one post about the plight of women in Kashmir and another about not liking a particular Indian actor. “The threats scared me,” she says. “I felt disgusted. I also felt extremely angry that there were men around us who had the audacity to violate my digital space to try and shut me up.”

Isha Yadav has been on the receiving end of online threats herself. “The threats scared me. I felt disgusted. I also felt angry that there were men around us [with] the audacity to violate my digital space to try and shut me up,” she says.

In her archiving and art project, Yadav plans to display the submissions she has received from women (there are 200 so far) at the art studio on the Ambedkar University campus in October.

“The visual medium not only brings the digital artefact, in this case the screenshot, into the physical space of an exhibition, but also turns the private into the public,” Yadav says. “I want to create a public picture of what women everywhere go through.”

To offer a sense of what it’s like to be on the receiving end, three videos of selected submissions will play on a loop simultaneously, via three projectors. Notes from women who have shared how the threats made them feel will also be displayed. By November, the project will also have an Instagram account and a website.

The project covers rape threats as well as violent and overly aggressive messages, including the sending of unsolicited dick pics and pornographic material. Among the submissions that Yadav has to choose from are the following (Note: This could be triggering for survivors of abuse or rape):

* Will you just shut up before I come and f*** you

* I hope u get raped u cow worshiping c**t

* I will throw acid on your face

* …you should be gangraped… and burn alive (part of a longer violent message sent in all caps)

* I’ll make sure you never sing again

Yadav has spent countless hours, over two years, trawling through such messages, and it’s taken a toll, she admits. It can get overwhelming and exhausting, aside from which it’s hard to know how to respond to certain contributors. “Imagine urging women on your social media to contribute a rape threat and then a person says to you, ‘Oh sorry, I don’t have a rape threat but I was raped’,” Yadav says.

It’s also a big responsibility, she adds, to “do justice to the information being shared with me, to represent this horror and trauma”.

Since starting this project, Yadav has registered a change in herself too. She says she’s stopped being afraid of what anonymous voices on the internet might throw at her. “The next time someone misbehaves with me online, I am going to take a screenshot and put it up in my exhibits and invite everyone to see it. The shame is on them,” she says.