‘You will die!’: A true story

The amazing technological advances the world has seen have triggered online problems no end, and of no mean dimension. Let’s not just talk about the Internet; let’s just first take a look at our cell phones, which accompany us everywhere. Arnold Toynbee once said: “The human race’s prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenseless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenseless against ourselves.”

Lucille, a single mother in her late forties, has her cell phone by her side everywhere, like many of us do. She’s got a good job and is good at it. Her only problem is her inclination to dress as sexily as possible — extremely plunging necklines that have plunged so low because women’s fashion these days dictates as much exposure of the breasts as possible, and tight-fitting skirts that hug her two other assets behind as sinfully as possible. Some of the words I have just used to describe Lucille have been taken from her two e-mails to me. This is a true story. 

One day when Lucille heard her cell phone beep, she gazed at the screen and her skirt almost got ripped in two as she read these words: “Let me suck your breasts or die.” The sender sacrilegiously identified himself as “PP – Padre Pio.”

Over the course of the next few days, without Lucille answering at all, more messages came — all the succeeding ones threatening to cause her ugly bodily harm if she didn’t answer. Lucille didn’t and the text messages continued. When the words “You will die” glared at her from her cellphone screen, she really got scared. She decided to contact the local police after a number of inquiries regarding the sender’s name proved fruitless. The police were not able to give her any assurance after she gave all the details regarding PP, telling her that they did not have the ability to do so regarding grave Internet threats.

She e-mailed me and gave me all the details of her problem after she arrived home two weeks ago and discovered that PP had already invaded her chat room and had “shouted” the words (because they were in bold black capital letters), “UNLESS YOU ANSWER, YOU WILL BE RAPED AND DIE!” Lucille is not her real name, and all I can say at this point is that the police investigation is ongoing. Online crimes, however, don’t seem to be particularly appealing to police organizations all over the world.

It would not be so bad if Lucille’s texter, now chat abuser/offender, were content with online abuse. Sometimes the harassment goes offline. Steve Thompson, sexual assault coordinator at Central Michigan University, writes about a man allegedly from Florida who started “chatting” with one of the students. After about a month, he showed up at her apartment, talked to her for a while and then proceeded to rape her. She went to Dr. Thompson for help and worked with the local police to resolve the case. But the crime has been completed; a young girl has been raped — an abuse she will carry throughout her lifetime — and the offender should not go unpunished.

In the Philippines, the recent reported raid by the Las Piñas police on the sex facility of an elderly woman managing a chat room exposed photographs of a naked nine-year-old girl with the lens focusing on her front and her behind, highlighting all her private parts. The police raid was successful and the woman was captured by the police.

A lot of people, mostly women, are too embarrassed to come forward when they have been harassed and abused, even in a chat room, fundamentally because of the stigma (if we can call it that) that chat rooms have — mainly that these online rooms are visited by lonely people looking for online romance, which isn’t always the case.

I am not prepared to tell Lucille to refrain from displaying her sex appeal/sexual assets, especially nowadays when the focus seems to be the neckline and how big the woman’s bosom is. I am not prepared to tell Lucille to wear pants, which are really more comfortable than drop-dead body-hugging skirts. All these fall within Lucille’s freedoms under the bill of rights, unless declared violative of public morals. Instead, I have a suggestion.

“Instant Messaging” (IM) can be lots of fun and is, of course, more personal than chat. Instead of unleashing all your complaints about life or baring your soul to a roomful of chat people, you can “instant message” or “private message” (PM) one person. A small window pops up so that you can type your message to them. The replies are done through the same window. You can chat with only that particular person or you can carry on online text conversations with several people at once. It is possible that your computer screen becomes filled with separate responses for each person you are chatting with, and that’s when it becomes so easy to get confused.

From the professionals, the businessmen and entrepreneurs, the global players in trade and business, the remarkably growing number of business environments that now have exponentially growing utilization of IM programs, the need to communicate in almost an instant has become necessary, especially for businesses and industries with a global presence. IM has made the global e-workplace more efficient.

The Philippines remains such a text message-savoring glutton. The cell phone has become, for us, a constant companion. It is, of course, now possible to send an instant message from your computer to someone’s cell phone and vice-versa. This is offered through several IM services such as MSN, Yahoo!, AOL, etc. This has been extremely efficient to use if you are on the road and can’t carry on a line phone conversation, or if you just want to send a quick message.

Why do people love chat so much? It gives them the opportunity to interact instantly with people principally for social rather than political or business reasons. This is supported by surveys worldwide.  I am talking about chat rooms. One doesn’t conduct political dialogues or business discussions fundamentally in the chat rooms. For social reasons, one engages in chat with relative facility and ease without having to meet the other person face-to-face unless the parties want to.

Because chat is immediate, people tend to say things they wouldn’t normally say to a stranger standing next to them on the street. And this emboldens the sex predators looking for a lonely female, or a female looking for a lonely male, or other gender combinations, etc. This provides the avenue for the sex maniacs to come out of their shells.

My three sons, who are all professionals now, have a chat room where they can say anything from the sublime to the ridiculous. At the end of the workday, they chat to relax. They play jokes with one another. They call it “living their cyberlife.” Online chatters tend to display their emotions more strongly to the world, and most forget that the world can read anything they write, and sometimes, these chatters can get themselves in trouble even though they feel they can remain anonymous when using chat rooms or web sites such as Yahoo!

Yahoo! seems to be a magnet for people bent on harassment. However, it cannot be blamed for this but let me offer two reasons why this is so: a) Yahoo! offers a wide variety of other free services including chat, clubs, personals, groups, etc., and b) we all know that its e-mail accounts are freely available, so that when a problem like harassment occurs, Yahoo! is really fast on the draw, and quick to respond to the situation. And this helps Yahoo! keep its reputation as one of the most popular sites on the World Wide Web.

The line between exercising the right to free speech and expression and the harassment of another individual can so easily blur — for example, an employee complaining bitterly in a chat room about her employer. This employee may feel a lot better after she lets off steam, but she certainly is forgetting the fact that there are many other people in the room reading the chat.

You call these people “lurkers.” Should any of these lurkers happen to be another employee close to the employer-boss, or anyone who wants to be in the latter’s good graces and chooses to report that someone is bashing him or her and/or the company online, the chatter could be sued. Many times, the company involved is small to medium-sized. The records from the chat room provider may receive a subpoena duces tecum in order to find out and locate the anonymous username before filing a case; the company does not necessarily expect to win the case, but its immediate aim of shutting up the person complaining almost always works. There are quite a number of case studies supporting this conclusion now, whether in the United States or in Europe.

While the US Supreme Court has adjudicated that Internet speech should be accorded the same quality of protection as speech in any other medium, it is common knowledge now that many chat room providers are only too glad and too willing to turn over those anonymous identities to anyone who provides the subpoena, or even a search warrant to physically search, often without notifying the owner of the username.

Where do we really draw the line between harassment and free speech? Existing case studies have shown how some privacy advocates have supported these anonymous chatters, claiming the subpoenas are illegal and they’ve won. Traditional legal provisions will have to apply in the meantime that Internet law is evolving.

In the case of Lucille, where an anonymous chatter has clearly chat-abused and chat-threatened her, following her from chat room to chat room, leaving her no peace, then there is more than enough reason for the chat provider to surrender the chatter’s identity as soon as possible.

I have just received information that Lucille’s sex offender has been located and brought in for questioning to police headquarters. I am told he is a graduate student whose “eyes are hollow from lack of sleep.”

Lucille indeed is well-advised to dress with less exposure of her assets. It didn’t come from me. It came from her father.

She should listen to him … Sunday was, after all, Father’s Day.

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Thanks for your e-mails sent to jtl@pldtdsl.net.