Amnesty International asked about online abuse. Here's what I had to say.

Amnesty International put a call out on Twitter asking women about their experiences of online abuse. Here's what I sent to them...

The incident I reported to the police happened on Facebook. I'd been involved in a campaign around the normalisation of sexual objectification in Bristol, which had attracted a lot of local press attention. I was the spokesperson so was very visible. Things built up and eventually a young man posted on Facebook that I was a cunt, he was going to post my address details online and 'make me pay'. I wrote about this for the Guardian at the time.

Another man joked about kicking me in the vagina.

That's the stand out incident, but online abuse happens all the time. I wrote about abortion issues and I had a man call me a 'fucking baby killer'. This particular individual targeted me repeatedly, commenting on every blogpost I wrote. He'd start off polite then it would build up until he'd call me names such as 'fucking feminazi bitch'

He had a really common name. Every time I saw that name afterwards it would make me really uncomfortable. Once I saw his name in a conference line-up and had a real triggered reaction. It wasn't the same man but the same name. I know the man who used to comment on my blog worked in academia and it bothers me that he might work with students when his attitudes to women are so disgusting and violent.

I wrote about Fathers 4 Justice and a man in the comments said he hoped 'some cunt raped' me, because I was a 'fucking fascist'.

More recently I've experienced the 'pile on'. I tweeted a joke about Boris Johnson and had around 200 @ messages in an hour ranging from the mild (of the 'you stupid feminist bitch' variety) to the obscene (men saying what they would do to me sexually). On another occasion I deleted a tweet after within 5 minutes I had 5 @ messages all quoting the tweet, and all the avatars were naked pictures of men.

More recently I tweeted about an Amazon advert and a man told me to drink a bottle of floor cleaner, alongside the usual sexist slurs.

The scary thing about pile-ons is you don't know when they will stop. After the Boris Johnson joke I was still getting unpleasant messages 24 hours later. You feel very vulnerable, you feel like this is it now, it's never going to stop.

I feel that when people excuse men's behaviour online, they resort to the line 'he didn't think you were a real person, it's just online so it's not real'. I think this is nonsense. It is just another form of victim blaming. It re-enforces the message that women are not human. It says that women cause the problem by being online.

I've had rape threats, death threats, threats to my safety, been called names, had men send obscene images, had men fantasise about what they would do to me sexually. They didn't do this thinking it wasn't real. They did this to bully, intimidate and most importantly of all to silence me.

I won't be silenced.