Original title: "High profile online" should not be the reason for being harassed

Author/Bai Jingjing

In 2020, the American horror film Invisible Man was released. The thriller of the film is that the evil deeds that the heroine wants to fight against are clearly proved to exist, but they are hidden in the invisible air. For the victims suffering from network harassment and threats, it is no easier to take up the weapon of counterattack than the heroine struggling to survive.

According to surging news reports, He Tong (not his real name) has been harassed by strange men for six years. The other side used the keyboard as a "shield" for dirty behavior and frequently sent pornographic pictures and obscene words. Until the woman collected information records and called the police for help, the other party was sentenced to administrative detention for 5 days. Hu Li (not her real name), who has similar experience with He Tong, shares her experience of fighting back at harassers on social networks, hoping to encourage more girls not to escape but to fight against them.

However, sometimes, the brave people who face harassment directly do not get much affirmation, but instead wait to be hit by the "victim's guilt". As for their experience of being harassed, some people found out that the "cause" was "you deserve to be harassed because you are high profile online". The "prescription" they gave was just to swallow their pride and cancel their registration. Many people, holding the posture of "past people" and wearing the mask of "painstaking care", accused the victims of being harassed because of overexposure of their personal lives.

Looking back at the significance of the birth of the Internet, isn't it just to break down barriers and walls, so that more people can find a place to talk? Someone on Zhihu asked why young people like to share their life through social networks? A good answer is because of loneliness. In the face of fragmented life, social networks are like glue, recording daily joys and sorrows with the help of a beautiful photo and a punch card.

When the sharing has been listened to and the release has been praised, the mind can also establish positive feedback that is recognized and concerned. From this perspective, the so-called "high profile" is just the need to fill the spiritual world. The distorted causal theory of misinterpreting normal sharing as an abnormal "high profile" and attributing the victim's suffering to his own "problems" simply does not hold water.

The accusation imposed on the victim should actually fall on the harasser. It is also an invisible erosion of the legitimate rights of the public to blindly discuss how to protect themselves, ask the harassed to build a protective wall for themselves, and even eliminate the network "traces" to prevent the victimized from being selected. In the long run, the public space will become pale and lose vitality, which is by no means the right way to solve the problem.

Only by tearing up the permit of the despicable and exposing the hidden crimes to the sun through institutional constraints can the hiding place of the harasser be completely destroyed.

The determination of the responsibility of the harasser has always been a difficult problem in the field of judicial practice. For the harassed, the psychological state of fear, uneasiness, perplexity and humiliation is very common, and the parties often fall into a situation of collapse and helplessness, even resulting in a lifelong knot. However, it is difficult to prove the mental damage, which is also an important reason for the victims' difficulties in safeguarding their rights.

However, with the independent codification of the right of personality in the Civil Code and the first definition of "privacy", similar harassment will be more forcefully punished. The law clearly stipulates that any organization or individual who infringes upon the privacy of others by means of spying, intrusion, disclosure, publicity, etc. will be subject to legal sanctions. In reality, relevant judicial precedents have also been successively implemented. It is hoped that more people can take up legal weapons, defend personal dignity, and let the harassers pay their due price.

In fact, many harassers are bluffing, and only because the victims choose to "hide" rather than retain evidence and safeguard their rights and interests by legal means, will they become even worse. From the experience of the girl Hu Li, in the face of continuous harassment, she chose to disclose the other party's social account and conversation screenshots to "pull them out of the dark". The effect is immediate, and the other party will cancel the account soon.

For all major social platforms, this experience is also very enlightening. Compared with the time cost of judicial relief, the relief of "private land" managed by the platform is obviously more efficient. A perfunctory response is the greatest connivance of evil. Only by seriously handling every network harassment threat incident can we be the most solid backing for users.