Caroline Criado-Perez

Caroline Criado-Perez (born 1984) is a British journalist and feminist activist. She has been involved in high profile campaigns for women to gain better representation in the British media and to be depicted on banknotes. The later campaign culminated in a successful resolution in July 2013, but led to sustained harassment on Twitter of Criado-Perez and other women. Twitter has announced plans to improve its complaint procedures as a result.

In a June 2013 profile by journalist Cathy Newman for her Telegraph blog, Criado-Perez was quoted as saying: "the culture we live in is made up of little tiny sexist acts which you can just ignore but when you think of them collectively you start to see a pattern".^[1] Left-wing commentator Owen Jones has described her as "a brilliant fighter".^[2]

Early life and education

Born in Brazil, she is the daughter of an Argentinian father, who had managed to escape from his country's military junta, and an English mother.^[3] Carlos Criado-Perez has worked internationally for supermarket chains in the United States and other countries, including Safeway in the UK,^[4] necessitating that the family (she has two brothers) lived in a number of countries during her childhood.

When she was 11, while the family was living in the Netherlands, she was sent to a public school in England, but disliked that culture. She left school at 18, and spent a year at university, before leaving her course.^[3] Having developed a passion for opera during her teens, she wanted to become an opera singer,^[5] and various jobs subsidised her singing lessons. Her parents divorced, and her father broke off all contact with his children.^[3]

She worked in digital marketing for some years,^[6] but found she wanted to change her career path and studied for her English Literature A-level in the evenings and at weekends, having dropped out of completing the qualification at school. She gained a place to study English Language and Literature at Keble College, Oxford as a mature student,^[5] and graduated from Oxford University in 2012.^[3] A participant in the London Library Student Writing Prize in 2012, she was one of the runners-up who received £1,000 and other prizes.^[7] Since then, she has worked as an editor for an information and networking portal of the pharmaceutical industry^[6] and is in the process of gaining a Masters degree in Gender Studies from the London School of Economics.^[3]

Campaigns

Female representation in the media

In November 2012, with Catherine Smith, she founded the website Women's Room, whose goal is to collect suggestions for female professionals and to convey to journalists to increase the proportion of women in the media.^[8][9] The immediate reason for this development were two features on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme broadcast on consecutive days in October 2012, on the prevention of teenage pregnancies and breast cancer, in which no female expert was interviewed - the interviewers were also male.^[10] As a result, presenter John Humphrys had to ask during the latter item: "if you were a woman you would have no hesitation about being screened"?^[11] One of the interviewees on the item about teenage pregnancies was Anthony Seldon, the headmaster of Wellington College, a public school. An authority on contemporary British political history, Criado-Perez wrote, but not on the immediate subject under discussion.^[12] She commented on the rather narrow selection of voices, on social lines as well as gender, in such broadcast debates in early November 2012: "These voices are shaping the debate, and they therefore wield a huge influence over our currently populist public policy. If public policy is going to be so responsive to the media, let's make the media truly representative of the public."^[11]

On the Wikipedia controversy in April 2013 concerning the creation of a sub-category for American women novelists, she was reported as saying: "It perpetuates the idea that men are the default and don’t need to be marked in any way, whereas women are still seen as the outliers."^[13]

Women on banknotes

In another campaign, she called the Bank of England on their decision to replace Elizabeth Fry with Winston Churchill on the £5 note, leaving only historically prominent men represented on the reverse of bank notes;^[14] the Queen is depicted on the front of bank notes. Criado-Perez argued that as the Equality Act 2010 commits public institutions to end discrimination, proof the Bank had acted within the law was absent because the decision was made in secret.^[15] Criado-Perez was among those invited to make a representation on the issue with the Bank of England's Chief Cashier, Chris Salmon, in the second week of July.^[14][16]

The campaign, which gained the support of 35,000 petitioners, and financial support for a potential legal challenge^[17] which Criado-Perez had not ruled out,^[14] led Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, to announce a change of plan on 24 July 2013. It is now intended that the image of Jane Austen will appear on the £10 note, probably from 2017.^[16][18] The process to make such decisions is to undergo an extensive review.^[18] "People have said this was not such a big thing to tackle, but I didn't especially pick on banknotes", Criado-Perez commented to The Observer's Vanessa Thorpe. "I just saw the new note and thought, 'I am not having this'. And the Bank of England is not a small institution."^[19] Jane Austen was not her preferred female historical figure, but Criado-Perez still approved of the choice: "She spent her time poking fun at the establishment. All her books are about how women are trapped and misrepresented. It is really sad that she was saying that 200 years ago and I am still having to say that today".^[16]

For her successful activism in this area, Criado-Perez won the human rights campaigner of the year award from the pressure group Liberty in November 2013.^[20]

Harassment on Twitter

This decision by the Bank of England was enough for numerous threats, including threats of rape and murder, to be made against Criado-Perez and other women, on Twitter from the day of the Bank of England's announcement in July 2013.^[21] At this point Criado-Perez herself had been receiving about 50 such threats each hour,^[22] and found somewhat inadequate the suggestion that she fill out an on-line form for Twitter detailing the behaviour she had experienced.^[23] At the height of the abuse, Craido-Perez "lost half a stone in two days" and "couldn't eat or sleep". She commented later:: "I don't know if I had a kind of breakdown. I was unable to function, unable to have normal interactions."^[24]

While she felt it was taking over her life,^[25] Twitter at the time was assuming no responsibility for the content of tweets, merely advising users to contact the relevant authorities.^[23] Criado-Perez said the campaign of abuse, provoked by a small issue, "shows it's not about what women are doing, not about feminism. It's that some men don't like women, and don't like women in the public domain."^[26] In her view: "Men get attacked because they’ve said or done something someone doesn’t like, whereas women get attacked because they’re visible."^[27]

The Labour MP Stella Creasy, who had been involved with Criado-Perez in the bank note campaign, was amongst those who suffered similar criminal harassment. Two people were arrested towards the end of July.^[28][29][30] An on-line petition calling on Twitter to introduce a button to enable site users to report abuse had gained 110,000 signatures by 2 August.^[22]

Criado-Perez did not participate in the Twitter silence organised by Times journalist Caitlin Moran for 4 August to persuade Twitter to change its policies.^[26][31] "Sorry, but I won't be silenced by anyone", she said. Although she acknowledged that the boycott was a "mark of solidarity", she argued the need to "shout back" at trolls.^[32] On 3 August, the micro-blogging site's general manager in Britain, Tony Wang, announced a one-click option on all posts enabling users to easily report abusive tweets,^[17] and apologised to the women who had received abuse.^[33]

In September 2013, Criado-Perez felt that the Metropolitan Police had not treated her honourably,^[34] and reported that they had lost evidence.^[35] The following day, the Metropolitan Police said they had not lost evidence in this case. Meanwhile, Criado-Perez deleted her Twitter account^[36] for a time. On 16 December it emerged that two people from Tyne and Wear would appear in court in early January having been charged with the improper use of a communications network. It was announced at this time that two other suspects were not going to be charged, and of a fifth a decision was yet to be made.^[37] On 7 January 2014, John Nimmo (25) and Isabella Sorley (23) pleaded guilty to the charges brought against them.^[38] Sorley was sentenced to 12 weeks and Nimmo 8 weeks on 24 January.^[39] When asked on the BBC Newsnight programme in early January whether she was surprised that one of the convicted Twitter abusers was female, Criado-Perez said that the woman in question had "internalised" misogyny already rampant in society as a whole.^[40]

References

External links

• The Women's Room website
• Caroline Criado-Perrez contributor page at The Guardian