On October 13th, 2016, Lou Dobbs, anchor of the Fox Business Network’s show Lou Dobbs Tonight, posted a link to the home phone number and address of Jessica Leeds on Twitter. Leeds is one of many women openly accusing Donald Trump of sexual assault shortly after a video surfaced of him bragging about his habit of pawing women without their consent.

The post was eventually deleted, though whether that was done by Twitter, Fox, or Dobbs himself is unclear, and it was already too late. The post was shared at least eight hundred times before it disappeared from Dobbs’ Twitter feed. When he was called out on what he did, his apology was nothing short of pathetic, Tweeting simply:

“My Retweet, My Mistake, My Apology to Jessica Leeds,” the subtext being that the only thing he is sorry for is that people called him on it.

This article is not about Lou Dobbs.

It is not about the fact that his tactics prove him to be nothing but a poor journalist. If Dobbs is resorting to posting Jessica Leeds’ home address and phone number in order to incite Trump followers (who are known for their violent behavior) to attack and threaten her into silence, it is because he is incapable of refuting her claims with researched facts. It is not about the fact that he has helped turn Trump’s campaign into the ugliest in history.

This is not about him. He, like the Republicans’ offensive excuse for a presidential candidate, has had enough attention.

doxing-flandersThis is about doxing.

Doxing is the publishing of the personal information of an individual on the internet, usually without their consent, in order to cause the victim distress, fear, embarrassment, and shame.

According to Danielle Citron, law professor at the University of Maryland and author of Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, the victims of doxing are primarily young women who are stalked online with threats of rape and sexual humiliation with the intent of silencing them and forcing them offline. It is a tactic commonly employed by Men’s Rights’ Activists (MRAs) who do it to anyone criticizing their fight to have raping women legalized worldwide.

One MRA who visited Montreal and was publicly shamed for tarnishing our city with his presence has encouraged the practice among his followers in an attempt to scare off his critics. When he himself was doxed, he suddenly became against it, at least for himself.

Though Canada has no specific law criminalizing doxing, our existing laws fill this void just fine when you think about what the act entails.

People post home addresses, phone numbers, credit card information, and private email addresses with the intent that someone other than them will see it and steal, harass, and threaten death, rape, or worse.

Fortunately, in Canada we have section twenty two of the Criminal Code which says that anyone who counsels someone to commit an offense is considered party to said offense. That means that if you encourage someone to commit a crime, you are considered as guilty of the crime as the person who actually did it even if they did it in a way other than the one you recommended. That also means that you are subject to the exact same penalties.

Let’s say you post a woman’s home address on social media and say that she should be raped. That night someone sees your post and goes and rapes her. If the rapist convinces the authorities that they got the idea from your social media feed, you might be charged with rape and face the same five or fourteen year prison sentence (depending on the degree of violence involved) as the rapist.

If you post a person’s private email address and phone number and encourage your followers to make death threats, rape threats, or threats of bodily harm, and they do it, you’ll be looking at the same eighteen months to five years as the people making the threats.

In order to get the same penalty, the prosecution would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you actively and willfully sought to encourage people to commit the crime and that you knew or ought to have known that a crime was likely to be committed as a result of your encouragement.

The laws to punish doxers are already in place. The only thing protecting doxers is police indifference. Reddit Moderator Blake Hebb, for example, had a lot of trouble convincing the authorities to investigate when he was doxed and harassed in 2015.

But hope is not lost.

In the June 2015 ruling of the Provincial Court of British Columbia in Regina v. BLA, a seventeen year old received a custodial sentence of sixteen months plus eight months supervision after he doxed, harassed, threatened, and “swatted” (tricking emergency services and police to send responders based on a false report) female gamers who refused his demands to chat with him and show him their butts.

The laws to fight doxing are there and the authorities are slowly beginning to enforce them. It is up to us to make sure they keep listening. That means reporting every incident and making a big stink if the police and RCMP are dismissive.

Contact the press and shout it from the rooftops if you have to. No more letting predators hide behind their computers unpunished while they get others to do their dirty work. If they encouraged and made it easier for someone to hurt you, threaten you, destroy your property, kill your pets, or steal from you, they are just as guilty as the ones who did it and should be punished the full extent of the law.

When sections of a website are labelled “Entitlement Princess of the Month” and “13 reasons women lie about being raped”, it’s usually easy to tell the website belongs to an angry internet troll – someone who never leaves their house and whose opinion no one gives much thought to. Unfortunately Mike Buchanan is no anonymous troll.

Buchanan is, in fact, a UK writer and conservative politician, who previously worked as a consultant for the Tory government. Not surprisingly Buchanan quit in 2009, when British Prime Minister David Cameron announced support for an all-female parliamentary candidate shortlist. Since then Buchanan has devoted himself to being a men’s rights advocate, founding the political party “Justice for Men and Boys (And the women who love them)” in 2013.

Researching Buchanan quickly becomes infuriating. Not because he claims to fight for the rights of men and boys. It’s infuriating because Buchanan is a hypocrite. Buchanan continuously argues online and in the media that feminism is nothing more than a hate-filled ideology. But Buchanan then uses his Justice for Men and Boys website as a personal arena to attack and belittle women.

A quick scan of the J4mb website shows that Buchanan posts emails from the type of fans that compare feminists to dogs. Buchanan argues in his party’s election manifesto that more women in the workplace have collectively ruined pretty much every industry in the UK including medicine, education and policing. He even declares that female genital mutilation  has less impact on women then circumcision does on men.

The law in the UK forbids all forms of female genital mutilation – FGM – including those which have less impact on females, than male genital mutilation – MGM – has on males. FGM is justifiably regarded as a human rights issue, and the law makes no accommodation for religious or cultural considerations.”

Statements like these (and much, much more) are just on the J4mb website. Buchanan has also written three books on anti-feminism including The Glass Ceiling Delusion: The Real Reason Women don’t Reach Senior Positions (spoiler alert: it’s all a conspiracy orchestrated by militant feminists). But the twice-divorced Buchanan insists he’s not a misogynist. “Insinuations of misogyny invariably come in the wake of my presentations of reasoned arguments,” Buchanan writes on his website.

Buchanan’s idea of proving he’s not a misogynist includes praising the website “Women against Feminism.” He congratulates these women on their “independent minds” as oppose to “miserable whine merchant” feminists. His comments begs the question has Buchanan actually read the website WAF?

Because as I pointed out in my last post, while many WAF posters don’t want the stigma of being called a feminist, they do in fact support many of the same issues feminists do. Could it be that Buchanan is grasping at straws to make his points that he’ll simply praise anything that claims to be against feminism?

Buchanan’s ideals are especially troubling in regards to his political ambitions. The Justice for Men and Boys party is currently running for three seats in the May 2015 general election in Nottingham, England. Effective political leaders need to work towards the good of everyone in their community, not a narrow-minded view of what the right kind of people are. While it’s hopefully doubtful anyone in the J4mb will be elected, it’s important for Nottingham voters to be reminded on some of issues Buchanan will be running on the following topics.

Rape: The manifesto declares that the allowed time for abortions should be cut down from 24 to 13 weeks. It makes compensations for abortions when the woman’s physical health is at risk, but not mental health.  So who cares if you were raped or the victim of incest, have an unwanted child already.

Women should be held morally accountable for the children they conceive… There’s no evidence to support the thesis that abortion reduces the risk to mental health of women with an unwanted pregnancy, and clinical trials to investigate the matter would, of course, be highly unethical.”

Education: Gender stereotypes on the types of careers men and women should have need to be enforced, and how dare the British government try and encourage otherwise!

“We also take issue with governments continuing to spend large amounts of taxpayers’ money ‘encouraging’girls and young women into STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine) subjects and careers. These subjects were historically the routes to careers for many young men, yet the government is spending £30 million ‘encouraging’ women into engineering careers, although women have for decades expressed little interest in engineering as a career choice.”

Family: The entire notion of family has been ruined by feminism. Feminists are destroying fatherhood, and women are solely to blame for society’s high divorce rate. All these feminists family-destroyers really want to do is use our sperm and become lesbians.

“In only forty years or so, the entire institution of the family, underpinned by a lifelong commitment to marriage, has been overturned. This was driven by feminist politicians such as Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt […] Divorce is at an all-time high, having increased by 800% since 19603 and almost half of all children now see their parents break up by the time they are 15 […] Furthermore, women are the principal agents in ending their marriages – at more than three times the rate men are. Fatherhood is deemed unnecessary by the state, so taxpayers are subsidizing sperm banks for single women and lesbians.”

All this being said, Buchanan does bring up certain points that I agree with. Raising awareness and helping prevent male suicide, supporting male victims of domestic and sexual abuse, creating more balanced custody arrangements after divorce, and ending stigma around homelessness are all issues of Buchanan’s that I support. But where he loses my respect is when he twists each of his arguments around to demonstrate how things were just fine under a patriarchal society, and feminism has subsequently managed to ruin it.

That’s when Buchanan becomes less of an activist, and more of a man who’s upset about more women becoming doctors, women who have abortions after the mental trauma of being raped, or single women deciding to have a child without a father. Instead of Buchanan, let’s praise real activists and politicians in the UK who fight for HUMAN rights. And for god’s sake don’t vote Buchanan into office.