For too many women, domestic violence does not end when they find the courage to leave an abusive relationship. The suffering often continues online, where abusers use their own social media posts or stories to dehumanise, degrade, blackmail, and shame their victims. Men using children to hurt their partners via a social media platform is WRONG.

I am speaking on behalf of many women who have been traumatised and humiliated by this undisputed form of abuse. 
As survivors, we carry the trauma of our experience, but the added dimension of online harassment can make healing and moving forward even more challenging.

It is not as simple as 'Just block them.' This digital abuse can infiltrate our lives in ways that make it impossible to ignore. It's a pervasive problem that aims to publicly humiliate and traumatise victims, undermining their confidence and sense of safety and damaging their reputation.

Approximately 1 in 4 women and 1 in 9 men in the U.S. experience severe intimate partner physical violence, intimate partner contact sexual violence, and/or intimate partner stalking, with impacts such as injury, fearfulness, post-traumatic stress disorder, use of victim services, contraction of sexually transmitted diseases, etc. (National Domestic Violence Hotline). Many of these cases have migrated onto digital platforms, evolving from a physical to a digital battle.

Social Media corporations have a responsibility to protect their users from such misconduct and to instigate measures that prevent online harassment and humiliation. We need to see active, immediate measures taken to ensure a safe virtual environment for all users.

Men that are unstable should not be able to breach a persons human rights, in a public place on a public profile, these men need to be removed and banned and penalised from social media. Woman often do not have the mental strength to report to police once leaving these horrific relationships. 

Sign this petition to urge social media platforms to take a harder stance against domestic violence and online harassment, and to implement protective measures for victims of abuse. Together, we can make the internet safer for survivors of domestic violence.