This (above) is a real tweet sent to journalists Caroline Criado-Perez and Helen Lewis last week for voicing feminist opinions. How did sexual threats (or the retraction of) become ‘banter’? And how can it be stopped?

I will rape you tomorrow at 9pm. Shall we meet near your house?” Now that’s romance. This charming vignette was just one of many tweets that Stella Creasy, MP for Walthamstow, had flood her Twitter feed last week when she dared stand up for journalist and campaigner, Caroline Criado-Perez, who too was victim to a deluge of sexually violent threats. Her crime? Celebrating the fact that Jane Austen’s portrait will grace the £10 note in 2017. We know. Controversial stuff, right?

What’s emerged from this latest Twitter crisis (possibly culminating in its nadir last week when newspaper columnists Hadley Freeman and Grace Dent were sent bomb threats via the social networking site) is that there are men and women wandering freely through society who have absolutely no issue with conjuring up the foulest threats possible and sending them to people they’ve never met.

For most of us, it’s a complete mystery as to why. We all harbour negative thoughts about other people. Occasionally these result in an argument or a deep-set dislike. But who goes around threatening to rape, sexually violate and kill women who form opinions on such hard-hitting topics as illustrations on currency? And why does the internet give people the courage (or audacity) to voice the darkest and most twisted of thoughts?

This example has been voiced before but it’s worth repeating; if a man approached a women he didn’t know in the street and told her the exact time he’s planning to rape her, he would be arrested. Social media should be no different – and, in fact, a 25-year-old man has been arrested for sending Criado-Perez and Creasy threatening tweets. The digital realm is one we all occupy in some way or another and it’s a realm in which we’re destined to spend more time (84% of Britain’s population is online and 22% of online time is spent social networking.)

So, surely now is the time to mark the boundaries of what’s acceptable; to set in stone what rules of law govern the virtual world just like those that govern the real world; to ensure that people know the parameters of what’s acceptable and what won’t be tolerated. Yes, we should protect and fight for freedom of speech but terrorising women who dare to voice an opinion with threats of sexual violence is not freedom of speech; it is intimidation. It forces valid opinions into the shadows. It is a completely unacceptable abuse of power. If we don’t act now, we risk descending into some sort of dystopic virtual hinterland that makes Lord Of The Flies seem like a beach holiday.

And while most of us have not yet been subject to torrents of abuse online, if nothing is done on policing online behaviour, it can only be a matter of time. We asked three writers to share their experiences of intimidation and how they deal with faceless trolls.

Twitter Trolls