Hurt is price of hate
Evil troll isn’t first man jailed for abusing me and he won’t be last
“IT’S just one of those things,” I said to my husband with a shrug. I’d just read that the man who’d aggressively harassed me for nine months had been sentenced.
I often diminish things that are sent to hurt me. It is a protective reflex.
But it does hurt me, it does make me feel scared. The abuse I suffer changes my life, it affects my mental health.
In this case the harassment came in the form of hundreds of emails and messages, day in day out.
On one occasion in excess of 100 emails in an hour with reams and reams of aggressive racist abuse.
Email upon email accusing me of being a “treasonous cow”, facilitating rape and barking far-right, white supremacist propaganda at me.
Images of my friend Jo Cox, pictured right, the MP killed by someone who signed up to a similar ideology, appeared alongside messages about how he “would have me dealt with”.
Imagine opening your inbox and watching as it updates, the constant pings alerting you to a new email.
But every email is from the same man who has clearly just sat up all night sending you aggressive email after aggressive email. Frightening, right?
The first I knew Tony Eckersley had been sentenced to more than two years imprisonment for racially aggravated harassment was when I read about it in the newspaper two weeks ago.
I had no idea that the case was due for sentencing that day, I didn’t know he had pleaded guilty.
I had been expecting to appear in a Manchester crown court to give evidence in December 2021. Thanks to our decimated justice system, the court date I’d been given was two and half years after my initial police complaint in May 2019.
And we wonder why victims and witnesses drop out of cases.
Imagine being questioned on abuse and violence you had suffered two and half years earlier.
It is a shock to be informed about your own life from a newspaper.
The general public finding out about your fate at the same time as you doesn’t seem right.
It made me feel inhuman again just as the abuse had done, as if my position as a public figure meant the rules were different for me because of my job. Eckersley, I read, was handed a 10-year restraining order disallowing him from coming within 100 metres of me, my home or my place of work.
Did you know that when you have a restraining order against someone, you get an actual piece of paper like a Grade 2 piano certificate that you can proudly brandish as proof should you need to?
Mine is still sat on my kitchen table as I don’t know what to do with it.
Where do you file a restraining order? Next to the passports and the kids’ baby scan pictures and birth certificates?
Eckersley isn’t the first man to go to prison for harassing or abusing me, and I am afraid to say with absolute certainty that he won’t be last.
I won’t just shrug anymore though because it’s not OK.
It’s not OK to violently attack our democracy of course, but I am not just a democratically elected official, I am also a human and for most humans this isn’t just one of those things.