We ignored abuse for too long, now it’s out of control

THE message arrived at 9.22pm. ‘How many chances you need to score in second half, stupid bitches,’ wrote user dzo09.

The sentiments grew increasingly vile. ‘I wish you cancer and leukaemia.’ Finally: ‘I hope someone will rape you to death.’

When Karen Carney, of Chelsea and England, reposted the abuse, with support from England coach Phil Neville, more effluence predictably followed.

‘I’m going to rape and kill you,’ one of her team- mates was informed by benhughes_15. ‘Can I get a headline on BBC Sport?’

Maybe now someone can. Now that we suddenly seem offended by abuse.

Previously, not so much. What Carney and others of her generation are going through is a direct result of the complete lack of interest the social media guardians and the country have shown in dealing with the abuse of sports people in the public eye; the chants, the threats, the hatred and much of it dressed up as banter. We have allowed the conversation to become coarsened, for the followers of clubs to be defined by who they hate.

At Chelsea, before the teams come out, they play the ska classic Liquidator by Harry J’s All Stars. You’d know it if you heard it. Fantastic whirling organ line and then ‘clap-clap-clap-clap — Chelsea!’ Except as they clap these days, they chant, ‘We-hateTott- nam — Chelsea!’ They mention the name of another team, one they despise, before they get to their own.

And you may think that’s a million miles away from what Carney received in her inbox last week, but it’s not. This is the natural product of considering abuse just another part of the game — or rather, of not considering it at all. Until it is too late.

‘ Online abuse in football is certainly nothing new,’ one well-intended report announced

last week. And yes, that’s the problem.

‘Middle America, now it’s a tragedy, now it’s so sad to see,’ as Eminem said of the Columbine High School massacre. Now the abuse has reached its crescendo in the women’s game, we see the problem. Karen Carney shouldn’t have to read that, but then no-one should.

If social media is slow to act against abusers, it is because they have been allowed to think none of this matters; because we lazily accept the myth of banter, even when it is plainly nothing more than cheap, verbal violence.

We have three triggers: sexist, racist and homophobic abuse, and as long as the language does not encroach on those areas, we let it slide. But of course it does enter those areas, precisely because we let it slide.

IN 2013, West Ham visited Tottenham and repeatedly sang a song calling Jermain Defoe a c***. Had they placed ‘black’ in front of it there would have been outrage. But c***’s OK. You can call anyone that word on social media and nobody bats an eye. Phil Neville probably wouldn’t even register it in a career spent on Manchester and Merseyside.

The year he was blamed, wrongly, for England exiting Euro 2000, he will have heard that word — and others like it — more often than he heard his own name at football grounds. Yet this entry point makes it easier to

graduate to the levels of threatened violence Carney saw when she switched on her device after Chelsea played Fiorentina.

And by then, we’re trying to put toothpaste back in the tube, because it’s too late.

‘No one should be targeted for abuse because of their gender, or subjected to gender-based abusive language,’ announced Women In Football, putting the full stop in that sentence 11 words later than necessary.

No one should be targeted for abuse. Isn’t that the message?

And if no one is abused, then it goes without saying that genderspecific taunts are unacceptable. Back in the 1970s it was necessary to address racial abuse specifically because no one was throwing bananas at white players. Yet most of what appeared before Carney’s eyes — death threats, cancer stuff — will be very familiar to footballers of all genders.

Rape threats tend to be gender specific, yes. But what are we saying here? Rape threats are out, but the rest is fair game? No. All abuse is abominable. The abuse of female footballers, of male footballers, of anyone in the industry.

If we make none of it acceptable, then the social media outlets will have to take these protests seriously and shut it down.

Anything less than zero tolerance creates a grey area of opportunity. While we continue grading levels of insult and injury, while we confuse banter and abuse, the threats will not merely continue, but grow and mutate in ever more appalling ways.