Two of unionism’s most high-profile figures have joined forces to campaign against the social media abuse of women in the public eye.
rlene Foster’s departure as First Minister resulted in her special adviser Emma Little-Pengelly also stepping away from political life.
Mrs Foster has said she will campaign against social media trolling and harassment of women in the public eye.
“As a public representative you do put on an armour of defence regarding your views and policies, but if the abuse is directed at those closest to you that is when the impact kicks in,” Mrs Foster told the Belfast Telegraph.
Earlier this year the High Court in Belfast ordered celebrity doctor Christian Jessen to pay a record £125,000 plus legal costs to the former DUP leader for tweeting a false allegation she was having an affair with one of her security detail.
“Obviously as a female in public life I get attacked for all the usual — looks, weight, hair, clothes etc. But when the attacks are directed at the family or my relationship with them, that is the pinch-point for me and what pushed me to take the case in the High Court,” she said.
“I have no difficulty with people being anonymous on social media but I do have a problem if individuals use that cloak of anonymity to abuse, and therefore I do think that the platform at least should have a record of who these people are so if they abuse they can be held accountable. If individuals can abuse with impunity then they will continue to do so”.
Mrs Foster added that she was concerned if allowed to continue as it is currently, social media would become a deterrent to young women wishing to enter politics.
“This is my fear, as young people now do spend so much time and have so much regard to social media,” she said.
"If I was a young person looking at the abuse directed, especially to women in public life, I think I would think twice about getting involved, unless there were strategies to help deal with all of this. And that is why I want to encourage and empower young women to have resilience and deal with the trolls.”
Mrs Little-Pengelly, who has been the target of Twitter and Facebook trolling during her time as a MLA and later as MP for South Belfast, said sanctions on repeat offenders needed to be tougher.
“I didn’t have a Twitter account because I’d been a Spad, so just thought I’d set one up in anticipation at me coming over as a MLA, and I have to say it was an immediate shock,” she said.
“I tried to keep my Twitter feed very cheerful and upbeat. I’d worked a lot with youth groups and the constant complaint was: ‘We can’t get coverage for good news’.
“But from the first couple of days it was horrendous. I think Twitter had started to change at that point anyway.
“That would have been the autumn of 2015, and what I naively thought was if you try and engage with people and explain to them where you’re coming from, that people would actually see you as a real person. But there was zero interest in that.
"No matter what I said or did you just had people criticising you, and the personal nastiness really started around that time as well.
“Social media companies are just not fit for purpose in terms of hundreds of anonymous accounts that can just abuse people repeatedly and say what they want.
“Arlene was able to tackle that Christian Jessen stuff because it was his own account and he could be tracked down.
“I was subjected to hundreds of sexual slurs without any redress.
“You’re caught in a situation where you have to ask: do I just ignore it and block the accounts or do I try and do something about it and as a consequence attract further attention towards what are complete lies?”
While there are those who argue political representatives are fair game in terms of engagement with the public and that posts challenging them fall under free speech, Mrs Little-Pengelly said it was not her political views that was subjected to abuse, but every aspect of her life.
On one occasion the former MP was subjected to hundreds of abusive tweets after posting a picture of her Christmas tree, on another occasion for commenting on the death of a popular actor.
She explained: “At the time when it was really bad, I remember John Hurt had died and I loved The Alan Clark Diaries.
"I posted as a fan that I was sad to see he’d died.
"The first response to that was negative.
“I thought, seriously, is this how bad it is, no matter what you put up?”
She argued the way women in politics are treated in general public life feeds into the abuse they receive on social media.
When the DUP struck its confidence and supply agreement with Theresa May’s Tories, local MPs were suddenly thrust into the national spotlight like never before.
Mrs Little-Pengelly, a barrister, said while her male colleagues were profiled in terms of their previous achievements, she was described in terms of the men in her life.
She said: “Nigel Dodds was described as a barrister; Gavin Robinson was a barrister involved in the defence committee, and for me it was ‘married to and daughter of’.
“Everything in that profile of me was about men associated with my life; no mention that I’d been a junior minister or a special adviser, and it’s that casual sexism that feeds into Twitter as well.”
Married to Richard Pengelly, permanent secretary at the Department of Health, her father Noel Little spent two years on remand in a French prison in the late 1980s before receiving a suspended sentence as part of a loyalist gunrunning plot.
This was also used to attack her.
“I get far more abuse about things that had nothing to do with me,” she said.
“You feel, as an adult, you put all that behind you, and then enter into a job like politics, where people bring up all kinds of stuff.
“That would be ‘Shinnerbot’ territory, and was the hypocrisy of that. Of course, you should be judged on what you do but not what others do, and the same people would be the first to call that out if it was levelled at someone else.”
Mrs Little-Pengelly claimed satirical sites such as Loyalists Against Democracy (Ladfleg) “hounded and humiliated” her, with thousands of abusive and defamatory messages allowed to remain in the comments section.
The Ladfleg Facebook/Twitter pages were set up during the flag protests and closed last year. It had been accused of being bullying and sectarian in terms of how it parodied working class loyalist communities.
“I think that was a bit of a clickbait, they knew if they posted something up about me that it would attract comments,” she said.
“They would do that on say a Saturday night at about 9pm, when people had a drink, and it really was vitriolic, I think that was purposely done.
“The comments under their posts were horrific in terms of sexual slurs and being overtly sexually demeaning, along with comments about my looks. I reported them as seriously defamatory, but they did nothing. There would be hundreds if not thousands of comments under those posts.
“If you are a woman in public life, you don’t want to put yourself out there as a victim. I am not a victim and I don’t want people to pity me, so I’m not going to complain constantly about abuse because that becomes the dominant narrative about yourself.
“But it was just so humiliating. I would wake up in the morning after they’d posted and just feel really embarrassed that people I know, colleagues I’d worked with, friends from university, were seeing these scoffing, humiliating posts… that’s hard to live with. It’s hard to deal with this caricature of yourself that doesn’t really reflect the person.”
Having stepped down as a Stormont Spad, while not ruling out a return to politics, Mrs Little-Pengelly said she was looking forward to other things and plans a return to the Bar sometime in the autumn.
She said: “I really enjoyed Westminster. Yes, there were some harder sides to it in terms of, particularly, social media abuse.
"Putting yourself up for election is tough; it can be incredibly rewarding but it can also be quite bruising at times.
“For me, at the moment, I’m going to take some time out to do other things that interest me.”