AA Edit| Rapist' trolls: Shame them

The cyber wing of the Chennai police should not stop with registering the case against the Twitter user who issued a rape threat to the daughter of award-winning film actor Vijay Sethupathi. The police should pursue the pervert, going by the Twitter handle @itsrithikrajh, in all earnestness and arrest him.

Earlier, the five-year-old daughter of cricketer Mahendra Singh Dhoni was threatened similarly by a 16-year-old boy from Gujarat on Instagram. Though the police cracked down quickly and caught the boy, it is not clear what action was taken under the law, which would serve as a deterrent to every other pervert lurking in the shadows of social media.

Traditionally, rape threat has been used as a weapon by roguish men to establish their gender supremacy and to intimidate women they disliked. That it is now used freely in social media to silence women who have a mind of their own is one of the banes of modern society. It is a tragedy that not much has been done by the enforcing agencies so far to put an end to this cheap tactic employed by men running short of ideas and words to counter women intellectually.

Now that the trend has degenerated further, touching such an abysmal level wherein men threaten children just because they do not agree with their fathers’ behavior, whatever it is, the crime has to be seen in a new light. Rape threat should be treated as a felony and dealt with accordingly by the police. Also, such persons need to be exposed to society with a view to telling all men that as a civilised society we have zero tolerance to rape and rape threat. Above all, we need to enlighten young men that such threats come out of men’s impotence in dealing with themselves and their problems.