Justice for Rape Victims in Maryville, by Hashtag
Anonymous takes a stand against the Maryville rape travesty, and wins
In Maryville, Missouri, a girl has been raped only to have her community turn against her (even burning her house down!), instead of the rapist. When the police fail to uphold the law, what allies does she have? As it turns out, thousands of digital natives organized by Anonymous.
A Clear Case
In January of 2012, then-fourtheen-year-old Daisy Coleman was raped at a party while black-out drunk by Matt Barnett, a popular, politically-connected seventeen-year-old football player. At that same party, Coleman’s thirteen-year-old friend was also raped by a different young man. An hour after the incident, still incoherent, a crying Coleman was carried to Barnett’s car and then unceremoniously dumped on her front yard where she passed out in freezing temperatures until her mother found her the next morning. Coleman was rushed to the hospital, and law enforcement officers were called. They did their jobs quickly and made arrests that next day.
Maryville sheriff Darren White described the department’s activities to the press with pride: “I would defy the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department to do what we did and get it wrapped up as nicely as we did in that amount of time.”
At the time, White was “confident” — nay, “absolutely” certain, as he told the Kansas City Star — the young men would be prosecuted given the plethora of evidence, including the rape kits and the taped confessions the police had gathered in just four hours. It was a shock, then, when the charges against Barnett were mysteriously dropped in March. The only explanation inferred for why the case was closed, despite the “strong” evidence, is Barnett’s grandfather, who is part of the Republican party machine in Missouri and has been a state congressman since 1994. Rep. Rex Barnett has denied involvement in the investigation.
Following the shuttering of the case, Coleman and her family were subsequently bullied by classmates and locals and essentially forced to relocate. In their absence, their Maryville house was burned down. It seemed like justice would never be served.
Anonymous to the Rescue
That all changed last Saturday when the Kansas City Star published a 4,000 word expose on the circumstances surrounding the rape case that promptly went viral and caught the attention of the hacktivist collective Anonymous. By early Monday morning, the collective announced #OpMaryville, and released a statement with the hashtag #justice4daisy demanding “an immediate investigation into the handling by local authorities of Daisy’s case.”
Another missive called for three specific things:
- For protesters to gather outside the “Nodaway County Courthouse in Maryville, Missouri with daisies in our hands for a peaceful protest in support of Daisy Coleman” this upcoming Tuesday;
- For “Missouri’s Attorney General Chris Koster to immediately open an investigation into the lack of charges against Matthew Barnett, despite a confession and evidence of his guilt,” and lastly;
- For “members of the press [to] investigate and file FOIA requests to discover any connections between Matthew’s grandfather, Missouri State Rep. Rex Barnett, Maryville law enforcement and the prosecutors who dropped Daisy’s case.”
No one advocated, or engaged in, any extreme, dangerous or violent activity vigilante mobs are feared for, like beating Barnett, egging or burning his house, or bombing the Maryville police department building. Anonymous didn’t even bother DDoSing a site this time, as is their usual M.O. The UK’s Daily Mail, that bastion of journalism, claimed Anonymous shut the local sheriff’s website down “in protest,” but the company who hosted the website actually took it down voluntarily for “security concerns,” fearing an Anonymous digital attack that never materialized.
The scariest, most dangerous thing the collective did was garner widespread press and make the hashtag #justice4Daisy a top trending topic on Tuesday. According to Topsy, #justice4Daisy has been mentioned 30,000 times to date, not including retweets. #OpMaryville has been tweeted 29,000 times to date, not including retweets. To compare social media platforms, the Justice for Daisy Coleman Facebook page has 15,800 likes.
There are two reasons for the widespread use of these hashtags. First, Anonymous’ “Twitterstorm” tactics designed to trend topics and second, the moral universality of #justice4Daisy: no one likes rapists, let alone a rapist let go because of political connections. Mirroring Steubenville and the Halifax case of Rehtaeh Parsons (teen rape cases that saw resistance from their respective communities as well as incompetent police) men and women not typically associated with Anonymous or prone to vigilantism joined in on the online protest to ensure Coleman got justice. Under the associated hashtags, Coleman supporters urged each other to call Sheriff White, contact Representative Barnett and sign a MoveOn.org petition demanding an “immediate investigation.” So far, 43,000 people have signed it. Coleman supporters also shared images of Matt Barnett with the words “Maryville must right this wrong.”
Swift Success
By Thursday, a special prosecutor was called to reopen the case. This isn’t the first time an Anonymous operation undertaken predominantly on Twitter led to the reopening of a closed rape case — just this April, the collective successfully leveraged social media and public support to reopen the Parsons case after her suicide.
Daisy Coleman herself has thanked Anonymous repeatedly for their efforts, even on her XOJane post where she wrote: “You may have heard my story, thanks to Anonymous who trended #justice4daisy.”
As for organizing a peaceful rally, it appears that objective has been met as well. The Justice for Daisy/Rally for Justice Facebook page has 2,000 confirmed protesters, some of whom are driving in from nearby towns. Maryville’s population hovers around 12,000 residents, so only one hundred people actually need to show up to have a substantial impact. More importantly, there appears to be only one confirmed as attending with an Anonymous symbol ( the Guy Fawkes mask ) as his profile picture. This man also happens to be one of the rally organizers. Everyone else has a picture of their face, or changed their profile picture to a daisy in solidarity.
In this light, hashtag justice doesn’t seem like vigilantism as much as it is a sophisticated and organized form of public outcry. In the past few years, angry citizens have done everything from reopening a case about a gas leak explosion in India to the relatively mundane cause of keeping a lighthouse in New Jersey open on the weekends. It took the court in India fourteen years to reopen the case and New Jersey two months to open the lighthouse, but regarding Daisy Coleman and her rape case, it took less than a week once her plight was known, all thanks to hashtags.
Hashtags as Movements
By definition, vigilantism rises in the absence of adequate justice systems and corrupt law enforcement but despite its well-meaning participants, vigilante mobs are traditionally seen as chaotic and dangerous. Anonymous is our modern (and “scary”) digital justice machine, but last week’s events surrounding Maryville rape victim Daisy Coleman prove sometimes you need a little vigilantism to get things done. That isn’t to say Anonymous gets a free pass to vigilante out on whoever they deem fit, but compared to other operations the collective has engaged in, #OpMaryville/#justice4Daisy is their most successful non-hacking operation they've done to date, with very few shades of “chaotic and dangerous.”
This August, the FBI triumphantly claimed to have dismantled Anonymous with their string of hacker arrests, and while it’s true the collective is currently neutered in that regard, it is important to note the core strength of the collective was never in their hacking ability — it was their global cyber activism. That engine is still on, and still gunning for justice.
