Naomi created a tool to help victims of online harassment to help create their own reports and to encourage safer online practices.
Use the Online Harassment Reporting Tool: https://online-harassment.indigibot.ca/
About Online Harassment
Online harassment can range from persistent over many days, months or years. In Ontario, online harassment is recognized as “harassment in internet communications” where such communications “go beyond all possible bounds of decency and tolerance”. The Court recognized online harassment as an “unstoppable intrusion” leaving victims feeling like they can’t escape with the harassment invading their home or private domain.
About Naomi
Naomi is not new online harassment. In 2014, after testifying at parliament and publicly opposing a bill (now law), Naomi began to experience increasing attacks to her personal well-being and safety that impacted her everyday life. Since that time, she has learned practices to document online harassment because for her, it is not a question of if it will happen but when it will happen again. And true to form, she experienced online harassment again with two major incidents happening in 2021 that resulted in creation of this tool.
She has a forthcoming book chapter to be published in Australia entitled Legal Possibilities and Criminalized Population Groups: A Personal Experience of an Indigenous Woman in the Sex Trade, which discusses the limitations of the current legal frameworks when sex workers and marginalized professionals like Indigenous women lawyers experience technology-facilitated violence, specifically online harassment facilitated through images and nonconsensual use of images. This book chapter talks about her personal experiences with online harassment as an Indigenous woman with sex working experience and also as a lawyer.
Using the tool does not create a lawyer client relationship with Naomi.
Thank You/Acknowledgments
Naomi thanks Ben A. and Johann Kwan for their help in implementing the tool.
Ben A., a technologist-in-training interested in the use of tech for social good, implemented the site.
Johann Kwan an Ontario-based tech lawyer who started his law career in the public interest space and is keenly interested in using technology for the public good. He now focuses his energies on helping enabling small business to thrive in online, including helping them to ethically and effectively handle the data entrusted to them.
Naomi thanks the many students and lawyers who helped test and provide feedback to the tool.
The tool is self-funded and maintained financially by Naomi. You can support her work here.