It's a well-known fact that games journalists of the female persuasion take a lot more flak than their male peers. One such journalist, Alanah Pearce, an Australian who reviews games for radio and television stations, as well as runs her own YouTube channel, has a rather amusing method of dealing with some of the abuse that's sent her way.
"A while ago, I realised that a lot of the people who send disgusting or overly sexual comments to me over the internet aren't adult males," Pearce told the Guardian.
"It turns out that mostly they're young boys and the problem is they don't know any better, so responding to them rationally didn't resolve the situation. And it got to the point where their comments were starting to make me feel really uncomfortable."
Ultimately Pearce decided that dealing with this situation required some motherly intervention, as you can see below, there was at least one positive response: "Most of them write to me through their personal Facebook pages. It's shockingly easy to find out who their families are."
"She responded in almost exactly the way I wanted her to. The fact she called him a little shit I found funny as well because I thought that but I wasn't going to say anything," Pearce said of the exchange she subsequently posted on Twitter.
"It was just a way to try to reach a resolution, to productively teach young boys it's not okay to be sexist to women, even if they're on the internet, that they are real people and that there should be actual consequences for that."