The United Nations’ violence against women and girls special rapporteur has called out rape and death threats directed at prominent Australian campaigners, Collective Shout.
The UN special rapporteur has written to the Australian government following Collective Shout staff being bombarded with threats for campaigning against payment platforms handling funds for online games that enable sexual abuse and misogyny.
The abuse was “the most serious form of online violence against women human rights defenders I have seen in a long time”, special rapporteur Reem Alsalem said.
“When gamers realised that members of the Collective Shout were behind the efforts to remove violent games, they began sending threats of rape, sexual assault, and death, via social media platforms such as X/Twitter, the Collective Shout’s website, online forums, direct messages, and emails to individual staff, subjecting them to large-scale, co-ordinated harassment,” Ms Alsalem said.
Collective Shout staff were threatened with public release of their work and home addresses, and threats of violence which referenced family members, in a wave of attacks which massively escalated in mid-2025.
The Australian Federal Police are investigating but no arrests have been made.
“The allegations described, if confirmed, suggest a sustained campaign of intimidation, harassment and sexualised abuse targeting women human rights defenders and may constitute forms of violence against women and girls within the meaning of international human rights law,” Ms Alsalem said.
“The language of many messages was sexually violent and sought to humiliate them on the basis of their sex.
“Others explicitly called for their deaths … the volume and persistence of communications created an atmosphere of intimidation and fear.”
The Australian anti-gendered violence campaigners were the targets of doctored naked images, which depicted them as rape victims, extreme physical violence and victims of mutilation.
One X account – named @Americanrapist – spread most of the deep fake images.
The UN rapporteur has called on the Australian government to explain what protections were offered to the Collective Shout staff, and detail how such attacks are investigated and evidence digitally preserved.
Collective Shout is a group of Australian anti-gendered violence campaigners. Director Melinda Tankard Reist regularly fronts parliamentary hearings.
Ms Tankard Reist was the target of many of the fake naked images.
She said the “mass misogynist cyber terror attack” began against Collective Shout staff in mid-2025.
At that time, the group was publicly calling out PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, Paysafe, Discover and Japan Credit Bureau for processing payments from platforms Steam and Itch.io which hosted games promoting rape, incest and child sexual abuse.
A Collective Shout worker created a Steam account and documented content which included gamifying violent sexual torture of women and children, and incest.
The public campaign against the payment processors was co-signed by eight other experts, ranging from academics to child sexual abuse survivors and other public campaigners.
But the campaign sparked a barrage of abuse, particularly via X’s AI bot Grok.
“While the intensity of the cyber abuse attack has lessened, death threats and Grok-enabled deepfake images of our team, including violent porn-themed videos, were still being circulated into this year,” Ms Tankard Reist said.
