Stay safe online! It’s essential in this age of technology.  The Me Too movement began in 2008 to promote awareness regarding both sexual harassment and sexual assault.  It is known across the world in different translations and brought attention to their prevalence in the workplace.

Stay Safe Online

I feel like it is also bringing awareness in other areas and encouraging and empowering victims to speak out rather than hide in the shame they feel. This is long overdue.  As a victim myself, I didn’t speak out because of shame and that was difficult to overcome.

While it’s too late for me to do anything about, I can certainly take steps to make sure it never happens again, and so can you.  Since it’s so prevalent, I’ve done a lot about online dating lately as there are so many free dating sites and it has become so common.

What I would like to address this go round is harassment and online abuse.  I suppose I should have posted about them before I posted about dating safety, but it really didn’t occur to me.  So, here are some tips to help you deal with those unfortunate occurrences.

 6 Tips That Will Help You Stay Safe Online

1. Don’t be afraid to block someone! You are valuable, you do not deserve and should not tolerate person’s being mean to you.  Block them. The sooner the better!  Especially trolls! Trolls are those people who only have negative things to say and can get pretty mean on posts and such.
2. Contact Admin. Every site has admin, If you are being harassed, threatened or abused online and blocking isn’t working, contact admin and report them.  I suggest keeping the profile links or screenshots to pass on, this will help admin be able to find them and keep them off their servers.
3. Call the Police: If at any point the person seems to have found you or is making threats of physical harm, contact your local police. Even if there isn’t anything they can do immediately, they can put it on file and add extra patrols in your neighborhood.
4. Never, ever put anything revealing on your profile or in photos. Remove the GEO data from photos before posting them.  Also try not to post a lot of photos from the same location (like your favorite hangout) and don’t put specifics.  Rather than saying “I love Fatty Patty’s in City X” on social media, perhaps put “I love the Fatty Patty’s Chain!”  If it’s not a chain, I’d just say a general comment about pubs or whatever.
5. Leave out or minimize location information in posts/profiles. For example, rather than posting the city you live in, perhaps post the region instead. Predators will take the time to go through all of your posts and find other accounts in order to narrow down where you live.
6. Speak Out! Don’t be afraid to speak out when you feel harassed, threatened or, especially, are harmed in any way.  No matter who it is.

Remember the importance of this topic.  Today it is harder than ever to stay safe online with so much technology so easily available. You are a valuable asset,  Stay Safe Online!

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