Alanah Pearce received rape threats. What she did next will impress you.

Alanah Pearce is an online gaming journalist from Brisbane. She reviews games for radio stations Triple J and 4zzz and online.

She is smart, passionate and very savvy.

Recently, Alanah was sent multiple rape threats from teenage boys via Facebook, including one that said “I’ll rape you if I ever see you c*nt”.

She could have allowed them to scare her. She could have replied to them with abuse. She could have called the police. She could have ignored it.

She did none of these things.

But what she did do scared the pants of those teens in a way that none of those things ever could.

Alanah Pearce dobbed on them to their mums.

That’s right. Determined to show the teens that there were consequences for violently threatening people online, Alanah tracked down the mothers of her abusers, and showed them the threats.

BOOM. GAME OVER.

So far she’s received one response from a mother who was nothing short of furious.

“She responded in almost exactly the way I wanted her to,” Alanah told the Guardian. “The fact she called him a little sh*t I found funny as well because I thought that but I wasn’t going to say anything.”

The 21-year-old posted the mum’s response on Twitter, where she has received an overwhelming amount of support from both men and women, many of whom have congratulated her on tackling the issue in such a hands-on way.

“I wasn’t going to post it on Twitter but I was just so excited,” she added. “And I thought some of my friends would find it amusing.”

Too often women writers face threats of violent abuse online. It’s not, “I don’t agree with you” or even “you are an idiot”. For some reason, when it comes to women, it seems that the only way some people can express their disagreement or dislike is to threaten rape.

So today we say congratulations to Alanah.

Congratulations for taking a stand. Congratulations for not allowing this abuse to go unpunished.

And congratulations for getting back at them in a way that truly brings it home.