Interview: Caroline Criado-Perez, on her refusal to be silenced

When we meet for coffee in a Glasgow hotel, Criado-Perez doesn't look how I remember. In the footage of two years ago, she was long-haired, feminine in a slightly old-fashioned way, like a woman who wore dresses because that was what you were supposed to do. Today, with her cropped blonde hair, leather jacket, vest-top and tight jeans, the 30-year-old looks like a warrior; like someone who is even more of a fighter than when she first came into the public eye. In a recent article, she described a more amplified version of this outfit as "a deliberate challenge - imagine I exist to decorate your world if you dare". Fashion, she pointed out, needn't be a purely feminine pursuit. It "can also be about being dramatic, bolshie, singular, free".

This is what she appears to be projecting: she remains "bolshie", and is not going to apologise for anything she is. She recently started boxing, and has taken up rock-climbing, partly in response to an interview she did with Victoria Henry, a Greenpeace activist who scaled the Shard in London as a protest against Shell plans to drill in the Arctic. It's one of the most thrilling sections in a book that includes interviews with inspirational women, from Felicity Aston, the first woman to ski alone across Antarctica, to lawyer and activist Leila Alikarami, who is fighting to change the legal status of women in Iran.

The book includes short sections of memoir and lists the most sadistic social media messages Criado-Perez received, almost like an exorcism. Having never been allowed to recount those things on TV or in newspapers, she was in effect rendered voiceless, unable to utter the details of how ghastly the trolling had been. "It felt like a very important political act to put it in [the book]. Because I feel like the whole episode was people telling me to shut up. I had rape threats telling me to shut up. I had people who were telling me not to feed the trolls telling me to shut up. And I had the media telling me to shut up because I wasn't allowed to say what had been said to me. This is my book and I'm writing it and I'm in charge. I'm bloody well going to put it in there."

Many readers will be horrified that the world contains such woman-hatred, appalled that it wasn't just men who wrote such stuff; that among those convicted for sending menacing tweets was a woman. How could a campaign about banknotes have prompted such nastiness? Criado-Perez has her own answer: a crisis in masculinity that is almost existential. "I think it's fear: that the public space which was for a very long time a white, male domain, is being encroached upon by all these bloody women and all these ethnic minorities."

Criado-Perez has been a feminist for only five years. As a teenager she was, if anything, "anti-feminist". Her born-again moment came late, when she was a mature student, studying English literature, reading a book about feminist linguistics and the use of the word "he" to refer to both genders. "I thought, 'Oh my God, whenever I think of any of these professions - lawyer, politician, doctor - I see a man in my head.' I thought, it can't be a coincidence there are all these men in my head and anything I want to do, I feel I can't as I feel I would be judged by men. That set me off."

It would be wrong to suggest that this fighter cruised through her social media baptism of fire. Even now, Criado-Perez feels a little traumatised by it. At the time, she also felt that almost everything she said or did was treated as wrong. "As a woman in that situation, you can't do anything right," she says. "And of course it's irrelevant how I behaved. What people should have been focusing on was the people sending me abuse." The focus on her behaviour she finds "troubling" since she sees it as an extension of the victim-blaming that often happens around rape. She compares it to the attitude of "if you don't wear that short skirt" bad things won't happen.

Criado-Perez knows what it is to internalise that victim-blaming. She says she was sexually assaulted a few years ago, and blamed herself. She didn't talk about it for years, and it was only six months ago, when she had taken up boxing and was talking with a friend about whether encouraging self-defence is a form of victim-blaming, that she told someone. "I'd been blaming myself," she says. "I was ashamed. And I realised a huge reason why I was ashamed was because I'd been seeing myself as he saw me."

She had felt, she recalls, powerless at the time as she was not able to defend herself. "One of the reasons I was blaming myself is that although I said 'No', I ultimately let it happen. I didn't fight back because I didn't know how to. When I was talking to this friend I started thinking about how I really wished I'd been able to just punch his f***ing face in, and run off."

Do It Like A Woman starts with a story about her mother, a housewife who followed her Argentinian-born husband around the world as he pursued a career in the supermarket industry, then was left rudderless after they divorced when she was in her 50s. Her mother turned that personal tragedy, that feeling "she didn't know who she was any more", Criado-Perez writes, into a "chance for yet another new life" as a nurse for Médecins Sans Frontières.

Over recent years, she says, her mother has become "more vocally feminist". Growing up - she was born in Brazil - Criado-Perez says there was little overt feminism in her household. But she had a growing "awareness my mum didn't feel very fulfilled". Later, after the divorce, Criado-Perez found herself looking in on a big question: "If you do make your life about someone else and about supporting them what happens when that person goes?" It was, she says, a formative lesson. As a teenager she decided she would never depend on a man.

Perhaps, I suggest, her dad was a big role model for her. "I suppose I identified more with my dad and what he was doing," she replies, "because he was the one out in the world. I really admired him and that's probably part of the way in which I rejected womanhood and tried to make myself as masculine as possible. To be more like my dad. It wasn't until I discovered feminism that I recognised I don't need to be a man to do these things. I can be a woman and do these things." Before becoming a feminist, she dressed in a quite masculine way: never wearing heels or make-up. She painted her nails, she says, for the first time this year.

Reading Do It Like A Woman, I was struck by how many of the heroic women featured came, like Criado-Perez, from lives of relative privilege. "Nine times out of 10," she says, "when I meet a woman who seems really confident and just assumes she's going to be able to do things, she's been to an all-girls school." Though Criado-Perez went to a private school, it was a mixed one, and this, she believes, had a negative impact. She remembers very clearly sitting at a lunch table at school and realising that she was talking and the boys were talking but the other girls were "more or less silent". After that, she tried not to talk so much. "I tried to be quieter. I tried to let people speak before me." It can't have been easy. Criado-Perez's natural state seems to be talking, gesticulating, expressing herself.

For all the trauma that social media and the web have brought her, Criado-Perez knows it also helped her find her voice. "The great thing about the internet is that it has taken away the need for permission," she says. "I'd not be where I am now if it were not for the fact that I could just start a blog or open a Twitter account. I didn't need anyone to say, 'Yes I'm allowing you to write for us.'"

By standing up to the barrage of hate, by rejecting the advice to "not feed the trolls", by retweeting the very worst messages, she has in her own way been a pioneer. There are still moments when she is transported back to that time in which she felt so traumatised - when, for instance, she sees a threatening tweet or email and has a visceral reaction. But she tends, for the most part, to block these things out and get on with life. If someone tells her not to write something for fear of trolls, she goes ahead and writes it anyway. "There is no way I'm going to let these a*******s dictate what I do with my life. I am quite bolshie about it. I'm very determined not to allow them to dictate anything that I do."

From 2017, a picture of Jane Austen will appear on Bank of England tenners. "Don't" is almost the worst thing you can say to Caroline Criado-Perez. Just try telling her not to do something, and you can almost be sure she'll do it. Like a woman. And change the world.

Do It Like A Woman ... And Change The World is published by Portobello, £12.99