IN THE wake of last week’s New Zealand terror attack Women’s Equality Party founder Sophie Walker tweeted that she hoped there would “come a time when male violence is recognised as the single biggest threat to peace and tackled accordingly”.

Though she had the stats to back her statement up - men being responsible for 97 per cent of US mass shootings and accounting for 91% of UK terrorism-related arrests - the response was immediate and vitriolic: she was talking rubbish and it was time she shut the hell up.

This is nothing new. As has been repeatedly pointed out by historian Mary Beard - a scholar who receives endless misogynistic abuse for telling the stories of the women airbrushed from history - “the mechanisms that silence women, that refuse to take them seriously, and that sever them from the centres of power” have been “deeply embedded in Western culture” for thousands of years.

That is a scary prospect in the internet age, as Conservative MSP Annie Wells has found out. Speaking to a newspaper at the weekend, the list MSP for the Glasgow region said that in the three years since being elected she has been forced to mute over 1,000 Twitter accounts after being bombarded with abusive and foul-mouthed rants, the vast majority of which have targeted her simply because she is a woman. With one troll in particular threatening her with violence - and tweeting that he knew exactly where she was - she has been left fearing for her safety.

She is not alone. When, in 2013, feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez led a successful campaign to have the image of a woman reinstated on the back of a Bank of England banknote she was deluged with so many rape and death threats she had to temporarily flee her London home to take refuge by the sea. “I’d do a lot worse than rape you,” one troll among hundreds had told her. “I’ve just got out of prison and would happily do more time to see you berried [sic]. #10feetunder.” Another said he would find her “and you don’t want to know what I will do when I do”. “You’re pathetic,” he added. “Kill yourself. Before I do.”

A year later 33-year-old Bristol man Peter Nunn was jailed for 18 weeks for bombarding Labour MP Stella Creasy with similar threats for supporting Ms Criado-Perez’s campaign, with he and others terrorising her to such a degree that she had to have a panic button installed in her own home.

The one thread that runs through these threats is that they come either after a prominent woman has spoken publicly or - worse still - has spoken publicly about an issue thought to relate only to women. Indeed, Labour politician Jess Philips, an outspoken advocate for women’s rights who once received 600 rape threats in just one night, last year told the Cheltenham Science Festival that she receives such abuse each and every time she speaks from a feminist perspective.

But why is it that some men feel moved to threaten violence simply because they’ve heard a woman speak in public? Why would the image of a woman on just one bank note give rise to murderous rage when the faces of men, who have graced our currency for centuries, remain on all the others?

Part of the reason is that, as Mary Beard says, men have been conditioned to want to silence women but, more than that, some appear to feel emasculated by women’s success as a consequence. Indeed, it is the same kind of people who send anonymous threats via social media that wrote to First Minister Nicola Sturgeon in 2014 complaining that her gender-balanced cabinet had resulted in unqualified women taking posts that should have been filled by innately qualified men.

Given that the kind of men who make these claims are the very ones who would stand no chance of attaining these positions even if there were no women on the scene, their position is almost laughable. Or at least it would be if men didn’t have such a proven propensity for violence.

Despite being at the receiving end of so many threats, Jess Phillips has said publicly that she does not feel either she or her children are in any danger from internet trolls - and she’s very probably right.

Yet given that in 2016 her friend and Labour colleague Jo Cox was murdered by a deeply inadequate man who did not like what she had to say or the fact she was able to say it, it should come as no surprise that the front door of Ms Phillips’s own home has now been reinforced with nine separate locks.

Annie Wells, too, has been forced to take precautionary action, changing her route to work and shifting the location of one of her surgeries from a back room in a library to the main library itself for fear she would be “violently attacked”. So seriously does the security team at Holyrood take the threats that she has even been advised to make sure she doesn’t go out and about on her own.

You see, while men have nothing to fear from successful women, women have plenty to fear from unsuccessful men. That doesn’t mean they stand a chance of silencing us, though, no matter how much Twitter amplifies them.