Women\u2019s Rugby World Cup organisers have said there is no room for online hate in the game, after the Wales back-row Georgia Evans was sent abuse for wearing a bow in her hair.<\/p>\n
Yvonne Nolan, the competition director of England 2025, also hailed the sport\u2019s community response after Evans released a statement last week saying she had been labelled \u201cchildish\u201d for her regular gameday look and told it was not one \u201cof a rugby player\u201d.<\/p>\n
It sparked fan support during Wales\u2019s defeat against Fiji<\/a> on Saturday with volunteers setting up a ribbon-making station and 1,200 worn by supporters during the final pool game.<\/p>\n Nolan pointed towards the formal process the tournament has in place in a partnership with the Signify Group using technology to remove abusive comments. \u201cWe do have a social media monitoring protection tool and that is action based,\u201d Nolan said.<\/p>\n \u201cIt monitors, takes down and if it reaches the right level we aim for prosecution. That is a deterrent and an action-based impact. But it is important to say, this is a drop in the ocean. This is a societal issue.<\/p>\n \u201cFor me the biggest impact at the weekend was watching that spontaneous volunteer-led ribbon station process. Spontaneously self-policing society is saying we won\u2019t tolerate that, there is no place for that in our game. We don\u2019t need a formal process to make that happen. That is us coming together as a rugby community to say it is not welcome in our sport.<\/p>\n \u201cIn our sport you can be who you want to be. For me that is the most powerful tool that we have and will affect social change.\u201d<\/p>\n Speaking after Wales\u2019s defeat in Exeter, Evans outlined the impact of the abuse. \u201cIt\u2019s tough because when we sign up to this as a professional athlete, you sign up for the scrutiny of your performance and what people think of you, I can take that as an athlete,\u201d she told the BBC. \u201cBut there is no space for derogatory comments, for hate or for any kind of abuse on social media.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n The latest rugby union news and analysis, plus all the week’s action reviewed<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s bigger than a bow, it\u2019s bigger than the game and it\u2019s bigger than myself \u2026 the support has been absolutely incredible. We haven\u2019t put the performance in that we would have liked and we haven\u2019t come away with what we wanted. I\u2019m heartbroken but heartwarmed at the same time by every single person who chose to wear a bow.\u201d<\/p>\n Wales are out of the competition after three defeats in the pool stage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Women\u2019s Rugby World Cup organisers have said there is no room for online hate in the game, after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":126068,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[5903,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-126067","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-rugby","8":"tag-rugby","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126067"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126067\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/126068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}