Caroline Criado-Perez: 'Twitter has enabled people to behave in a way they wouldn't face to face'

A couple of weeks ago Caroline Criado-Perez made a memorable appearance on News at Ten. The feminist campaigner had won her battle with the Bank of England to reinstate a woman on the back of an English banknote. She seemed as surprised as anybody that the bank had caved into her demands. She had campaigned ever since it was announced that social reformer Elizabeth Fry was to be wiped off the fiver and replaced with Winston Churchill, leaving an all-male, all-white lineup on our English banknotes (apart from the Queen who is there only as an accident of birth). Criado-Perez had threaten to sue the bank under the 2010 Equality Act. The then Bank of England governor, Mervyn King, appeared to dismiss her request. Then, within a week of new boss Mark Carney taking up his post, she had been invited to the bank and asked if she would accept Jane Austen on the back of a tenner. It was a great feel-good story.

Five days later, Criado-Perez was back on the news in a very different context. This time she was talking about the rape and death threats she had received on Twitter, following her victory. This story was as depressing as the first had been inspiring. But somehow she managed to put a positive spin on it. You've got to remember there are far more people who support me than are against me, she told Newsnight. It rang a bit hollow. One threat would have been one too many, but she had received hundreds. Her (incorrect) address had also been been posted on Twitter.

By last Wednesday, she had temporarily left her London home for the Kent seaside. She had always planned to have a few days off, but this had become something different. It wasn't so much a holiday as a bolthole. When I knock on the door of the B&B she is staying in, the landlord says he has not heard of her. It turns out that for security reasons, she has checked in under the name of her boyfriend, Matthew.

A few minutes later Criado-Perez, Matthew and their dog Poppy arrive at the B&B, next to the Lillyputt fun mini golf. This really is old-time seaside. The three of them seem in good spirits and we head for the bandstand by the Punch and Judy show. Matthew, an English literature academic, leaves us, and Criado-Perez flops into a chair. She looks through the menu and orders a tiny Mini Milk ice-cream. "I just feel really stressed and tired. I do feel hungry, but I also feel slightly sick."

She is still getting violent threats, and two people have now been arrested. When she was campaigning, she was getting hostile messages, she says, but they were relatively benign. "Get back to the kitchen, shut up, fuck off. That was just people being unpleasant and not liking feminists. But it was nothing that would have led me to report them to the police."

Now, she is dealing with something altogether different. What kind of tweets has she received? "Gosh." She looks embarrassed. "So, for example, someone was talking about giving me a good smashing up the arse. Somebody said: 'All aboard the rape train.' Some guy tweeted another guy asking if he wanted to join in raping me." Then there were the death threats. "One was from a really bright guy who said: 'I've just got released from prison.'" She shows me her phone: "I'd do a lot worse than rape you. I've just got out of prison and would happily do more time to see you berried [sic]. #10feetunder." The tweet is signed Ayekayesa. There is another one, equally chilling. "I will find you, and you don't want to know what I will do when I do. You're pathetic. Kill yourself. Before I do. #Godie."

She looks away from her phone. "Nice guy! He's not been arrested as far as I know." I tell her that I'm amazed that she has managed to stay so calm about it. On Newsnight, she seemed almost buoyant. As soon as I say it, she lets down her guard. "I have broken down pretty much every day since this happened. But I don't want to give them the satisfaction of knowing they are getting to me. I feel it's my responsibility to maintain this defiant stance of: 'Fuck you, you are not getting to me and you're not going to win.'"

There is an endearing guilelessness to Criado-Perez. For all that she is determined to look strong – and is in many ways admirably so – she is anything but a practised politician. Talk to her long enough, and she will say just how vulnerable and violated this whole thing has made her feel, even if that is just what the trolls (Twitter abusers) want to hear.

"I felt really sick, to be honest. And horrified. It's not like I didn't know this happened to women, but to see it in front of you, directed at you ..." Poppy is standing on her knee, licking her face as she talks. "Sit down Poppy … And while I'm not necessarily walking round in fear all the time, it has come to my attention when various things have happened ..." That's another thing, she says – her sentences have become fractured and she can't find the right words. "I was in the car with Matthew and he held out his phone and said: 'We need to talk about this' with a very serious face, and my immediate thought was somebody had found where I lived and had made a direct threat. The same thing happened when a journalist knocked on my door at 10.15pm. My immediate thought was ..." She comes to a stop. "That brought home to me that I am really scared, and I've got this fear and tension bubbling up underneath the surface all the time. And I guess that's why really I can't eat."

She takes an incisive bite out of her Mini Milk and the positivity returns. "But it is important to remember there are so many more of us than them. It can feel they are unbeatable, there are too many of them … don't feed the trolls, just ignore them, there's nothing you can do about that ... bollocks to that. I don't want to live in that world."

Criado-Perez, 29, was born in Brazil to an Argentinian father and an English mother. Her father, a self-made businessman who started out selling handmade dolls on the streets, went round the world troubleshooting for supermarkets. Every three years or so, the family would move country with him, learn a new language, fit in with a new culture – Spain, Portugal, Taiwan, Britain. Criado-Perez initially spoke English with a Spanish accent, but nowadays it is cut-glass.

Her history is fascinating – every time you think she has finished telling you about her childhood, she embarks on another chapter. At times it sounds like a magic realist novel. She tells me how her father's family left Argentina – just as they were about to depart on a ship, her grandfather told her father that he was staying behind and would not be seeing them again. It was her father's duty to inform his mother and younger siblings because he was the oldest son. A generation later, history repeated itself when her own parents divorced and some years later her father broke off contact with his children. The funny thing is, she says, they had been such a close family, and the children had idolised their dad.

When she was 11, her father moved to Holland and she joined her two brothers at a public school in England. She hated the  culture, which she considered to be bullying, and blames that culture for a brother's attempted suicide – he was later diagnosed as bipolar. As for Criado-Perez, she says she was outspoken and insecure. She felt she was too loud and unladylike, and people disapproved, so she quietened down, unhappily. In her mid-teens she discovered opera, and was determined to become a singer. Then there was the year at university, dropping out, the clubbing and drugtaking period, the time working in a book shop, at a design agency, in jobs that bored her but subsidised the singing lessons.

As she talks, I notice a tattoo on her upper arm. What is it? "Ah, that is from a Smashing Pumpkins album cover, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. I got it when 18. I was really into the Smashing Pumpkins then." They are quite an angsty band? "Yeah! Very angsty."

She tells a story about herself that sums up her own angsty youth: "I stopped doing English when I was 17. It was basically because I always came top of the class but thought it was a fluke and I was going to get found out as a fraud. Looking back, I think, how could I be so stupid? I was taken to my head of house and told I couldn't drop English, and I just said: 'No, no, no, I refuse.'" Why? She stumbles towards an answer. "I didn't want the shame … I quit while I was ahead before anybody discovered that I wasn't good at English." Was her conviction based on anything real? "No, it was based on me being fucking insane!"

When she was in her mid-20s, she finally took her English A-level, and went to study English at Oxford University. For the first time, she felt she was making something of her life. She studed gender in literature and became politicised. She had never considered herself a feminist before, but now she began to think about patriarchy and whether that had something to do with why she had felt so out of place as a loud 11-year-old and why she had doubted her abilities. She had grown up believing that girls were meant to be emotional, consumer- driven, apolitical, fluffy – and rather than questioning the stereotype, she had simply decided she didn't like being a girl or wasn't a good one.

It is unusual to discover politics so late, I say. She grins. "Yeah. It's like born-again Christians, they are the most vocal and passionate about it."

After graduating last year at the age of 28, she began a masters in gender theory. Actually, she says, she had planned to write her dissertation this week rather than going into hiding.

The more Criado-Perez studied, the more vocal she became. She started to blog and tweet about feminist issues. Last October, she was listening to a debate on teenage pregnancy on the Today programme – the panel was all-male. She was outraged and turned to Twitter to vent her fury. The following day, there was a debate on breast cancer – another all-male panel. Presenter John Humphrys sheepishly suggested they couldn't find a female expert. Criado-Perez was incandescent.

But her feminism has always been more practical than ideological, and she and a friend discussed the problem and decided that if the BBC couldn't find female experts to discuss issues, they would. So they started The Women's Room – a database of women experts and campaigning group for fairer representation.

"It's made it easier to find women and harder to say things like 'We couldn't find a female breast cancer expert', because there must be 150 now on the Women's Room."

Criado-Perez was on a roll. Earlier this year, when she discovered that the banishing of Fry would leave no women of achievement on English banknotes, she decided to do something about that, too. "I just thought: 'No, I'm not fucking having this.'"

She was getting gobbier by the day? She shakes her head. "Feminism gave me a right to speak that I didn't feel I had beforehand. Without feminism I don't think I would have started blogging because I would have thought who the fuck am I, why would anyone be interested? Whereas, because of feminism, I now feel I have a duty to speak. For example, when the police came round after the first rape threat and said: 'Do you want to take this guy to court?', my first thought was 'Not really, because there might be awful repercussions and I'm a bit scared'. But because of feminism, I feel I have a duty to take it to court and to see it through."

She checks her texts for the first time in hours and looks upset. "Oh dear, something else has happened. Stella's just sent me a text saying: 'So angry that this is still happening.'" The Labour MP Stella Creasy, who has also receiving threats on Twitter, has been supporting Criado-Perez.

I ask Criado-Perez why she thinks social media has unleashed this plague of misogyny. "It's been going on for millennia. Women have always been put in their place and kept there through the threat of sexual violence. What social media has done is enable people to behave in way they wouldn't face to face. There's a feeling that they are anonymous and people can't find them, and there's also research into how people need to see a face in order to feel empathy, and if you don't have that then you feel you can fire off this sort of stuff."

Why does she think has she become such a target? "I'm going against what you're supposed to do; I'm shouting back at them, getting them arrested. I think that's wound up the extreme ones even more."

Criado-Perez is about to finish her MSc and needs to find a job, hopefully campaigning for the things she cares about. There is lots of work still to do. She has not even finished with Jane Austen yet. She is chuffed that they have chosen the author, but not so happy about the accompanying quote. "It is a rubbish quotation. 'There is no pleasure, I declare, like reading,' or something like that. It shows they just don't understand Jane Austen. It's said by a really vapid character who we're not meant to like. I think what would be lovely is if they put one of her quotations about women being written out of history up there, because it would be a nice statement and an acknowledgement that they are changing their ways. I think a really good one would be from Persuasion, where a guy says to Anne Elliot: 'I can point you to any historical book and you can just see women behaving badly', and she replies: 'Men have had every advantage over us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands.'"

With that, Criado-Perez, Matthew and Poppy head off for a walk along the beach.

That afternoon, the Twitter trolling reaches a new low. Women MPs and journalists who have supported Criado-Perez are sent tweets telling them their homes are about to be bombed. She emails me in the evening. "Just got another quite graphic death threat … not sure what's happened today and why it kicked off so much." But she is still managing to find the positive in it.

Look, she says, at least it is forcing us to have a debate. "It's like Twitter's just started vomiting up hatred and bile, and now it's moved beyond me and loads of women are being targeted in this really bizarre way. It feels as if we are really doing something now, like we're lancing the boil or whatever rubbish metaphor you want to use. We've got to go through this really horrible process and at the end, we'll have got rid of it all."

• This article was amended on 20 April 2015 to correct some personal details.