A cafe is facing a public backlash, including threats of arson and ram raids, after posting images of a young child scratching her name into a leather couch.
The owner of Hind Quarters Cafe & Bar in Waverley, South Taranaki, publicly shared details of the incident, hoping to identify two adults who were caring for a pair of children, arguing that they should have alerted staff to the damage before leaving. Instead, Kylie James has been left dealing with threats to her business.
Sean Lyons, Netsafe’s chief online safety officer, told the Herald that the backlash exemplified the potential harm that could be inflicted on people through their online activity, and showed the “unintended consequences” of such acts.
Security footage from the holiday weekend incident shows two adults sitting in the cafe corner as a young girl marks the couch – a brown leather Rembrandt valued at about $4500 – with her fingernails.
When a second child returns with a takeaway box, the couple begin to stack their plates and collect their belongings.
As they prepare to leave, the woman briefly leans over and attempts to wipe away the marks left by the girl, before continuing to depart as a staff member arrives to clear the table.
James later took to Facebook for help in finding the family, sharing a photo of the etching and the couple’s faces.
She soon became caught in a fiery debate around the importance of accountability and responsibility in parenting, as well as how such a post should be balanced against children’s privacy rights.
Speaking to Newstalk ZB last night, James said her only intention behind the public post was to identify the family so they could resolve the issue privately. She was “gobsmacked at where it’s headed”.
“This is a significant amount of damage. I just would have loved the opportunity to have the ownership of it and be done with it,” she told Nights host Marcus Lush.
She said staff did not notice the damage until Tuesday, sending her a photo while she was in her studio across the road, where she works as an interior designer.
“It’s two years old and it has worn exceptionally well ... it’s not really scratched or marked in any way, because my team there do a fabulous job of looking after it.”
James said she initially avoided posting a photo of the couch as it revealed the girl’s name, and “tried to be really professional” in sharing only what was needed for someone to recognise the family.
Instead, many commenters demanded that she explain why the couple were wanted or whether they had stolen anything.
When the footage was later shared, some questioned whether the child was behind the damage.
“I didn’t think I needed to justify or have a negative reason why I was wanting to track them down,” James said.
“Something simple that was professional, wanting to get a hold of somebody, is turned into, ‘I’m going to ram raid your building’, ‘I’m going to burn it down’, ‘I’m going to graffiti it’.
“You know, people just need to take a minute and think about what people have going on in their lives before they take to this keyboard.”
Lyons said people “need to think really clearly” about how varied reactions to a social media post could be, and consider whether sharing information in a public forum had the potential to generate backlash, cause offence or prompt viewers to conduct their own “online vigilantism”.
“We do have concerns that sometimes people who see this kind of conversation or discourse in public spaces don’t just think something should be done, but people start to think, ‘I’m going to do something’,” he said.
“If we are putting that material out there in order to identify somebody’s role in a situation, we have to be really conscious of the fact that some people might take what they see without any of the other context, and may not try to understand the wider situation.”
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