For years, the founder of the Everyday Sexism project has had vile abuse heaped upon her. But that still didn’t prepare her for what she found in the toxic world of online misogyny

Laura Bates founded the Everyday Sexism project in 2012, when she was 25, inviting women on social media to detail sexist encounters they’d had. Two years later, she published the book of the same name, curating a document that was horrifying but unsurprising. It should have been shocking but nobody was shocked. Six years on, we meet in King’s Cross, in London, where the cafe has separated the tables with Perspex, so I have a flash-forward to a dystopian near-future where one of us is in prison for feminist activism (obviously her, I decided, ruefully). She is as passionate and determined as I have ever seen her (I have met and interviewed her a few times before), yet somehow more cautious, for reasons that become clear.

Bates was surprised by certain elements of the Everyday Sexism project, like how many of the accounts came from girls in their mid-teens (she had expected more responses to be from women working in offices), but not the phenomenon of sexist harassment itself, which she knew was “hidden in plain sight. It was an invisible problem and this was very much trying to make it visible.” In doing so, Bates seeded an idea that would be proved again and again in the following years, in more and more vivid ways. From the #MeToo movement to Black Lives Matter, the inflection point for resisting injustice is not when one crusader saves the day, but when everybody is emboldened to speak out at once. Bates comes back to this repeatedly, and not, I think, for reasons of modesty. It was never, she insists, about her.