Anna Rowe, the woman who started a petition to make fake online dating profiles illegal, has lost her job as a teaching assistant at Ethelbert Road Primary School in Kent.
It was announced last week that Rowe had launched a new petition to try and change the way the law views fake online dating profiles.
The petition was created after her own experiences online dating, Rowe meeting a man on Tinder only to find out he was married with children.
Rowe met a man who went by the name of “Antony Ray” on Tinder, the pair speaking on the app for a few weeks before moving things to WhatsApp, after which Ray revealed his online pictures had been of Bollywood actor Saif Ali Khan.
Despite this, the pair hit it off and throughout the first six months of their relationship, Ray visited Rowe around twice a week, explaining that as he was regularly abroad for work, he could not visit more often.
However, after around six months his affections dwindled and Rowe re-downloaded Tinder to find that Ray’s profile was still on the app.
Rowe later found out that Ray was a top legal executive who spent his weeks working in London and weekends with his wife and children.
Following her experiences, Rowe decided to launch an online petition called, “Making a fake online profile with the intent to use women/men for sex, should be a crime”.
She hoped that enough signatures would spur a change in the way the law sees fake online profiles – as it stands, creating fake profiles is not a criminal offence.
However, this petition has now cost Rowe her job as a teaching assistant at Ethelbert Road Primary School, which she had since last September, after the school said she had brought it into disrepute.
Rowe said: “The irony is that the school has been running an anti-bullying campaign in which the message has been that children must speak up if they want things to change. If you stay silent, then nothing happens.
“People were horrified to learn that I had lost my job just for speaking up about my campaign. The school was saying it had to do it because of the sexual content of the article and the mention of Tinder.
“This really is null and void. There was nothing overtly sexual in the article. I had to talk about what had happened to me as a vehicle to get the campaign to change the law moving. That is what all this is about.”
To find out more about Rowe’s petition please click here.