For six months last year, when I was 20, my ex would publish explicit pictures of me online to his blog.
He'd upload them, I'd find them, I'd beg him to take them down. He would apologise profusely and take them down. Then the whole cycle would start again a few weeks later. People could like, comment and share the images. There were images of other girls posted up there too, all with derogatory slurs attached to them. I didn't know their names, so I couldn't warn them about what he was doing.
It completely consumed me. I would search every day for the images daily to make sure I could get them down. Every time I begged him to remove them, he would be so apologetic. There was always an excuse, and he'd always try to turn the conversation around - he'd ask me how I was, whether he could call me. I was convinced that if I was civil to him, then maybe it would stop.
I didn't tell anyone for six months, because I was ashamed. I didn't know who to tell, or where to turn. My confidence was completely shattered, and it all felt endless. I was trapped. Eventually, I went to the police. The officer told me there wasn't much they could do. They could 'have a word' with him and file a domestic incident report, and that was it.
I had to do something, just to get it to end, bring it to a head. I decided to tell everyone I could. Going public with my story wasn't an act of bravery - it was an act of desperation. I wanted help.
The response I got was phenomenal. Friends contacted me to say they were scared of where their images would end up. One friend told me that a similar thing had happened to her, only she'd been too ashamed to tell anyone. Another said that when she was 16, a man had used footage of her to blackmail her in to sexual activities. It was horrifying.
I started researching and came across the term ‘revenge porn’. There were entire sites dedicated to revenge porn, that profited from the pain and misery of young women. It sickened me to know that people were actually seeking out images taken or uploaded without the subject's consent, that they had such a lack of respect for women.
I became convinced that it should be a criminal offence in itself, so I asked my friends to sign a petition and contact their MPs. The petition got over a thousand signatures within 24 hours and more people came forward to tell me their stories. Many had been too ashamed to go to the police, and often, the ones who had tried had been sent away. Some of the stories were from girls as young as 14 - they were too ashamed to tell their families and had nowhere to turn. Some had considered suicide because they felt so trapped.
Parliament listened. MPs like Julian Huppert and Maria Miller fought hard for change and they showed victims that they had nothing to be ashamed of. On Monday night, the House of Lords unanimously agreed to criminalise revenge porn – which means it is only a couple of steps away from becoming a specific criminal offence. The police will receive new guidelines and victims will be taken seriously.
I'm thrilled with the amendment. I hope victims will begin to realise that they have nothing to be ashamed of and I hope no one else has to feel the horrible, endless loneliness that I did. I hope perpetrators will give up their sick hobby, scared of proper retribution.
But the amendment alone is not enough. Victims need support and help to get their images down from sites that are built to profit from their pain. We need to be teaching teenagers that consent is vital in all areas of sexual activity, and that explicit images are not a tool to be used to harass, humiliate and blackmail others. I want young people to grow up knowing how much power those images can wield - they need to understand that not only will uploading non-consensual, explicit images of somebody have devastating consequences on the victim, it will also lead to a criminal record.
In February 2015, the government announced that posting "revenge porn" on the internet would indeed become a criminal offence.
You can find out more about their #NoToRevengePorn campaign here, and access their resources here.
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Guest post: Revenge porn - 'I felt completely helpless'
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MumsnetGuestPosts · 23/10/2014 12:05
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lisamsheerin ·
23/10/2014 19:57
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