Revenge Porn, if translated bluntly, is revenge eroticism.
Specifically, it means that your ex posted your intimate photos or videos online and sent you a link, or sent the photos or videos directly to your family or friends to achieve the purpose of hurting you and retaliating against you for humiliating you.
Sounds like scum, right.
There are more scum.
In fact, more often than not, the misuse of the most intimate photographs is done in secret without consent, and the person who took the photograph may not have known about it at all.
Ruby, a 29-year-old British secondary school teacher, will never forget when she first clicked on the AnonIB website.
In January 2020, a friend texted her for help: I found a private photo of myself on a website, what should I do?
The friend was a little embarrassed and instead of sending her a post with a photo of himself, he sent her a generic link to the site itself.
When Ruby opened it, she was stunned:
I couldn't believe what I saw, there was such a systematic organization.
Websites are categorized by country, with the UNITED States being the most, the United Kingdom being followed, and then segmented by region, city, and cities of any size will have smaller specific categories, such as "University of Birmingham Students".
Ruby's small town has a population of only 55,000 people, and the post is actually 16 pages long!
Next to each woman's intimate photo, there is as much identifying information as possible provided by the local user, including the name, the school attended, who the relatives are... There are also some unsightly evaluations.
After reading this site, Ruby was really intimidated:
Frankly, I feel disgusted and confused, how can such a website be allowed to exist? (In fact, the AnonIB website changed its name many times over the past few years until it was shut down by Dutch police.) But later, it reappeared and is currently hosted in Russian domain names. ）
To make matters worse, four months later, Ruby's classmates told her that your photo had been added to the site.
Ruby went to see her photos on AnonIB, which were very old, taken when she was 17 years old, when she went on vacation with other girls.
One is that she was sunburned, lying on her stomach naked, and her friends were helping her apply sunscreen;
The other was that she was showing off the size of the hotel towel, which wasn't big enough to cover her body.
After the holiday, Ruby uploaded the photos to Facebook's private photo album for three weeks, when she had about 400 friends, so it should be 1/400 to post the photos to the AnonIB website, who is unknown.
Whatever the publisher's motivation, the impact can be devastating.
As a teacher, Ruby had to notify her employer because she didn't know if her students had seen the photos. Immediately after, she became nervous and sensitive. She would suddenly burst out of the crowd because the teenagers who had gathered together made her feel very uncomfortable.
Later, Ruby set up a WhatsApp group for local victims and learned a lot about the untold pain:
A girl wants to pursue a career in the performing arts, but she postpones her studies at drama school because in that industry, image is everything. She doesn't know if she can cope with the anxiety of being Googled;
There was a girl who hadn't spoken since she was 16...
For Helen, 28, the leak of intimate photos turned her into someone else.
This spring, Helen received an anonymous prompt on her Facebook account saying that her private photos had been collected in a Google Drive folder and posted online. The whistleblower, who was later traced down as being from Australia, whistleblowed for the reason: We thought you would want to know.
Helen remembers almost breaking down when she heard the news: running, falling to the ground crying, then running, then crying again...
The photos that were uploaded and shared were taken when Helen was with her ex, who had been together for five years and had been apart for two years.
Helen was very confused:
We were together for a long time and after the breakup my ex assured me that he had deleted all those photos.
Until the weeks before this incident, we were in touch as friends. I have no reason to think he would do that.
In fact, her ex was interrogated by the police and sent her a message acknowledging that he had shared the photos, adding:
I never wanted to hurt you!
Although it turned out to be like pouring salt on a wound, Helen was happy, at least she had a testimony that could be used by the police.
But remember, the scumbag's words cannot be believed.
Later, Helen discovered that his predecessor's seemingly apologetic "don't want to hurt you" was the reason for protecting him from any prosecution.
Now, many months later, Helen still hasn't recovered:
I've always been single and re-dating is really hard. I used to be open and confident, but now I have uncontrollable moments of shame and sometimes unpredictable fears.
I avoid intimacy for the most part because it's too scary to actually hand that trust over to another person.
Such phenomena are becoming more common and have attracted more attention.
The UK has set up an organisation called Revenge Porn Helpline (RPH) to provide advice, guidance and support to adult victims of intimate image abuse living in the UK and to help remove private content shared online without consent.
Zara Roddis, a senior practitioner at RPH, said:
This is one of the most inhumane aspects of intimate image abuse we have ever seen. Women become items that are passed on, shared, and traded. We usually don't know how these people got the pictures in the first place, maybe exes, friends, or hackers, but none of them are voluntary for women.
All we see in the comments is that women are constantly being objectified, humiliated, and exposed.
Clare McGlynn, a law professor at Durham University, argues:
The uploader can be anyone and everyone, which is the hardest message to convey.
Sometimes, people prefer to think that the perpetrators of abusive intimate images are either perverts or other types of people with extreme malice, which is not the case.
This sharing happens on multiple platforms: Mega, Dropbox, Discord, or anywhere a group can share, and it's extra common.
How common is it? To name a few chestnuts:
When Ruby's photo was added to an AnonIB post in May 2020, her picture id was already 72,000!
A previous study of intimate image abuse in Australia, New Zealand and the UK showed that one in five men had ever posted such images;
During the lockdown, the call rate of the RPH hotline doubled.
Perhaps, in the beginning, it is ordinary men and boys, chatting in closed groups, building friendships through explicit pictures and jokes;
But sometimes, they leak out and give a glimpse into the wider world.
Other times, this sharing is deliberate.
For example, the football team at Oxford Brookes University, which asked players to share and rate as many private photos of the Brooks Girls as possible, had a "men-only" private Facebook group to share pictures of their current and former counterparts, adding 7,000 members within days.
To that end, Professor Nicola Henry, a social law scholar at RMIT University in Australia, looked at 77 platforms, community forums and blog sites that share and trade images, and interviewed publishers to understand their motivations:
While much of the media's attention has focused on retaliation against an ex as the primary motivation, it's more commonly associated with sexual gratification or impressing online peers.
For example, on some websites, photos of wives or female tickets are shared to get positive feedback from other users. Publishers may be showing off, or they may be proud of it.
But they forget that their own satisfaction may be the pain of others.
What makes the victims even more sad is that it is almost impossible for them to find legal recourse.
Ruby went to report the crime, and the British police only gave her a crime number, and there was no response.
Another victim in the group said that when she went to report the crime, the police said it was the 20th AnonIB report of the day. Their cases are known as cybercrime and require a great deal of collective pressure to be brought before they can be referred to regional crime departments. There have been no updates since then.
Yes, it's hard to change the law, and it's even harder to change the cultural, educational, social issues involved.
The road is long and long, may every girl be treated kindly.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/06/i-have-moments-of-shame-i-cant-control-the-lives-ruined-by-explicit-collector-culture
Wen | Mu Nan