‘Leaky Images’: Women and Girls as Porn-Fodder in ‘Revenge Porn’

Have you ever had a dream about being naked in public?

Psychologists believe such dreams are a sign of stress or anxiety. We can probably all imagine the deep feelings- not just of embarrassment but shame and humiliation- that being publicly exposed would evoke. But for one in 10 Brits¹– mostly women and children – the experience of having intimate, nude or sexual images shared widely via social media or porn sites is a real, living nightmare.

This is a growing trend. And while the term ‘revenge porn’ is popularly used and widely understood, it’s problematic because ‘revenge’ is often not the motivation for the posting and in fact suggests that the victim did something wrong – and because the word ‘porn’ suggests the material is intended for public consumption. Although it’s rather long-winded and clunky, a more appropriate way to describe this phenomenon is ‘image-based sexual abuse’ (or IBSA).

Consequences for victims

The harm experienced by victims of IBSA is profound: the exposure leaves them feeling vulnerable and humiliated, and they often suffer from enduring mental health problems such as depression, withdrawal, low self-esteem and feelings of worthlessness. Victims also live in constant fear that their images will be seen by friends, family, neighbours and community members – or even by strangers on the street.

“I felt like there was nothing I could do. I was constantly worrying about who’d seen the pictures, and I felt like I couldn’t trust anyone. Even though I was the one who’d been violated, I blamed myself.”
Jess,IBSA victim²

In 2019, a UK report entitled Shattering Lives and Myths summarised its impact on victims. One of the main authors, Clare McGlynn, law professor at Durham University, comments in the Guardian: “What really came across was the social rupture – how it divides lives into ‘before’ and ‘after’. Some women lost jobs, relationships. They were isolated from family, friends, they withdrew entirely from the online world. And that was constant, an almost daily threat hanging over them. They’re always rediscovering it, or waiting for it to be redistributed. They see no time when the abuse will be over.”³

“I live in a rural area where everyone knows everyone and my life has never been the same since. It’s torture for the soul.”
IBSA victim ‘Ruth King’⁴

Prevention

In April 2015, Britain passed legislation that makes it a criminal offence to “disclose a private sexual photograph or film if the disclosure is made (a) without the consent of the individual who appears, and (b) with the intention of causing that person distress”.⁵ However, prosecutions are rare, not least because proving that someone shared an image with the explicit intention of causing distress is extremely difficult.

Whilst it’s good that the UK government recognises the seriousness of this issue, the law has done nothing to solve the problem. In fact, it’s getting worse: the UK’s only Revenge Porn Helpline, part of the UK Safer Internet Centre, has seen a huge surge in reported numbers, with 3,150 cases in 2020 compared with 1,685 in the previous year, a jump partly attributable to the Coronavirus lockdown.⁶

Undoubtedly, reforms to the law are sorely needed to ensure that victims are granted anonymity and to cover all perpetrator motivations. However, we cannot truly hope to tackle IBSA without recognising the underlying cultural drivers. Whilst we need to be better at teaching children about consent, both offline and online, this is unlikely to counterbalance the huge cultural influence of pornography. It’s no accident that the rise of online porn has coincided with the increasingly mainstream practice of sharing amateur porn and sexually-explicit messages (or “sexts”).

Under Pressure…

In a 2015 study, over 25% of female participants admitted they had sent sexual images by a partner because they’d been pressured into it.⁷ Although sexts are sometimes created as a result of pressure or coercion⁸,they are also created freely and consensually, often in the context of an intimate relationship. However, in the same study, 25% of the women said they sent nudes in order to “prove” their relationship commitment, which illustrates the fact that even when there’s no direct coercion, our actions are shaped by cultural norms and expectations. No choices are made in a vacuum.

Our hypersexualised culture, in other words, effectively values women and girls according to their appearance and sex appeal. This has the effect of conditioning women into sexual self-objectification, i.e. making themselves into sex objects in order to secure peer-acceptance. Teenagers are especially vulnerable to these pressures, particularly given their relatively limited ability to self-regulate, their love of technology and their growing sexual curiosity.

From boys and men

It’s estimated that between 15-20% of all British teens send “sexts” (sexually-explicit messages or videos). In a documentary discussing her experience of IBSA, former Love Island contestant Zara McDermott recalls the pressure she felt to send nude images as a 14-year-old to a boy who kept on asking her for them: “I’d never even kissed a boy. I was so innocent, I just thought this was something I should do. He kept relentlessly asking me… please send me that picture, it’ll really make me like you.” The boy immediately shared the image throughout the entire school.⁹

Speaking to other teenagers in a sixth form college in North London, Zara hears of many similar experiences:

“It comes up most times you start talking to a boy and if it’s late at night they’ll ask you to send something. You know that the conversation at some point will get steered towards that and then if you say ‘no’ they can be like ‘well, you’re obviously frigid then, you’re obviously this and that.’”

“It took me a really long time even being comfortable talking to boys, let alone sending pictures. But then I started to get called like ‘stuck up’ or ‘bougie’ for not sending pictures or not doing sexual activities with boys that I wasn’t in a relationship with, and then I did start questioning myself and asking, ‘am I being a bit too much of a prude?’”
6th form girl, interviewed in Zara McDermott’s Revenge Porn documentary

Sending explicit images or videos opens individuals up to the risk of victimisation through IBSA, sextortion, online grooming and cyberbullying, all of which have profound and lasting psychological consequences. Often, however, girls are not naive about these potential risks – indeed, often they’re disinclined to share sexts, but they do it anyway because they don’t know how to say no.

Researcher Sara Thomas of Northwest University analysed 462 anonymous stories posted on MTV’s A Thin Line campaign website, developed to empower young people to identify, respond to, and stop the spread of digital abuse.¹⁰ She found that young women were under huge pressure to acquiesce to “young men’s terms for romantic and sexual engagement”. She observes: “While many young women took on the responsibility of negotiating these pressures, they were also confused and didn’t have the tools to cope.”¹¹

Double Standards

When the 14-year-old Zara McDermott’s nudes were passed around the school, she was suspended, bullied and labelled a ‘slut’, whilst the boy who shared them walked off scott-free. This situation is typical.

“Teenagers are drafted into a sexual culture that rests on a harmful premise: on the heterosexual field, boys typically play offence and girls play defence… Most schools and many parents already tell teenagers not to send sexualized selfies. But why don’t we also tell adolescents to stop asking for nude photos from one another?”
Lisa Damour, US psychologist¹²

IMSA disproportionately affects women and girls, “with many victim-survivors experiencing devastating harms because of the social and political context of the sexual double standard and online abuse of women.”¹³ Girls are four times more likely to be pressured for nudes than boys. Not only that, but when they concede to the pressure, they’re often accused of trying to win popularity, or because they’re “a certain type of girl.”¹⁴

Boys, on the other hand, will often send girls unsolicited ‘dick pics’, a form of ‘cyberflashing’ that signals their presumption of sexual dominance.

Boys, on the other hand, will often send girls unsolicited ‘dick pics’, a form of ‘cyberflashing’ that signals their presumption of sexual dominance.

“Mom, you have no idea. Most teenage girls have received penis photos at some point during high school. It is a daily occurrence.”
Anonymous teenager¹⁵

Research suggests that almost a quarter of people who receive a sext in fact go on to share it with others – many without the original sender’s permission.¹⁶ Motivations for doing this vary enormously and include “control, attention seeking, jealousy, obsession, misogyny and lad culture, sexual gratification, a ‘prank’, distress, humiliation, entitlement, and to build up social capital.”¹⁷

Victim-survivor Vicky recalls her ex-boyfriend’s attitude to perpetrating IBSA: “It’s this whole thing of, ‘how many girls have you slept with?’ ‘I’ve slept with this many’… I feel like my boyfriend at the time, he was very ‘oh my girlfriend’s fit’ and he was just being very immature and wanted to show me off to his mates, just for the sake of [saying] ‘look at this fit girl that I’m sleeping with.’”¹⁸

Those who receive IBSA, meanwhile, rarely think twice about sharing it or downloading it. Not only does this sharing behaviour amount to collusion in a crime, it also tacitly endorses the original act and provides the perpetrator with affirmation and encouragement (“lad points”). We can’t single out the original perpetrators without acknowledging that the wider culture is effectively colluding in the crime. In 2019, an online petition to remove a website hosting IBSA had to be shut down because it had the unintended effect of generating more traffic to the site.

“Strangers at uni told me they recognised me from the images, and said whoever posted them was a ‘legend’.”
IBSA victim¹⁹

Driving forces

Is it possible for us to be concerned about the problem of IBSA, and to feel compassion for its victims, whilst we simultaneously consume vast quantities of unregulated online porn which depicts flagrantly abusive or non-consensual scenarios?

Sam, boyfriend of victim Zara McDermott, observed in her documentary how “no one sits there and sees that photo [of IBSA] and thinks, ‘wow I wonder what it’s like to be in that person’s shoes, I feel so bad for them.’” Few of us connect sexual abuse with pornography because we are so used to being uncritical consumers of porn.

Pornography centres on male sexual gratification and entitlement. This fuels misogyny and ‘lad culture’ in a way that undermines efforts to educate people about notions of respect, mutuality and consent. Research shows that watching a lot of porn makes consumers of both sexes show less compassion towards victims of sexual violence and exploitation, and more likely to trivialise rape and child sexual abuse as criminal offences; it also makes them less likely to identify instances of sexual assault and intervene as a bystander.²⁰

Because it centres on sexual objectification, porn also erodes our empathy. In the name of sexual fantasy, every kind of woman and girl in society is turned into porn fodder, reduced to sex objects that we as consumers can watch as they are sexually used and abused. No one watches porn while worrying about the thoughts and feelings of those featured in it.

We tend to assume there’s consent, even in the videos depicting illegal, abusive and non-consensual scenarios such as hidden-cam porn, leaked sex tapes, public sexual harassment and sexual assault, and sexual activity with minors. But the fact is. there’s no assurance that the videos hosted on most popular online porn platforms are made and posted by consenting adults, since it’s easy for users to upload any content freely and anonymously.

Our porn culture has conditioned us into feeling entitled to treat the sexualised images of any person as if it were porn, something to be enjoyed by the masses for entertainment and sexual arousal. Until we challenge this, we are unlikely to see an end to IBSA.