You’re standing on a busy train when your phone vibrates. When you unlock your phone, you receive an AirDrop request - someone wants to send you an image. You accept the request and await the image. It’s photos of an erect penis, it turns out. You don’t know who is sending them, where they are in proximity to you, or why they are doing the digital equivalent of exposing themselves in public, cyberflashing. All you do know is that you're scared, you feel targeted, and you’re not sure what you can do to protect your safety.
Women and even school-age children are being cyberflashed by men every single day. And although in-person, direct flashing is usually dealt with as a serious matter, cyberflashing doesn’t receive the same treatment. Rarely is cyberflashing addressed as the sexual assault that it is.
In my case, it wasn’t on a train. I was actually having breakfast with my mum. She sat next to me, pouring the milk over the top of our bowls of cereal when my phone buzzed next to her. Thinking it would be my uncle, who I was waiting for to pick us up, I told my mum to open the message and read it for me. Instead of a text from my uncle, it was a video of a penis ejaculating. A complete stranger had sent me a video of him masturbating. We had never spoken before.
Now, new research from the UCL Institute of Education has found that girls are increasingly becoming targets of cyberflashing and women - including children - are being cyberflashed every single day. They cite a lack of thorough accountability and identity-checking measures on social media platforms as a causative factor helping to fuel the online sexual harassment of young people.
UCL also say that non-consensual image-sharing practices were 'particularly pervasive, and consequently normalised and accepted'. This is contributing to 'shockingly low' rates of reporting online sexual abuse.
Social media giants have been urged to clamp down on 'cyberflashing' for some time and Grazia has been reporting on the impact of cyberflashing for a while, campaigning for cyberflashing to be made illegal. There is currently no law that directly addresses this “digital flashing” in England and Wales, although it has been illegal in Scotland since 2009. And, while the Women & Equalities Committee recommended the government introduce an image-based abuse law to criminalise cyber flashing back in 2019 the government rejected those plans.
Now, talk of cyberflashing is back in the headlines. The government did not do enough, and women and girls are still being attacked in this stealth-like way every single day. Three in four of the girls in the UCL focus groups had also been sent an explicit photo of male genitals, with the majority of these 'not asked for'. Snapchat was the most common platform used for image-based sexual harassment, according to the survey findings. But reporting on Snapchat was deemed 'useless' by young people because the images disappeared.
According to UCL’s research, cyberflashing was 'often experienced on a regular, sometimes daily basis'. Girls described 'getting used' to receiving this unwanted content and no longer seeing it as a 'big deal'.
Evidently, social media platforms have not done enough to prevent women from being targeted either. Meta - the company that owns Facebook and Instagram - along with Snapchat have both responded to say that the tools they provide are enough, but the statistics released today paint a grim picture that says otherwise.
Like many other women, I didn’t bother reporting my cyber-flasher the police. On one hand, receiving ‘dick pics’ was a normal part of my day. I receive at least three per month from strangers (though the gut-punch feeling never lessens). Being cyberflashed felt like such a normal part of my day, that it didn’t feel dramatic enough to report.
It’s clear that, along with criminalisation, women and girls also need to be provided with clear paths to report cyberflashing when it happens. Last month, Boris Johnson agreed that cyberflashing should be illegal, but the process is moving slowly. The report from UCL calls on tech giants to create 'clearer and more extensive privacy settings’ and introduce rigorous identification procedures to protect children from adult predators. This change may involve checking a user's identity with passports upon sign-up. Snapchat is also urged to keep a record of images, videos and messages to identify perpetrators and aid the reporting of incidents.
We already know that the Government must act faster to criminalise cyberflashing in the first place, but it's also up to big tech companies to protect their users and put forward ideas that will actually work, rather than ticking off the bare minimum.