Revenge porn – uploading indecent pictures or videos of someone to the internet, without their knowledge or consent (also known as being a massive dick), normally with the intention of causing harm and distress – became illegal back in September.
A specific amendment to the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill was made to cover photographs sent on social networks and also by text.
Yesterday, Samantha Watt, 31, became the first female in the UK to be sentenced to time in prison for posting sexually explicit ‘revenge porn’ photographs of her ex-girlfriend on Facebook.
Watt, from Enfield in London, was sentenced to 18 weeks in prison. The Daily Mail reports that the explicit and intimate images which she posted of her former partner online were uploaded with the caption: ‘This girl pays for rent with sex and dirty pics lol she wants a taste of Sam’s life she’s getting a taste of how I can be. You can’t disrespect me.’
Delivering her sentence, district judge Julia Newton said, ‘The photos themselves are very graphic in nature and were widely available for distribution over which she [the victim] had no control.
‘She [the victim] was clearly identified in the post and there were comments about her being involved in prostitution and pedophilia that you actively encouraged.’
Detective Constable Henry Marshall, who investigated the incident, said: ‘Samantha Watt deliberately and callously set out to cause the victim distress, humiliation and embarrassment.
‘By publishing these private images on social media without the victim’s consent, she broke the law and it is right that she now faces this custodial sentence.’
The fact that revenge porn is illegal coupled with the fact that many people do take naked pictures of themselves and share them with trusted partners means that it’s likely that we will see more and more convictions like this in years to come.
Molly Soda, an artist, recently decided to publish her own naked pictures online in a project titled ‘Should I Send This?’ as a comment on revenge porn. Soda compiled a series of images from her phone as an online zine and physical book, taking control and leaking them herself so that nobody else would ever be able to do it without her permission.
Along with the images, Soda has included snippets of text, which say things like, ‘I’m exhausted but I can’t stop writing love letters to people who don’t think about me before they go to bed at night.’ A reminder that messages we send in the heat of the moment and even the things we post on the internet ourselves in the form of statuses have the potential to leave us both vulnerable and exposed.
You can view the project here, it’s probably NSFW.
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Girl Takes Threesome Revenge Porn Into Own Hands Because Why Not?
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.