A police hotline for victims of revenge porn has had an influx calls after a documentary about the gross sex crime – where someone uploads intimate images they have of someone else in order to get revenge on them.
The Sun reports that the government-funded line, set up in April after the Government finally made it illegal to partake in revenge porn (as in, be the uploader of the images or videos), has had 1,800 calls. Staff have given emotional support, helped get images and videos removed and called in police. In the past couple of weeks, two people have been convicted on revenge porn offences.
But it’s not just these landmark cases that have drawn attention to the issue. Anna Richardson’s Channel 4 documentary shed light on the vile sex crime. The programme saw her upload intimate images of herself to a revenge porn site in order to see the timeline of events. Uploading the images, thousands of strangers viewing the images, and then people leaving hateful, sexually-driven comments underneath the images. And this is all for someone who consented to the images being there. You can only imagine how awful it must be for those who don’t agree to have their intimate images online.
‘It’s a sexually violent means of humiliation and control,’ Anna explained. Hopefully, the more people realising this is a crime, the easier it is for those doing it to be held to account. And then, fingers crossed, the punishments will be enough to put people off of this disgusting form of manipulation.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.