The public sharing of intimate images without consent is a growing problem in Australia. And teenagers are paying the price

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The public sharing of intimate images without consent is a growing problem in Australia. And teenagers are paying the price

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Imagine opening social media only to be greeted with an intimate photo of yourself you didn’t know existed. Or one you were sure had been deleted. Maybe you took the photo but shared it with only one other person and now it’s popped up in group chats where people you don’t even know can see it.

A growing number of teenagers, most of them young women, don’t have to imagine. They know how the shock can knock the wind out of you, how the violation leaves you frazzled and on edge, and what it’s like to walk around wondering if everyone you pass has already seen it.

Image-based abuse, the act of taking or sharing an intimate photo or video without a person’s consent, is becoming increasingly common — especially among young people.

About a quarter of all image-based abuse reports received by the eSafety Commission come from people under 18 years of age, with some as young as 13.

Young women are disproportionately affected, according to a 2017 eSafety Commission survey, with 15 per cent of girls aged 15 to 17 reporting having a nude or sexual image posted online without their consent.

But despite how often it happens, the young victims can face bullying and social isolation, and are often too embarrassed to seek out support.

That’s why 16-year-old Jess wants to share her story — so other people know they’re not alone.

Jess wants to share her story so other people know they’re not alone and it’s OK to ask for support.(ABC: Katie McAllister)

‘I saw it happen at least once a week’

Jess, like many teenagers, is no stranger to posting photos of herself online. Being able to control the way she’s presented, through curated selfies taken on days when she feels good about the way she looks, has even helped the teenager from regional Victoria feel empowered.

That all changed earlier this year when someone filmed a video of Jess getting dressed without her consent. When she realised what had happened and confronted the person, she was told the video had been deleted.

But two weeks later, she found out the video had been sent to other students on Snapchat — a social messaging app where videos and photos automatically disappear after they’re viewed.

“My whole world just fell around me,” she says. “I’d lost all my dignity, I was embarrassed, words can’t even explain the feelings that I was going through.”

A close up shot of an iphone with the Snapchat app open.
Social media app Snapchat, which automatically deletes photos and videos after they are viewed, is popular with teenagers. (ABC: Katie McAllister )

Jess spoke to a trusted mentor at school about what had happened. They directed her to the school’s wellbeing officer, who talked her through her options. 

“I decided not to do anything more, I just didn’t want the drama,” she says.

But Jess says the problem goes far beyond her own experience. At her previous school, she says she would see nude or intimate photos of girls posted in group chats “at least once a week”.

“People would joke about it, and it’s something you just don’t joke about, especially if the other person doesn’t know,” she says.

“I’m talking about something private that happened to me in public, because I don’t want someone else — even younger than me — to go through something similar and think it’s normal or OK.”

‘It’s a big problem’

Image-based abuse is an umbrella term encompassing a complex array of behaviours. 

It can refer to the sharing of intimate images or videos that were taken with the consent of a person — often called nudes — to third parties, or the capture or creation of images and videos without consent, like in Jess’s case, or say, by a stranger in public. It also refers to threats to release such images.

RMIT Professor Nicola Henry has spent the past decade researching the phenomenon after she began to notice it was increasing in frequency with the rise of smartphones and social media.

“It’s a big problem,” she says. “And it definitely has increased, which is not surprising really.”

To convey the scope of the issue she refers to a survey she conducted in 2016 and again three years later; in the first, one in five Australian respondents between 16 and 64 years old said they had experienced having a nude or sexual image or video of them taken, shared or threatened to be shared without their consent. By 2019, the number was one in three.

But, she adds, it’s difficult to get a true picture of how widespread the abuse is because many victims do not realise they’ve been targeted.

“What we know in relation to image-based abuse is that a lot of it is happening without the victim’s knowledge,” she says. “So the one in three figure we have could actually be an under-estimate of the true prevalence of image-based abuse.”

Acting eSafety commissioner Toby Dagg also says they’ve seen a “concerning increase” in reports of image-based abuse from young people between 13 and 24, with the number almost doubling in the period of January to March compared to the same time last year.

While the personal toll of image-based abuse varies drastically among people who experience it — from life-changing to a slight annoyance — Dr Henry says women and girls are more likely than men to suffer severe repercussions when their images are shared. And in closed communities like schools, the harm of the violation is often compounded by bullying.

One woman interviewed as part of Dr Henry’s research told her what happened after her boyfriend shared an intimate video of her with other students when she was at school was almost as harmful as the abuse itself. “She had this awful bullying experience, and then it went online, so she had to move schools but the students there had also heard about it,” she says.

“For some people, that can be the icing on the cake of what has already been a really horrible experience of someone breaching your trust and violating your bodily integrity.”

A teenage girl wearing a denim skirt and white t-shirt holds her phone and looks to her side.
When she found out the video had been shared with other students, Jess sought out support at school. (ABC: Katie McAllister)

Misplaced shaming and blaming

Importantly, image-based abuse does not include consensual “sexting” — the act of voluntarily sharing nude or intimate photos with someone. While research shows young people do engage in this practice, Mr Dagg says its prevalence is often perceived to be higher than it actually is.

According to an eSafety Commission survey, 5 per cent of 14 to 17 year old’s have actually sent a nude or semi-nude image of themselves to someone. For girls specifically, the number grows to 7 per cent.

Despite this research, Dr Henry says educational campaigns in schools are often what she calls “anti-sexting” instead of focused on the consequences of sharing such images without consent.

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