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Revenge Porn Is On The Rise In Aus, But We’re Finally Taking Action

Sexting can be fun. It can be empowering. It can be just the right amount of naughty to spice up your Wednesday arvo. But when sexting goes bad, it can go really bad. Sending a raunchy image to someone, you expect it to stay with them. But this is unfortunately not always the case. Enter, revenge porn.

Revenge porn can ruin a life. Careers and relationships have been destroyed because someone’s nudes have been posted without their permission. And what some may think of as just a harmless forwarding of an image, can be incredibly damning to the person in it.

In Australia, three in five people will experience digital harassment. And an alarming one in ten will have will have nude images released without their consent. For far too long, revenge porn has not been legislated, and as such, no one has been prosecuted for it.

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But we have some hope on the horizon. The first person has been charged under Western Australia’s new revenge porn laws. He’s now staring down the barrel of up to three years in jail, and up to $18,000 in fines.

24 year old Mitchell Brindley allegedly posted his ex-girlfriend’s nudes to fake Instagram accounts. Instagram removed the first account, which was specifically created to post the intimate images. But he then made a further three accounts to post and share more of her private images. Ten images were circulated without the woman’s consent in total.

This all happened over four days in April, just a few days after WA’s new revenge porn laws came into legislation. WA Attorney General John Quigley said that this form of online abuse aught to be treated with equal severity as other forms of harassment.

“That’s why we’ve introduced tough penalties for those who feel they can violate another individual’s privacy and dignity in this way.

Image-based abuse also extends beyond the scenario of ex-partners sharing an intimate image without consent to seek revenge.

It has emerged as an increasingly common feature in family and domestic violence cases, used as a means of coercing and controlling the victim, and it is also used to facilitate so-called ‘sextortion’.

Criminalising this degrading and dehumanising practice is long overdue and it will no longer be tolerated.”

This is an incredible step forward for internet safety and sexual autonomy. This is also win for Australian women, as revenge porn overwhelmingly impacts women. Taking the non-consensual sharing of intimate images as a serious criminal offence shows the types of people who do it that the computer screen is no longer a safe place to hide behind.

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As Australia’s revenge porn laws and legislation continues to work and bring people to justice, we can hold onto hope that the issue may be reduced, or wiped out entirely.

After all, sexting is fun. Just don’t be a dick about it.

Image Source: Unsplash (Daria Nepriakhina), GIPHY 

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