I WAS at a Eurovision Song Contest party on Saturday night. A young woman was there who’s a friend of my grown-up children. She told me something which I can’t get out of my head.
The young woman – let’s call her Emma – was the victim of a long-running so-called “revenge porn” attack. She’s 23. The images were taken when she was 15. She took a few intimate pictures and sent them to a boyfriend. Eight years later those images are still circulating online. Let’s be clear, Emma was a child when these pictures were taken. Sharing sexually explicit images of children comes with heavy jail time attached and, rightly, ruin for the criminal. It’s a paedophile offence.
Emma told me her story the day after some news broke that many people in Scotland over the age of 30 might have ignored. On Friday, it emerged that there could be thousands of images online of young women and girls from across the UK being shared without their consent.
One young woman even changed her name and moved cities because of what revenge porn did to her life. Mikala Monsoon discovered images on a website containing folders full of women – including herself – “from every city in the UK’.
One link had 146 names of young Scottish women, including Emma. Another link, Mikala said, “had every city in the UK as an individual folder with sub-folders inside there. So this could be hundreds or thousands of people.”
Mikala’s pictures weren’t explicit – however, other content was intimate and included nude images. Some folders gave names and locations of the women. In Emma’s case, the images included a partially naked selfie.
Mikala has seen the same images of her appearing over and over again online, even on a pornography site , thus her decision to change her name and move.
Police Scotland are investigating but Mikala and others, including Emma, feel the crimes need taken more seriously. Right now, there are young women the length and breadth of the UK fearful and distressed that their lives could be ruined.
Young women are being wrongly made to feel guilty and ashamed – rather than the despicable ex-boyfriends who exploited their trust and shared intimate images of them with the world. Let’s reiterate: in cases like Emma’s, young men are possessing and supplying sexual images of children.
In Scotland, revenge porn laws came into force in 2017 with the Abusive Behaviour and Sexual Harm Act. Guilt can carry five years. Those convicted can be placed on the Sexual Offenders Register. However, a court of appeal in Edinburgh overturned an order to place one man on the register. The court found that there was no “underlying sexual disorder or deviance”.
Revenge porn contains the same motive as any offence involving sex carried out against a woman by a man – power and humiliation. Rape isn’t about sex, it’s about control and degradation. So is revenge porn, and it should be treated as part of a spectrum of offences of male violence against women.
None of this denies that women can and have carried out acts of revenge porn against men. Such offences, however, seem fewer in number, and rarely involve images of men when they were schoolboys.
Anyone – male or female – found guilty of a revenge porn offence should be placed on the Sexual Offenders Register for a fixed period. If the images involve children, the offender should be prosecuted under laws dealing with possession and supply of abusive images of children, and placed on the Sex Offenders Register for life.
Emma told me that she worried how her parents would react. Thankfully, they ascribed no blame to her. She made a silly mistake as a teenager – a mistake that thousands of teenagers of both sexes make every day – but there was no reason for her to be ashamed or fearful.
Emma’s main worry now is that a future employer may see the images and that her job prospects may be damaged. She, too, has seen the same images of her crop up over and over again on different websites.
Read more: We must face up to the fact that capitalism is killing our planet
Emma has got to know some of the other young women whose images are on the same website where she appears. Many of those young women are much more distressed than Emma – some are dealing with parents who aren’t supportive or are angry at them. Others have much more explicit images of themselves online. Some can’t sleep or eat or work.
The police really aren’t cut out to deal with these crimes. I met one of the UK’s most senior police commanders last week and he said the tsunami of offences linked to the internet was driving officers mad – they don’t have the time or resources to police both the real streets and cyber land.
Maybe we need an additional layer of policing, a force dedicated solely to dealing with crimes online. Not merely a cyber unit inside Police Scotland or the Met, but a completely new service which patrols the internet, the way conventional police patrol your neighbourhood.
When organised crime in America got out of hand in the early 20th century, the FBI had to be invented to tackle the interstate abilities of sophisticated gangsters, where conventional state police could not.
Data from England shows that when it comes to revenge porn cases, some 61 per cent of reported offences result in no action being taken. Some victims are as young as 11. Change has to happen.
The biggest change, though, has to occur inside the heads of men. As the Eurovision party was coming to an end, I was left with the same thoughts that I’ve had thousands of times throughout my forty-something years on this planet: what’s wrong with men?
Why would some young man want to hurt Emma so dreadfully? Something in this young man made him want to shame and ruin a young woman he once professed to love. If only we could unravel the problem that lurks inside so many men. That journey will take generations – and a wholesale alteration of how society treats young men and women, and how parents raise their children. Until that day, though, the full weight of the courts must come down on offenders so no more Emmas face shame and sleepless nights.
Neil Mackay is Scotland's Columnist of the Year.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here