Horrifying rise in revenge porn, the curse of the smartphone generation

THE internet offers a conduit for the basest of human instincts – as anyone who’s ever logged onto social media will know.

For Andrew Dickson, it was also an opportunity to commit a degrading act of humiliation against an unsuspecting ex-partner.

He uploaded intimate naked photographs of her four years after their relationship ended, then posed as her during sexual conversations with men.

It’s hard to imagine a more sickening abuse of trust – though ultimately it was a decision that led to 40 months’ imprisonment for Dickson when his deception was uncovered.

For the 33-year-old abuser, it could have been a worse outcome – as new legislation cracking down on ‘revenge porn’ introduced three years ago provided for jail sentences of up to five years.

His former partner, aged 29, said she was ‘terrified’ when she saw him in court in 2018, adding: ‘I wanted to hear in person why he had done this to me, but I am still waiting for a proper explanation.’

Since 2017, when the new revenge porn laws were brought in, police and prosecutors have dealt with more than 1,000 cases, and new figures this week showed tens of thousands of Scots have sought advice about the crime.

Citizens Advice Scotland said that between December 2018 and May last year, its advice page for those who had been victims of revenge porn had 13,000 views – but this jumped to 30,000 in the following six months.

These are chilling statistics that suggest the true extent of revenge porn – which is really just a euphemism for sexual abuse – is far greater than the official figures suggest.

Fewer than half of complaints are resolved by police with a report sent to the fiscal: in many cases, the embarrassment is simply too great for victims to proceed, or they may fear recrimination.

When even an appalling offender like Dickson is able to spend just 20 months behind bars (his sentence was automatically halved because of automatic early release), it’s also possible some of the victims wonder if it’s worth the trauma of a court case.

And yet even more troubling is the revelation that some of the victims are just 11 years old – and that those shiny new smartphones many of them unwrapped at Christmas might in many cases represent a portal to a dark and dangerous world of sexual coercion.

In a nanosecond, explicit images and videos can be circulated around WhatsApp groups, or by email and text.

In 2017, a former public schoolboy who drove child victims to the brink of suicide with a revenge porn blackmail plot was jailed for three-and-a-half years.

Glen Wilson, then 18, urged children as young as 12 to make hardcore sex films for him to share with other paedophiles after grooming them on social media sites.

He threatened to expose his victims and used a countdown clock to terrify his female victims into believing that their identities were about to be made public.

Wilson, of Longforgan, Perthshire, admitted 23 revenge porn extortion and child pornography distribution offences against eight children aged between 12 and 15.

Preventing mobile use among children and adolescents might be an unrealistic goal – and counterproductive given that, as they grow up, there will be no escape from the smartphone: the genie is out of the bottle.

But the need has never been more urgent for schoolchildren to be told that the sharing of intimate images in itself could well be considered as a crime, regardless of the motivation for taking or sending them.

That’s a responsibility that inevitably must fall on parents and teachers, and indeed on police and prosecutors – but what of the porn sites that seem all too often to turn a blind eye to the origin of the graphic material sent to them?

Campaigners accuse porn streaming site Pornhub of profiting from ‘revenge porn’ by failing to remove videos once reported.

One woman, a married mother using the name Sophie, said she felt ‘violated’ after a video featuring her was viewed hundreds of thousands of times when it was uploaded online.

She had previously made six videos with her ex-partner; they broke up several years ago, and she had not given anyone consent to put them on the web.

Within a week of her becoming aware of the videos appearing on Pornhub, they were taken down.

However, someone took the opportunity to create about 100 video clips – and these were subsequently re-uploaded to the site.

But when Sophie reported this to the site some six months later, it was ‘not very helpful’; she called police, but no-one was charged.

In response, Pornhub claimed it had the ‘most progressive anti-revenge-porn policy in the industry’.

The porn site, owned by Luxembourg company MindGeek, has also been accused of failing to help a Derbyshire woman who did not know her ex-partner had filmed her having sex.

The 24-year-old administrator, who cannot be named for legal reasons, contacted Derbyshire police after seeing videos which showed her having sex with a man she had dated for a year previously.

Later the internet porn giant was accused of effectively sinking the police investigation into the incident by failing to respond to requests for information – though Pornhub insisted it did not receive any requests.

The images also find their way onto social media: in 2016, a spurned boyfriend who posted revenge porn pictures of his ex-girlfriend on Twitter was jailed for six months.

Kevin McKeeve, then 26, shared intimate snaps of the woman, and Paisley Sheriff Court heard how the painter and decorator had bombarded her with texts threatening to put the images online.

McKeeve posted the pictures on a Twitter account he had set up to message his former girlfriend, and on a business account. He told his victim: ‘You get what you deserve.’

For its part, Twitter maintains revenge porn ‘poses serious safety and security risks for people affected and can lead to physical, emotional, and financial hardship’.

But in 2018, a committee of MPs criticised social media firms – such as Twitter and Facebook – warning that ‘online spaces are public places where sexual harassment of women and girls is rife’.

The only safeguard against this depraved new phenomenon is not to take sexual images in the first place – another message that needs to be driven home; and those most deserving of our scorn are of course the sex offenders who distribute them.

But the porn platforms and social media behemoths have just as crucial a role to play in policing an increasingly toxic online realm – and if they underestimate the scope of the poison they are helping to peddle, they must also face the full force of the law.

*This column appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on January 8, 2020.