Alex Phillips: We need to talk about revenge porn

Have you ever had the nightmare of being somewhere public, naked? The blind panic, the inability to do anything to protect your vulnerability? The knot of utter dread in your stomach when you wake up - and the relief when you realise it was all just a horrible dream? It can be a recurring subconscious torment for people suffering from anxiety. For many of us, it is one of the most panic-inducing moments to contemplate.

Now imagine the horror of receiving a threat that explicit, intimate videos of you could be shared with the entire world. Your family, friends, colleagues, those that know you, those that don’t. The terror of someone taunting and intimidating you with blackmail and threats of making your worst nightmare, a reality. I know it well.

Mere weeks before being elected as a Member of the European Parliament, my Belgian ex-boyfriend, whom I had discovered was not only having a relationship with another woman who then gave birth to his child, but had used his job as a website developer to store my online banking details and was routinely sifting from my savings to fund the secret baby, entirely without my knowledge. When I happened one day to open my computer to an account he had logged into, and discovered the horrific truth, my world came crashing down.

Everything I thought was true, was a lie. My situation was to go from horrific, to hellish. Having discovered the full extent of the fraud and demanded he pay back the thousands he had stolen, the threats began. Threats to not only publish intimate videos of me he claimed he had filmed online, but send them to every newsroom in the UK. Police in Brussels wouldn’t help. I was told it was the responsibility of the British police.

The police in Britain said the opposite. Plus, it was only a threat. The videos he claimed existed had not, to my knowledge, been posted anywhere. I had hit a dead end.For days, weeks, months, the torment and panic continued. I did not know where to turn. Nobody could, or would help. In the end, I chose to sit down with a female journalist from The Sun to tell my story, should his vile threat ever be acted on. I was harrowed by the prospect of videos of me as a newly elected politician appearing on porn websites. Eventually I was too scared, humiliated and exhausted to have the story published. To this day, my abuser has gotten away with it all. I was beaten. I am now left to constantly wonder whether he ever did follow through on his menace. This is the first time I am telling this story publicly.

Revenge porn, as it is called, is more prevalent than you think. Despite legislation being brought in to tackle it in 2015 and growing numbers of reported abuse, conviction rates have tumbled. The offence is not categorised as a sexual offence, as the motivation of the offender is rarely a sexual one, yet the repercussions for the victim are often the same as sexual abuse.

That means people who have suffered revenge porn do not have access to the same support services. It also means the punishment carries less severity as a communications offence with a maximum 2 year prison sentence for the worst incidents.

It is also not a specific crime to threaten revenge porn. A proposed amendment to the Domestic Abuse bill would potentially protect millions of potential victims from this grotesque and life changing manipulation and intimidation. Abuse that is horrifically more prevalent than you realise.With the power to record and share material in the hands of anybody with a mobile phone, and increasing pressure on minors to share intimate pictures of themselves on platforms such as snapchat, one in three underage teens have had a photograph of themselves non-consensually shared. Recently a survey of 2000 people by a UK law firm revealed 40% of us know someone who has been threatened with revenge porn.

15% said intimate sexual pictures of them had been shared without their consent, a figure that has doubled in the past two years. One in ten even admitted to having shared, or threatened to share an explicit image, with a quarter of those saying it would have been ‘for a laugh’. But this is no laughing matter. There are now 9 cases of revenge porn reported to the police in the UK every day and 24,000 images a year. Today, we are looking at where we are legally, if social media platforms are doing enough and whether victims get the support they need.

We will be speaking to those who have suffered revenge porn and those working tirelessly to tackle it.It’s a story that not only impacts me, but so many of you out there.

A story that needs to be told, so we can act together to stop it.

Today, we really need to talk about revenge porn.