This victim of image-based sexual violence calls for radical change

I’ll never know what exactly set him off (I’ve never been able to talk to him about it, and no excuse justifies his harassment), but around the same time I started coming out as queer, he told me he was going to ruin my life. At the time I didn’t know what it meant and I couldn’t understand the gravity of the situation like I do now. He ended up sharing my naked photos on Facebook Messenger with a group of boys from our town. They spread through my high school like wildfire. They were spread throughout my city. And I thought: It’s going to be really bad – kids in high school are looking at me like they saw me naked. But it was worse.

The photos were posted on an international bulletin board called Anon-IB, where my name, age, city, face and body were distributed and accessible for over five years. They are probably still there today.

After this event, I was silent for a really long time. My abuser knew where I lived. He knew my younger sister. He knew where I went to school. I knew that if I tried to speak out against him, my community would accuse and shame me. I felt like she was my property, my dignity and my safety. I was very, very afraid that I would be arrested. (Connecticut had no laws protecting survivors of image-based sexual violence from being held accountable for sharing images.)

I did my best to make myself as invisible as possible. I was afraid that if I didn’t become absolutely small and silent, something worse would happen, that more people would find out, that the photos would be published elsewhere. When I went to college, I moved away from my small hometown and began to rely on self-harm and alcohol to numb the pain. During this time, at the age of 19, I had what Dr. Spring Cooper, a survivor and researcher in this field, calls a “fuck it” moment. The moment I woke up.

I opened Facebook on my laptop and saw an article showing a picture of a man who had molested me when I was a teenager. It was a poignant moment when I saw his picture staring back at me. It burned itself into my brain. And I said, “OK, this man is either going to kill me because I’m killing myself in the way I’m dealing with the trauma of this situation, or I’m going to take action.” At that moment, I decided to save my life and I made the decision to take action.

I wrote a poem; I started doing research. At the time, there wasn’t much material about “revenge porn” as I knew the term or other people referred to it. (I now know that I have never done anything to deserve “revenge” and that my body is not inherently “pornographic”, especially my childhood body, so the correct terms are “image-based sexual violence” and “abuse material “So I decided to talk about my experience and it started to attract a lot of attention. I organized a protest march across the Brooklyn Bridge, March Against Revenge Porn, on April 1, 2017. It was an important cultural moment and an important personal moment for me. This catapulted me into the advocacy space where I have been ever since.

Over the past decade, I have been healing the parts of myself that are cracked and broken from the inside as a result of this abuse and exploitation. And now, at the age of 27, I am in a place where – despite the cracks, despite the breakdown and trauma that lives within me – I am strong enough to speak out against the people, structures, and institutions that allowed harassment like mine. happen. Now I focus on responsibility for perpetrators of violence.

I work with two coalitions that combat image-based sexual violence online and child sexual abuse material online, and we work to hold tech companies and perpetrators accountable.

During the January hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, I was in the room and listened to the CEOs of leading technology companies testify before Congress. I was joined by other survivors and watched as parents and families of children who died as a result of sexual abuse through this technology spoke. There were stories of young people purchasing fentanyl pills on Snapchat and young men taking their own lives after experiencing sexual violence. It made me realize that the abuse and violence made possible by our technology and social media affects so many of us in so many unique ways.

I experienced violence in an Internet and social media environment that was completely different than today. There were no precautions or tools in place to help protect and prevent this type of abuse on the platforms. Now I feel happy that I can live in a time where my voice has value and the five years I suffered in silence were not wasted.

However, passing federal legislation is extremely important. We have no laws criminalizing non-consensual photo sharing in all 50 states. (In some cases it is a misdemeanor and in others it is a crime). If I had the power to change the situation right now, I would immediately pass a package of laws proposed to protect children and prevent their online exploitation:

• The The EARN Act, which allows websites to remove content posted by users deemed inappropriate and removes general immunity for breaches of laws related to online child sexual abuse material (CSAM)
• The SHIELD Actwhich makes the distribution of intimate visual depictions a crime
• Children’s Online Safety Act (KOSA), that would protect children online by enabling stronger privacy settings, making it easier to report harmful behavior, limiting the spread of content promoting eating disorders, substance abuse, CSA and suicidal ideation, and requiring independent audits of the operation of social media platforms

When I first started talking about this 10 years ago, no one wanted to listen. No one wanted to publish my story. My lawyers wouldn’t work with me because I was under 18 at the time of the incident. Everyone blamed me and no one cared. But now we’re at a turning point. I’ve been begging people to listen to me on this for 10 years, and it seems like people are finally waking up. President Biden said during his State of the Union that it’s time to pass laws to protect kids online. My dad texted me and said, “I heard that and I immediately thought of you.”

If I could tell every young person one thing, it would be to implant in their brain that no matter what happens to you, abuse is never your fault. And if it takes you two days, two years, five months or five years to tell what happened to you, there will always be someone to listen. In this space there is a community of survivors, experts and allies who are ready to support and validate you. You don’t have to just survive. You deserve to live loudly.