MELBOURNE university student Amy Cornes, 21, first became aware naked images of her had been posted online when she was contacted by a friend in June this year.
Images of Ms Cornes, a former resident of Adelaide and the daughter of South Australian football legend Graham Cornes, had surfaced on a US website that featured stolen nude photos of more than 400 Adelaide women and teens.
“My friend sent a link and I went to the site and all I could see was ‘Adelaide nudes’ and my first thought was ‘oh my God, I’m on it’,” Ms Cornes told news.com.au
Instances of intimate — and private — images of Australians ending up online for all to see are becoming increasingly common with research from Melbourne’s RMIT and LaTrobe universities suggesting as many as one in 10 people reporting a nude or semi nude image of them distributed online without their consent. In some cases ex-lovers had taken to sharing images of their former partners via Facebook in an act commonly know as “revenge porn”.
Yet, in many parts of the country, there’s no legal recourse for victims to fall back on.
NO CRIMINAL OFFENCE
Last week Queensland police told an alleged revenge porn victim they were powerless to act, despite her jilted lover admitting he posted her naked images online.
Glen Martin, a staffer of the state’s Treasurer Curtis Pitt, resigned earlier this month after his ex partner filed a police complaint over allegations of domestic violence and unauthorised online sharing of her nude photos, reported theCourier Mail. Mr Martin claimed his sharing of the nude photographs was consensual.
Jeda Nash said police had closed the investigation and she was forced to withdraw the complaint because “no criminal offence had been committed”.
“Why is this not against the law?’’ Ms Nash said. “I feel like I have been totally violated — by him and the system.’’
Private images are all to easy to end up online. Picture: Channel 4Source:Supplied
Yesterday in Sydney, the NSW Parliament held hearings into revenge porn as part of a wider inquiry into the legal remedies against serious invasions of privacy.
Dr Nicola Henry, a senior lecturer in legal studies at La Trobe University who gave evidence to the inquiry said Australia was behind other countries.
“The problem is that we have very limited protections for invasion of privacy and very limited remedies, so for victims of revenge pornography there’s very few sanctions.”
Dr Henry said laws need to be toughened, and made more specific, around the unauthorised sharing of intimate images and an independent regulator should be created to initiate proceedings on behalf of victims.
‘IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT JILTED LOVERS’
The behaviour was increasing as mobile technology became sophisticated with cameras in every smartphone, said Dr Henry.
“It’s not just about a jilted lover getting revenge on a partner,” she said, “it might be images being traded on websites for financial purposes and there is anecdotal evidence that many people aren’t even aware their images are being distributed.”
Ms Cornes, whose nude picture went global, said the main image of her was taken from her Facebook page several years earlier.
“One of my friends took it of me from the back in the shower and posted it but it was only on there for about 10 minutes so whoever sent it to the revenge porn site must have saved it for all those years,” she said.
‘I’M THE ONE IN CONTROL’
To regain control of the situation, Ms Cornes censored the image and posted it to her Facebook wall for everyone to see.
“I wanted to make other women feel better about it by showing I wasn’t embarrassed by it,” she said.
“People who do this are setting out to hurt and tarnish a woman’s reputation and if a woman doesn’t allow them to do that, then they can’t hurt them.
“That was their main goal and if I take away their main goal then I’m the one in control.”
But for many victims of revenge porn, the humiliation that comes with being exploited in such public way, is too much to bare.
One Sydney woman, who spoke to news.com.au on the condition of anonymity, said she is plagued by the possibility that each person she meets has seen her naked and performed sex acts.
MP Tim Watts is campaigning for tighter laws round ‘revenge porn’.Source:Supplied
*Alice was involved in a bitter break up with a partner of three years when things took an ugly turn.
“There was a video we’d made, I didn’t even realise it still existed until my ex started threatening to upload it if I didn’t agree to things going the way he wanted them to,” Alice said.
“It was about five months after the first threat when I started getting texts from friends with links to amateur porn sites that were more like online forums that I realised he’d actually gone through with it.
ONE DAY MY KIDS WILL SEE IT
“I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me.
“It was one of the first things to come up on Google search when you entered my name but there was nothing I could do to make it disappear. I knew there were no laws to govern revenge porn and I didn’t want to make a big fuss and draw more attention to it.”
Alice went to great lengths to reduce the likelihood of others, including friends and colleagues, from discovering the footage.
“I legally changed my last name so that when employers looked me up it wasn’t that video they saw,” she told news.com.au.
“Chances are my kids will see it one day … once it’s out there there’s just nothing you can really do to stop it and that’s the hardest part to accept.”
New Zealand has recently introduced new civil and criminal legislation barring the unauthorised distribution of intimate images, joining Canada, the UK, Japan, the Philippines and 26 US states.
But in Australia, a victim’s legal protection can vary enormously. In 2014, Victoria outlawed maliciously distributing an image with a custodial sentence for offenders.
Federal Labor MPs Tim Watts and Terri Butler have introduced a bill in Canberra that would see people nationwide sent to jail for three years for a similar offence. Mr Watts told the Courier Mail last week that, “Revenge porn isn’t only embarrassing, it can seriously damage a person’s relationships, career and mental health.”
But the legal wheels turn slowly and, in the meantime, more victims are sure to emerge, said Dr Henry.
“In the absence of criminal legalisation there is no deterrent effect and no communication that these behaviours deserve to be punished.”
[Source:- news.com]