Revenge porn victim shares story for Shine the Light anti-abuse battle
After years of her privately shared intimate photos making the rounds on revenge porn websites, it finally clicked for Shainee Chalk that it was abuse. “I felt like I deserved it for most of the time,” she said. “I felt like I couldn’t go to police. I felt that they couldn’t help me ... I felt like I had deserved what had happened.” The 28-year-old is this year’s survivor honouree in the London Abused Women’s Centre’s ninth annual Shine the Light on Woman Abuse campaign — a push to raise awareness about violence and abuse against women and girls. Nude images of Chalk — shared with men she trusted and met online, including two long-distance boyfriends — first appeared on a now-defunct online revenge porn site in 2011 when she was just 21 years old. They were posted anonymously and included links to her other social media pages. Chalk received messages from concerned friends who had seen the intimate images. She couldn’t trace who had put them online — or why.
“I wanted to crawl into the deepest darkest hole I could find and pull the hole in after me,” she said. She blamed herself and kept the humiliating and hurtful secret from her family.
“Who could tell their father they had sent a bunch of nudes to guys and now was being punished for it?” she said.
Chalk’s images surfaced over and over again on different sites over the past seven years. The ordeal — and dread of another image popping up — took a steep toll on her mental health.
But after years of blaming herself, she is now deciding to take action and tell her story. “I hope I can change something for someone else,” she said. Since 2015, it’s been a crime in Canada to distribute an intimate image of a person without their consent.
The public is invited to wear purple Nov. 15 for the Shine the Light campaign, a grassroots movement that’s spread across Canada and to other countries.
The London Abused Women’s Centre is also hosting several community events to boost public awareness about violence against women and girls.
The agency will be remembering another victim of violence against women, Maddison Fraser, at their official campaign launch Nov. 1 at Victoria Park.
Fraser, who entered the sex trade when she was 19 years old, was killed in an Edmonton car crash in 2015. The driver was a sex purchaser who was impaired.