Snap of shame: The rough road

Victims will suffer while laws criminalising imagebased sexual abuse are being developed

When lecherous strangers began knocking on her front door expecting sex, Greta Potgieter knew who was to blame. What she did not know was how difficult it would be to stop the person: her ex-fiancé. His reaction? Revenge porn.

The men were responding to a mass of lewd personal advertisements linked to nude photographs of her on numerous adult websites and blogs. Attached to these sex ads were her phone number, email address and, at one point, even a map to her home in George.

Persuaded by the man she once loved and trusted, Potgieter, then 42, had agreed to pose for the photos. When those images were used to shame her publicly, it was not only an egregious breach of her privacy but also a deeply personal betrayal as well. The former kindergarten teacher felt stripped down, naked and exposed.

“I’m a real woman with real needs … I do this for recreation and fun,” read one post online.

The farmhouse she shared with her grandmother no longer felt safe when, eight years ago, men arrived brimming with lustful expectation. The cyber personality created for Potgieter —“lust lady” — could not be more different from what she is really like. The daughter of a Christian minister grew up in a house just a stone’s throw away from her father’s church. She was naive and trusting.

The brown-haired, modestly dressed woman was nearly 50 years old when we talked. She had enlisted the help of a computer expert as soon as her troubles began. His job was to get the photos taken down. But, as the years ticked by, her image landed on roughly 150 000 sites.

Potgieter’s internet shaming began in late 2008 when few South Africans were using the term “revenge porn” and years before officials would draft proposals to criminalise it.

Now a recognised phrase in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, “revenge porn” is a misnomer, because not all perpetrators are jilted lovers acting out of a warped sense of justice. The language is also inherently misogynistic, focusing on the supposed motive of the perpetrator instead of what the victim is experiencing.

The former fiancé, a web developer by trade, was married when he struck up an affair with Potgieter — a detail she said she found out about only once their relationship had run its course.

Needing legal advice, Potgieter approached the office of Lefevre Joubert, a pragmatic attorney who persuaded her to file a lawsuit in the high court in Cape Town against her ex-fiancé. They wanted a court order preventing him from posting content about her online and an order giving the computer expert access to the man’s electronic devices. She won the civil case, but it was a hollow victory because the torment continued. Adding to her woes, she had to bor- row money to pay her legal fees.

Seriously impairing a person’s dig- nity is a common-law offence known as crimen injuria. It covers a range of scenarios from using racial slurs to posting nude pictures without consent. Throughout the criminal investigation into Potgieter’s case, prosecutors were unsure what to charge the accused with. It became apparent that the police did not have the experience or the expertise to probe a case like this. “They struggled to pin him on a specific crime,” her lawyer said in a disappointed tone.

Although police officers had evidence the accused had the images in his possession, they had difficulty verifying that he had uploaded them to the internet after Potgieter won the lawsuit.

“I don’t have human rights,” said Potgieter. “It’s not important if someone comes to rape me or not.”

Image-based sexual abuse is a sobering term that describes what happened to Potgieter. Although it affects both men and women, experts argue the emotional, psychological and reputational harm is amplified for women.

Distributing nude photos of women without their consent predates the internet. Hustler magazine led the way by publishing photographs of women submitted by readers under a section titled “Beaver Hunt”. When the magazines gave way to an eruption of online pornography, homemade or “real porn” gathered a sizeable following. California native Hunter Moore is notorious in the United States for profiting from other people’s humili- ation. In 2010, he started the website Is Anyone Up?, which allowed people to submit nude photographs of their former partners anonymously. Moore, known as the “king of revenge porn”, would publish the images along with names and his personal brand of commentary. At its height, he said the website drew more than 30-million page views a month. Under a barrage of threats of lawsuits, Moore shut his site down a year and a half later, claiming he was tired of screening for photographs of children.

Image-based sexual abuse also punishes women and girls for their sexual autonomy and in far too many cases they are blamed when nude pictures end up on the web. South Africa has no shortage of examples of how men and women are held to different moral standards such as a disturbing incident in 2008 in which a group of men groped a 25-year-old woman at a Johannesburg taxi rank, and tore off her clothes because they reportedly found her miniskirt too revealing.

“The idea that immorality is a femi- nine characteristic is deeply rooted and stubbornly difficult to dislodge,” said Lisa Vetten, a researcher in the field of violence against women. “We think we’re a sexually open society, but if that were true there wouldn’t be judgment attached to these images.”

It’s a paradox: on the one level South African society is sexualised, but sex is still a source of shame. Vetten coauthored a research paper in 2008 that is an important study of how cases of sexual violence have been dealt with by the criminal justice system. Rape, the authors found, was a “sexualised act of humiliation and punishment”. Men felt entitled to have sex with their victims. and her ex-boyfriend had deliberately cut himself out of the shot. If you did not know it was Keke, her name and her employer’s name next to the video would have cleared up any uncertainty.

“He raped me as a human being and violated my rights,” she said.

Image-based sexual abuse has also been referred to as cyber rape — a term notably used by Charlotte Laws, an American author and mother whose daughter was subjected to online humiliation. But cyber rape is not a common phrase for reasons that are explained by law professor Danielle Keats Citron, author of Hate Crimes in Cyberspace. Sexual violence is its own separate thing with its own harms, Citron told the Mail & Guardian.

“You’re not going to convince anyone of your argument if you don’t recognise the differences between physical violence and sexually threatening and demeaning harassment,” Citron said, making the point that one risks trivialising both by equating them.

Keke dated the man for a few months until she caught him cheating with another woman. Several months later she discovered what he had done. “If you googled my name the first 20 things that came up about me was this stuff,” she said. “It was really hard,” she added, her voice cracking.

Women victims of image-based sexual abuse exhibit a similar range of mental health problems as rape survivors, according to an aca-

Female victims of image-based sexual abuse exhibit similar mental health issues as rape survivors