Digital scarlet letters

demic paper published by Canadian researcher Samantha Bates. She recommends “revenge porn” be treated as a sexual offence. In her qualitative analysis, Bates wrote that the women in her study had experienced posttraumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression. Although participants struggled to cope early on, they showed positive coping mechanisms after going to therapy and getting involved in advocacy work.

Keke managed to keep the compromising video a secret from her employer, but she carried the shame for years.

Clinical psychologist Gershen Kaufman, who has written books on the topic of shame, wrote: “No other emotion feels more deeply disturbing, because in the moment of shame the self feels wounded from within.” Shame is an internal injury with potentially enduring consequences.

Potgieter and Keke are victims of “digital scarlet letters” even though the men in their lives were the cheaters. The two women were publicly shamed to the same degree as author Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fictional protagonist, Hester Prynne, in The Scarlet Letter. She endured public humiliation by having to wear the letter A on her dress for committing adultery in 17th-century Boston.

Keke would not have succeeded in getting the sex tape removed from the internet if it were not for the help of two lawyers who offered their services for free. Finding them was serendipitous, triggered by her decision to share her story (under a pseudonym) on a local radio show several days after she found out about the existence of the video. Advocate Nicholas Tee was driving when he heard Keke’s voice. “I pulled over and listened attentively … she almost had me in tears,” he said, recalling the moment he made up his mind to contact her.

So where does a 54-year-old lawyer with rudimentary computer skills begin when trying to get a sex video of his first ever “revenge porn” client taken down? Tee did what most people would do — he combed the web for answers, using searches as basic as “How does the internet work?” He found contact numbers at the bottom of most properly constructed websites, he explained.

Luckily for Tee, he had a savvy colleague — an attorney named Emma Sadleir, who had just returned from London where she had completed a degree in information, technology, media and communications law. The laborious task of removing the content proved to be a learning curve for Sadleir too — an experience that led her to coauthor a book on legal advice for the digital age. “I realised that once it happens to you, there is so little you can do,” she said.

They offered Keke practical support, but legally, there was little they could do for her because her ex-boyfriend had left the country. “With the nonconsensual distribution of pornographic images, the practical considerations outweigh the legal considerations, so what we landed up doing [is contacting] every one of the websites,” Sadleir explained.

That was 2011, several years before tech companies updated their policies. In June 2015, Amit Singhal, a former Google Inc executive, announced the company would “honour requests from people to remove nude or sexually explicit images shared without their consent from Google search results”.

There are various ways in which compromising images can end up on the internet. People are filmed without their knowledge or electronic devices are hacked with the intention of blackmailing victims for money or sexual favours. “Something like the screenshot has changed the game,” Sadleir said. “Anyone can appropriate another person’s private image if it’s posted to a public platform.

This may have been the undoing of a woman who became a national example of how photographs can be distributed for reasons that have little to do with revenge. Last August, a photo of Margaret van Wyk’s vagina circulated on social media and popular mobile messaging platform Whatsapp. Van Wyk, a hockey mom who used Whatsapp to communicate with a network of about 17 other parents in the small town of Schweizer-Reneke in the North West, had accidentally sent the image to the chat group. The image became public fodder when someone apparently leaked it.

“Margaret van Wyk’s case made me so angry,” Sadleir said of the flurry of memes that followed the mass distribution of the photo. Although Van Wyk’s case did not fit the strict definition of “revenge porn,” her story is an example of why this language is inappropriate. “I think she should be treated as a victim of a sexual offence,” Sadleir said.

Sadleir’s colleague in the legal fraternity agrees. Sharing a video of somebody’s private parts without consent is abusive and humiliating, said advocate Ben Winks, who sometimes partners with Sadleir to help victims of online abuse. “We criminalise other forms of sexual violence; there is no reason why this shouldn’t be a crime,” he said.

He doesn’t bill the victims for his legal services. “There is something about an imbalance in power relations being abused that gets to me,” Winks said.

He was the “nerdy kid” who struggled socially. For that, he was bullied and mocked by his classmates. Winks could do little about this when he was in school, but as an advocate, he now seeks justice for the little guy.

MPs have to strike a balance between protecting human rights and keeping internet accessible