Teenager whose drunken night out went viral was inspiration to help others
WHEN actress and writer Belle Jones saw a teenage girl shamed in a sleazy social media post which went viral, she felt enormous sympathy for the youngster.
The girl had been filmed performing a sex act on 24 men on a drunken night out in Magaluf – and the images had gone around the world.
Belle recalled: “I had a really strong reaction to it. I felt that I had been punched in the stomach.
“I felt such empathy, especially as the girl was only a teenager. I wondered how someone could move on with their life after something like that had happened to them.”
Revenge porn and public shaming have become a modern day equivalent of putting someone in the stocks and the humiliation can have devastating consequences.
People can be vilified on a global scale for the mildest of transgressions and some have taken their own lives as a result.
Belle’s reaction to the “shamed” teenager was to give her and others like her “a digital hug”, where solidarity from the sharing of shaming stories would take the sting out of any humiliation.
She explored the issue through a play, Shame, which premieres at the Edinburgh Fringe next month.
In the play, a mother deals with the disappearance of her daughter, who is the victim of online shaming.
Her family and friends start sharing their stories online with the hashtag #unshamed to show her that everyone has been in embarrassing situations.
The next step was to turn the campaign she invented for the play into reality.
Belle said: “We felt that by launching #unshamed in real life, it was a way of bringing something altruistic out of the play.
“It has opened a conversation about what shame is, the different types people feel and how shame is put upon people, when it isn’t their own response.”
Belle has already been contacted by people who have been victims of revenge porn and who have found comfort in the project.
She said: ”That’s the point of the whole project. Our hope is that people will take it up and start sharing their stories.”
With programmes like Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why and ITV’s Broadchurch shining a light on internet shaming, the public are growing more aware of just how awful it can be for victims.
The first to share their stories on the website of #unshamed are Belle and her fellow founders of the project, Allie Butler, who directed the play, and actor Neil John Gibson. They are encouraging others to share their stories in video or text form on various online platforms, using the hashtag to identify them.
In Belle’s video, she admits she has too many shameful stories to mention.
She said: “Little things like, forgetting to draw my curtains and getting caught naked coming out of the shower by my neighbour.
“Or when my dog invaded a funeral and wanted to make friends with all the mourners. As we were leaving, he needed to empty his bowels but it was really runny and I couldn’t pick it all up in the poo bag. “
For Belle, now nine years sober, her past drinking problem has brought the most shame. She said: “I have plenty of unshamed stories of my drinking days, like wetting myself in my sleep when I was sharing a bed with a friend.
“There are lots of stories about falling asleep and wetting myself. Also waking up in places and not knowing how I got there, particularly in hospitals.”
Belle is keenly aware that had such things happened in the days of Facebook and Twitter, the spread of her embarrassment would have been boundless.
She said: ”I would probably have posted things I regretted in the morning.
“There is something very curated about social media and the way that people present themselves. As an actor talking
I felt such empathy and just wondered how you move on from that BELLE JONES