Noelle Martin

WA Young Australian of the Year

IT WAS AN impulsive moment of curiosity that blew Noelle Martin’s life to pieces. In 2012 when the 17-year-old innocently plugged a photograph of herself into Google’s reverse-image search function, she was not expecting anything salacious or scandalous. But as soon as she clicked ‘search’ her screen was swamped with pornography sites containing photographs stolen from her social media pages, accompanied by graphic, abusive commentary.

“It was the shock of my life,” she says. “I never in a million-millionmillion years thought I would see what I saw.” Shaking, Noelle dug deeper and discovered her face had been photoshopped onto vile images of naked, adult women. She had been the victim of a crime so new it didn’t even have a name, and there was no law to address it. Noelle reported the abuse to police and government agencies, but it fell to her to contact the webmasters to try to have the images removed.

It was an impossible task. She had no idea who had created them. The sites that published them were shadowy offshore outfits and the images were spreading at an unstoppable rate.

“I contacted one webmaster and they said they would only delete the site if I sent them nude pictures of myself within 24 hours,” she says. “There’s not much any country can do when you’ve got sites hosted overseas.”

She knew she could remove herself from social media, but she didn’t think she should be the one who had to give up her online identity. “I absolutely on principle detest that attitude,” she says. Instead, she did the opposite – she decided to go public and speak out. “I needed to reclaim my name.”

Noelle, now 24, started speaking about what had happened to her. She’s delivered TED talks and been interviewed on national media about this grave invasion of her privacy. The campaign was long and ugly, and there was heartache and setbacks. When she first went public she was met with a wave of victimblaming hate, but she would not be deterred. Her fierce advocacy was instrumental in the introduction of state and federal laws that make it a criminal offence to distribute non-consensual intimate images.