One in five Aussies victim of online image abuse

sydney — Researchers on Monday urged tougher laws to protect victims of “revenge porn” in Australia after a survey revealed abuses, including shooting and sharing intimate images without permission, on a “mass scale”.

One in five Australians have fallen prey to abusive behaviour, including having intimate photographs taken without consent and then confronting threats to share them on social networks, a government-funded national study of more than 4,200 people revealed.

Academics at Monash University and RMIT University found that men and women were equally likely to be targetted, while 50 per cent of those from minority groups, like Aboriginal Australians and those with disabilities, reported some form of abuse. Researchers behind the survey said legislation needed to be strengthened, adding “revenge porn” had emerged at such a rapid pace that laws were “struggling to catch up”.

“Our survey only captured those victims who had become aware their images had been distributed, whereas some victims may never discover that their images have been taken and distributed,” Monash senior criminology lecturer Asher Flynn said.

The most common type of abuse was taking intimate images without consent.

Some 11 per cent of victims saw their images distributed without their consent, with some 40 percent of those being shared across social media platforms like Snapchat and Facebook. A vast majority of those who experienced “sextortion”, or threats to share their images, said they suffered from anxiety as a result, with many fearing for their safety.

About half of the victims said their perpetrators were male, about a third that the violator was female while 13 per cent said the offender was unknown. “We need to rethink our approach from a legal perspective but also as a community, to change attitudes that often blame the victims and play down the very real harm caused by image-based abuse,” said RMIT legal studies lecturer Anastasia Powell.—