I’ve received unsolicited pictures of men’s penises every month for the last 12 years. Almost every young woman I know’s been CYBER—FLASHED
As the first person in England is jailed for cyber-flashing, victim-turned-campaigner, Jess Davies explains why it’s so invasive. . .
BROADCASTER Jess Davies makes the mental calculation swiftly: about once a month a stranger sends her an unsolicited, anonymous photo of his genitals. The revelation is abhorrent and shocking, but, she says, the practice is commonplace.
‘For the past 12 years, since I was 18, I’ve received hundreds of images — on social media, by email — of men’s penises in a state of arousal. Sometimes it’s just a photo. Other times, there is also text of a sexual nature.
‘It is happening on such a huge scale it’s frightening. Almost every young woman I know has received them. It’s so prevalent.’
Jess, 30, is speaking to me after convicted paedophile Nicholas Hawkes last week became the first person in England and Wales to be jailed for the crime of cyber-flashing.
Hawkes, 39, sent an unsolicited picture of his erect penis to a 15-year-old girl.
He also sent similar explicit photos to a woman who took screenshots of them and reported the offence to police.
Hawkes, who admitted two charges of cyber-flashing, has been sentenced to 66 weeks in jail for sending the images of his genitals with the intention of causing alarm, distress or humiliation.
He had been given a community order last year for exposure and sexual activity with a child under 16 and was also in breach of court orders.
The Online Safety Act, which came into effect on January 31 this year, made cyberflashing a criminal offence. Jess, a TV and radio presenter and former model, welcomes the new law: ‘Criminalising this gives off a message to men that cyber-flashing is a serious crime. It also shows women and girls they should not have to put up with it, that’s it’s not just a joke, harmless banter. It’s sinister and invasive.’
HOWEVER, she fears the law’s remit does not go far enough: ‘Hawkes was relatively easy to prosecute. He was a known sex offender. He admitted the crimes and targeted an under-age girl.
‘But I don’t think it will always be as easy to secure convictions. Prosecutors have to prove the defendant intended to cause alarm, distress or humiliation.
‘Proving intent is a high threshold. Men will say it was a joke. The standard for criminalising obscene pictures should be consent, not intent. If they were sent without the recipient’s permission — if the receiver did not agree to them or ask for them — that should be enough. Women should not have to fight to prove the sender’s intentions.’
Jess, a vivacious sociology graduate who co-presents a drive-time radio show in Cardiff, has become an impassioned campaigner on the subject.
She has lobbied Parliament and gives talks in schools; she’s presented documentaries and is writing a book, No One Wants To
See Your D**k, which charts her experience of online misogyny and gives tips on how young women can protect themselves.
‘The more I speak out, the worse the abuse I get online. Every day I’m looking over my shoulder. What if someone finds me and breaks into my home?’ she asks, acknowledging the fact that as a single woman who lives alone, she is conscious of her vulnerability. ‘But I feel so passionately about this. It is such a huge issue. A lot of men feel they can do or say whatever they want.
‘I wouldn’t say most men are misogynistic, but I protect myself.
I don’t use dating apps and haven’t had a serious relationship for seven years.’
Jess reports obscene photos to social media platforms. Weeks later she discovers the offender’s account is still active. Even as she blocks senders, more spring up.
She is, of course, sharply aware that the threat is all-pervasive: potentially outside, on the street, as well as more insidiously, in the sanctuary of her home. In fact, it was while scrolling through her work emails in bed one morning in October 2021 that it struck her forcibly how intrusive and violating cyber-flashing was.
‘I opened my work email account at home and a man I did not know had sent me three images of his erect penis. I imagine he was in his mid to late 20s.
‘I was in bed — somewhere you’re supposed to feel safe — and it felt really invasive. There was text as well; not too graphic, but still sexual.’
When she condemned this grotesque invasion of her personal space on social media, she faced a slew of abuse: ‘People said: “There are real crimes out there. Why are you complaining?” ’
But she points out that such offences — often diminished as minor infringements — can lead to the most heinous crimes. PC Wayne Couzens was accused of indecent exposure six years before he murdered Sarah Everard, 33. Libby Squire, 21, was abducted and killed by Pawel Relowicz, who also had previous convictions for voyeurism and performing sex acts in public
‘So we have to ask why so many people think cyber-flashing is OK. It’s seen as victimless, but it is a sexual crime. It’s crazy that it has become normalised. If every time we went outside we saw a flasher, we’d never leave home. Yet we log on online and there they are.’
A survey three years ago by the online dating app Bumble suggested almost half of 18 to 24year-olds in the UK had received an obscene photo they did not ask for or consent to. One in three had been sent one of these pictures while they were at work.
‘And the motivation is invariably sexual gratification and to cause distress,’ says Jess.
‘Forcing a woman to see a man’s penis without her consent is also an exercise in power and control, and it is happening on such a huge scale it is terrifying.
‘These are everyday men we work and socialise with and, disturbing as it is, hundreds of thousands of people sign up for “doxing” forums in which personal information — social handles, names, addresses and phone numbers — are shared without people’s consent.
‘Every time I check my social media now I’m on edge. I hope the new law will act as a deterrent, but the police do not have the resources to investigate every
case. There are millions of men doing this across the world and they are not all going to be convicted and sentenced. ‘The key is education.’
To this end, she visits schools, giving advice on how teenage girls should protect themselves against it.
‘I tell them to keep their social media profiles private, not to share their location and to report offences to social media platforms — and to the police, even if they cannot act on every single case.’
Jess says, from her own anecdotal evidence, schoolgirls are being targeted by grown men, some as old as 50, as well as fellow pupils. ‘And they’re often pressured into sending images back, which can then be on the internet for ever,’ she says.
She also urges parents to be aware: ‘A lot are not involved with what their children do on social media. They should talk about it, know which sites their children are using and ensure their privacy controls are turned on.’
So how did Jess — attractive and forthright with a river of platinum blonde hair — become such a fearless and impassioned national campaigner? I suspect her determination to protect young women is rooted in her own teenage naivety which led her to feel pressurised into making decisions she felt uneasy about.
The daughter of retired policeman Neil Davies, 57, and his childminder wife Angela, 53, she was raised, the middle of three children, in the coastal Mid Wales town of Aberystwyth.
‘I was protected from the big, wide world,’ Jess says. ‘I was very trusting.’
While studying for her degree at the University of South Wales, she began modelling and, against her better judgment, was persuaded to pose for topless shots in lads’ mags in her late teens.
‘Looking back, I think I was manipulated. I did my first shoot in a pink mesh swimsuit and I was horrified my nipples were visible,’ she says.
‘I had been assured that they’d be photo-shopped out, but when I looked online they hadn’t been. I was crying hysterically. I hadn’t chosen to do that.
‘My (then) agent said, “You don’t want to upset the client.” Then it was: “This is as far as you’ll go unless you do topless.”
‘You’re promised the world and money. You look back and think: “That wasn’t OK. It wasn’t what I thought it was.” I was a naïve teenager. I was pressurised.
‘The internet was exploding at the time. We didn’t understand its power. Images from my website were being promoted on porn sites without my consent, and I could do nothing to stop it.’
She reflects: ‘If someone asked me to do topless modelling now I’d say “no”. But going through that experience has opened my eyes to this world. I might not be campaigning now if I hadn’t had that early experience — and the campaigning is something I’ll never regret.’
Jess first encountered a cyberflasher — an adult male — when, aged 16, she was in an internet chatroom with a group of female school friends: ‘ There was this sick sense of shock that a grown man was exposing his penis to a group of schoolgirls.
‘Added to this we felt guilty — as if it was us, rather than him, who had done something wrong — so we just blocked him and said nothing. Basically, we were children and there was this awful power imbalance.’
Then, at university, she discovered online socialising was rife with similar abuse.
‘We played Chatroulette (an online chat website that pairs random users in webcambased conversations).
‘Men would often have their penises out. Sometimes they would be masturbating. It became normalised, it happened so often.
‘You’d just block them, get rid of them, laugh it off as ridiculous.’
Then, after she graduated and began broadcasting, her social media profile grew — she now has around 150,000 followers on Instagram and uses her account to communicate with listeners. But with this came the unwelcome attention of cyber-flashers.
explicit images are routinely sent on social media and messaging apps, through Air Drop, WiFi networks or Bluetooth.
home Office research reports that cyber-flashers often Air Drop obscene photos to women in public spaces — supermarkets, libraries, restaurants, museums, train stations and airports, as well as on public transport — because the technology is short range and people often forget to turn it off.
‘I haven’t had an image Air Dropped to me in public, but I’ve heard of women who have,’ Jess says. ‘It’s horrific because the man could be sitting in the same train carriage as you and that makes women feel terrified and vulnerable as well as violated.’
For Jess, the awareness of just how pernicious cyber-flashing is grew as she reached her 20s.
‘As you mature, your thought processes develop, you realise how disturbing it is when you open a message and it is a d**k pic. You ask yourself: are these men going to see me on the street? Do they know where I live?’
In 2017, Jess was sexually assaulted by two men while waiting for food at an all-night takeaway in Cardiff.
‘They put their hands down my top and squeezed my bare breasts,’ she recalls. ‘They thought it was funny. I was upset, crying.
‘What strikes me now is their sense of entitlement. I think this has ramped up with online abuse. Men think that they have the right to exert power over women in this way.
‘I managed to push them off and ran to the taxi where my friends were waiting for me. I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t been with my friends.’
encouraged by her parents, Jess reported the assault to the police: ‘As my dad was a policeman, I grew up thinking you could go to the police for support and help.’
She was then pushed from pillar to post. Finally, after her father intervened, a sympathetic female officer took a statement from Jess three days after the assault.
‘But a week later I heard that the case had been closed through lack of evidence,’ she says.
She felt powerless. Which is another reason why she stands up for young women.
JeSS abhors the growing prevalence of ‘ deep fake’ porn in which the faces of non- consenting individuals are transposed over those of actresses, as well as the dark world in which men plague women with obscene, unwanted photos.
‘Before the internet if a depraved man wanted to get a kick out of exposing himself to a stranger he would have to go out and commit the physical act of flashing. Now, all he has to do is send a photo of his penis from his phone.’
Chillingly, despite the prominence Jess has gained as a campaigner, she still receives obscene photos.
‘The last one was a month ago,’ she says. ‘It was from someone calling himself Coke Can Greg because, supposedly, his penis was the shape of a Coke can. I reported it to Instagram, but they said there was nothing they could do about it.
‘I felt no less disturbed by it than I always do. This man might have targeted me specifically. he may even be someone I know. Or he may be a stranger who has sent the photo to millions of women. There’s no way of knowing.
‘ It all ties into safety. I feel vulnerable when I go out.’
She hammers home her lessons in self- protection: check your social media settings so you can receive private messages only from your followers. Report offences to social media platforms. Tell the police.
‘I view the world a bit differently now,’ admits Jess. ‘ I’m more reserved, and I would never date anyone whose views did not align with my own. I do hope to marry one day, but I’m more cynical and mistrustful than I was.
‘Obviously there are a lot of good men out there — and I’m aware not all of them are cyber-flashers — but in the back of your mind, especially on dating apps, you’re always asking: “Who are these men? What is their motivation?” ’