Intimate images: ‘I wanted to help others so they wouldn’t be called a porn star on a night out’

“Faces of exes,” Mia Landsem reads out loud as she clicks on a link to a forum exposing intimate images of other people’s ex-girlfriends, her frowning brow illuminated by a three-screen computer. On the 25-year-old’s neck, beneath wisps of blond hair, are tattooed reminders in Norwegian to be “brave” and “don’t give a f**k”. An internet-security expert by day, she has made it her mission by night to hunt down and report such images from her apartment in Oslo. “I try to focus on the worst ones,” she says. “I can maybe get a few groups removed in a day, but then 20 more appear.”

Digital image-based sexual abuse — a catch-all phrase that includes deepfake pornography, so-called upskirting, and “revenge porn”, a term rejected by activists for implying the victim has done something wrong — is a global problem on the rise. Almost three out of four victims are women, according to a 2019 study by the University of Exeter, in England. But there are male victims and female perpetrators.

I didn’t understand anything. Then they showed me that photo. I remember running to the toilet of the bar and crying

Catching digital perpetrators was, in Landsem’s words, initially a way to stay alive. When she was 18 she was at a bar in the Norwegian city of Trondheim when she noticed a group of guys sniggering at her. When she asked what was so funny they said, “Aren’t you that porn star?” Landsem recalls. “I didn’t understand anything. Then they showed me that photo.”

In it Landsem and her ex-boyfriend were having sex. She was 16 at the time. “I remember running to the toilet of the bar and crying,” Landsem says. Seeing how distressed she was, the men deleted the image. But it was already making the rounds of the city.

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Although it is difficult to pin down how widespread digital intimate-image-based abuse is, aid organisations in several countries report that it exploded during the pandemic. “We’re seeing more and more content,” says Sophie Mortimer of the UK’s Revenge Porn Helpline, whose caseload surged to a record 3,146 cases in 2020. “We need to act in a global manner,” Mortimer says. “Because that’s how the internet works: it is a global thing.”

Victims are often left to fight their battles alone due to what lawyers, scholars, psychologists and activists interviewed across Europe for this article deplore as a lack of will to prosecute the crime and to regulate tech companies.

Landsem says she never charges victims for her help, whether they are 12-year-olds or celebrities. “No one should have to pay for this,” she says.

If I had known that people exchange intimate images like they are trading Pokémon cards, I would never have done it

Most evenings she spends hours going through her emails, responding to desperate requests for help. She also has hundreds of bots set up across the internet, alerting her when new groups form, so she can report them. “If there’s a crime scene and someone is murdering someone, you have to gather the evidence right after it happened,” she says. “That’s why I try to help with the most basic evidence I’m allowed to gather, and I give it to the police to make them work a bit faster.”

She sometimes uses fake identities to join closed groups, taking screenshots that she sends to police and to tech platforms. Among the other digital evidence she collects are usernames, IP addresses, URLs and the metadata from the images themselves — which can include when and where the photograph was taken, and on what device.

What people often fail to understand, Landsem says, is how common it is to upload nude images of others without their consent — especially among teenagers. (According to the Norwegian police, digital image-based sexual abuse becomes a problem at the age of 12-13.) “I wouldn’t call it a subculture. It’s everyone,” Landsem says.

One of the first people to spread Landsem’s image was her former best friend. The two young women had fallen out at the time. One day Anne Fredriksen received a message from Landsem’s ex. “He said it would be fun if this came out,” Fredriksen recalls. “If I had known that people exchange images like they are trading Pokémon cards, I would never have done it.”

The Revenge Porn Helpline calls this “collector culture”. “One underexplored aspect is that it has become a kind of hobby,” says Julia Slupska, a cybersecurity doctoral student at Oxford Internet Institute. Ruth Lewis, a sociologist and coauthor of Digital Gender-Sexual Violations, has found that men who engaged in so-called upskirting — taking a picture up the skirt of a woman without her consent — wanted “to get kudos from other men for taking great photos that are risky” without being caught. “The woman is almost immaterial,” she says. “She’s just currency.”

Clare McGlynn, a law professor at Durham University, in England, describes digital image-based sexual abuse as “about a masculine culture that rewards treating women not very well”. “It’s about power and control,” she says. “The partner that would take a picture of someone in the shower and then pass it to someone else, it is just because they can, they want to.”

In a Norwegian group on the encrypted messaging platform Telegram — a favoured service for those seeking anonymity — one user encourages the nearly 900 members to “share what you have”. Users request specific names of women — “anyone got…?” — but also geographical areas (regions, cities or even schools). “If anyone wants to trade, DM,” writes another. Some have joined using their full names and turn out to be at high school. We contact three group members, none of whom agree to an interview for this article.

Maëlle Chiarolini was 14 when a video of her and her ex-boyfriend having sex made the rounds of online groups, available for everyone at her school in Belgium to see. Her mother, Zara Chiarolini, was oblivious to what was going on. “She didn’t want to go to school; she had stomach pains,” Chiarolini says. Maëlle went from being a cheery teenager who loved boxing to snapping at her mother and hiding her phone.

We must work on turning the shame around. It’s the perpetrator who should be ashamed

A couple of months later, in January 2020, Maëlle killed herself. “Maëlle ended her life because she didn’t see a solution; she didn’t see who she could talk to about this,” her mother says. Chiarolini joined a group working to help children who are victims of cyberbullying. “We must work on turning the shame around,” she says. “It’s the perpetrator who should be ashamed, not the victims.”

Shame is an important reason why victims are reluctant to seek justice, according to lawyers, scholars and activists interviewed for this article. It took Landsem nearly two years before she reported her ex-boyfriend. When she did, she included proof of him admitting to the crime. “I served the police the case on a golden plate,” Landsem says. Months later the police dropped the case. “I was very depressed. I didn’t want anyone else to experience that. I started looking at the legislation, how to help others so that they wouldn’t have to be called a porn star on a night out.” (In the end Landsem’s ex got fined for spreading pornography.)

Landsem’s digital detective skills would help pivot the Norwegian approach to digital image-based abuse. In 2017 she discovered several nude images of Nora Mørk, a handball player on the national team. The case kickstarted a national debate, and in the summer of 2021 Norway made the spread of intimate images a crime punishable with up to a year in prison — two if the abuse is “systematic” or “organised”.

[ Online abuse: ‘I was waking up every day to malicious messages from men’ ]

In Ireland, since the Harassment, Harmful Communications and Related Offences Act came into force, in February 2021, image-based sexual abuse has been a criminal offence, with the possibility of up to seven years in prison in severe cases. But even countries with laws in place struggle to take cases to court. In France, spreading intimate images of someone without their consent is punishable with up to two years in prison and a €60,000 fine. Unfortunately, says Rachel-Flore Pardo, a lawyer and cofounder of the organisation Stop Fisha, which helps victims of digital image-based abuse, the law is not adequately implemented yet.

Activists such as Pardo believe tech platforms need to do more. This spring the European Union came close to adopting a landmark law that would have increased pressure on websites publishing pornographic content. But during the final stretch of late-night political haggling, the relevant article 24b of the Digital Services Act disappeared from the text.

“No one was willing to fight for it,” says Alexandra Geese, a Green MEP who campaigned to get the measure through. “You know, it’s just women, who cares? It’s not business. It’s not important.” A European directive against violence against women is currently in the works, but, according to Geese, “it does not bite”. Victims, she says, would still be left with the burden of chasing down the images and proving who uploaded them, “which is impossible, basically”.

It’s the hardest part of my job. It feels like someone is being murdered, and I’m watching

Prosecuting image-based sexual abuse is tricky, not least because of its prevalence. Inside the headquarters of Kripos, the Norwegian national unit that specialises in combating sexual abuse of children, police officers sift through thousands of images every year.

Kripos’s superintendent, Helge Haugland, says international co-operation is key in order to successfully prosecute digital image-based abuse, and welcomes the increasing number of platforms seeking to join efforts to alert authorities to abusive material. But “it would be easier for us if there was one way to ask all the companies for data, instead of it being up to the tech platforms”, Haugland says.

It is in this emerging field that people like Landsem are operating, though Haugland warns that well-intentioned hacktivists could hinder police operations and, if operating illegally, fail to produce evidence that could be used in court. Landsem, who says she never does anything illegal, is well aware of the tension. “It’s the hardest part of my job,” she says about doing nothing when she knows she could do something. “It feels like someone is being murdered, and I’m watching.” — Guardian