Please Stop Calling It ‘Revenge Porn’
The way we frame this heinous action is victim-blaming at its worst.
For the longest time I felt like it was my fault. My fault for letting this man form a manipulative relationship with me, my fault for letting him groom me since I was 14 years old, my fault for not realizing he was just using me, my fault for being so lonely that I kept in contact with him for so long, my fault for needing attention.
And of course, my fault for taking the photos.
I found out I was a victim of what’s commonly called “revenge porn” in 2015, when a friend informed me that someone had been using my photos for a fetish Twitter account that shared links of fake profiles with my face and body on them. The account also actively encouraged people to share my images and make up horrific stories about them.
Through tracing the IP addresses of some of the images, we discovered they were posted by a man I’d been in a sometimes flirtatious off-and-on friendship with since I was a teen, who I was never physical with and had only met once.
At that point, the law for “revenge porn” in the UK had only been around for four months. It covers the sharing of images showing people engaged in sexual activity or depicted in a sexual way or with their genitals exposed, with…
