Revenge Porn Offences Skyrocket During COVID Pandemic, Targeting 'Victims Young as Ten'

Incidents of revenge porn, the practice of circulating explicit pictures online of an individual in a state of undress or participating in sex acts without their consent, sometimes alongside their personal information, had been steadily increasing over the last five years since 2015, when the number of cases totalled 288.

The COVID-19 pandemic has seen reports of revenge porn skyrocket, with the number of offences growing by 329 percent over a 13-month period in London. According to new data, revealed by the Metropolitan Police through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request and reported by the Daily Mail, some victims were as young as ten.

The overall number of revenge porn incidents had risen by 698 between 1 October 2020 and 31 October 2021. Reports of female victims of the offence have surged by a total of 572 cases as compared to 177 reports last year. In the case of male victims, the increase was by 162.

Figures show that compared to the year 2020, the number of victims aged between 10 and 17 has quadrupled.

This comes as South West Grid for Learning (SWGfL), a UK charity that has been working with schools and other organisations to protect children online and who operate a Revenge Porn Helpline, witnessed cases double last year.

The charity warned that incident show “no signs of slowing down” as it released their five-year report covering the period between 2015 – 2020.

Cases of “sextortion”, or webcam blackmail, where criminals use fake identities to befriend victims online, subsequently persuading them to perform sexual acts, had tripled last year.

“We have seen a double increase in reports for intimate image abuse practically overnight during the Covid pandemic. This can be to do with a variety of reasons, though we can only postulate,” Senior Helpline Practitioner Zara Ward was cited as saying.

She clarified that as the COVID-19 pandemic brought with it measures introduced to curb its spread, people were encouraged to work from home and generally stay home more.

“Relationships were formed online… which meant sexual behaviour was happening virtually. Subsequently, we saw the number of intimate image abuse cases double in 2020 and sextortion reports triple,” she added.

Such cases are hardly new in themselves and had been steadily increasing for the last five years, according to experts citing police records.

In 2015 just 288 image abuse cases had been registers, but in the period from 2019 to 2020 the growth was by 164 more cases.

“We believe that prior to 2020 we were just seeing the tip of the iceberg. But now reports are further increasing - which have been propelled forward by the pandemic - they show no sign of slowing down,” said Zara Ward.

In the UK, revenge porn laws came into effect in 2015, with the criminal offence in question classified in Section 33 of the Criminal Justice and Courts Act. If you are accused of revenge porn and found guilty of the criminal offence, you could face a sentence of up to two years in prison.

Keyboard and mouse

CC BY-SA 2.0 / Orin Ryan/Flickr / Keyboard and mouse

It states that it is a criminal offence for a person to: “disclose a private sexual photograph or film if the disclosure is made (a) without the consent of the individual who appears, and (b) with the intention of causing that individual distress.”

Those found guilty of intentionally sharing sexually explicit images of an individual without their consent both on and offline could face up to two years in prison.

This also includes images shared via text message, email, on a website or via physical distribution.