Love, or what we think is love, can make us do stupid and spontaneous things. What started as selfies has quickly progressed into nudies and pornographic material racing across cyberspace. People think they are safe by using apps such as Snapchat and Grinder to cover their tracks, but once you create a digital copy of anything and post it somewhere online, it is there forever. Not even deleting the content in question will make it truly go away.
Snapchat recently admitted that photos taken and sent using their app do not disappear within 1 to 10 seconds as promised but in actuality are stored in a server making them vulnerable to hackers and online leakages. The same concept can be applied to relationships and flings as one person can fall out of love while the other can seek the ultimate revenge by posting that racy nude photo or (even worse) the sex tape he convinced you to make with promises of never-ending love.
Revenge porn has unfortunately become a quickly growing trend, and women are the majority of those being victimized. It is meant to humiliate and shame them online. Their ex-boyfriends, ex-husbands or ex-significant others become scorned and seek a way to hurt the women they were once in a relationship with.
Countries like England have already taken steps to protect victims of revenge porn by passing laws to prevent these kinds of crimes from happening. When dealing with digital and cyber-crimes, the law is still evolving to deal with the relatively new form of media.
According to USA Today, the heinous act has become so prevalent that 13 states have enacted laws to address the issue with many more gearing up to follow suit. However, the law has not been able to keep up a consistent stance, and many states’ anti-revenge porn laws have the news, media and publishing outlets fighting against it as a violation of their First Amendment rights.
The laws are too broad in that they encompass too great of a spectrum to cover revenge porn on its own and encroach on several First Amendment and free speech protections.
For example, the American Civil Liberties Union has taken a strong stance against these laws, challenging that they fail to protect photos and videos with artistic, historical and educational value by criminalizing them. As terrible as revenge porn is, these laws are too broad and undermine the value of our constitutional rights of free speech, especially with material that includes nudity.
As states rush to pass laws protecting the victim, they do not look at laws already in place such as invasion of privacy, stalking and harassment. A recent string of celebrity nude photo leaks have brought this issue to the forefront and started the conversation on revenge porn despite the fact that it has been happening for years now.
As the fight to protect themselves continue, potential victims can take steps to prevent this from happening to them. The most important and obvious thing to do is not engage in any activities that will have you recording yourself in the nude in any way, shape, form or fashion.
By recording this kind of content, you automatically make yourself a potential victim and it may not affect you immediately or even next week but will come back to haunt you one day when you are least expecting it. It is important to remember that you have to only do things that you are comfortable with and not let peer pressure make you do things you do not want to do like take sexy photos or worse make a sex tape.
Hollywood even addressed the issue of revenge porn in the movie “Sex Tape” starring Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel about a couple that gets blackmailed when a copy of their sex tape falls into the hands of a teen. It goes on to show how this kind of thing happens all the time and how people can deal with it if it happens to them.
In the age of technology that we live in, revenge porn is not going away anytime soon, but you can take the proper steps in the right direction in order to prevent and stop others from exploiting you and making you into a victim.
