Women around the world are harnessing the power of the internet to build a new set of digital ethics based on consent.

They include Katelyn Bowden in the U.S., who found out a year ago that intimate photos of her were posted online by a man who had allegedly stolen her boyfriend’s phone. And Emma Holten in Europe, whose intimate photos were leaked online after her identity was hijacked seven years ago. There’s also Saba Eitizaz, who was doxxed, threatened, and eventually forced to flee her home country of Pakistan.

The list goes on and it transcends borders. But what links these women isn’t the organised attacks of online abuse, harassment, and consent violations against them. It’s their commitment to regaining control of their digital identities and sexualities — and helping others do the same.

We’ve meandered from loving to loathing the internet in the past 10 years. Social media platforms were once considered revolutionary political forces. Now they face serious accusations, including eroding democratic institutions, facilitating the silencing of dissident voices, and spreading intimate images without consent, also known as revenge porn. While anonymous message boards like 4chan other dark corners of the internet may have once been the more popular home for revenge porn, mainstream sites like Facebook and Instagram are no longer immune.

“It’s incredibly important, especially for young victims, that revenge porn photos aren’t seen on Facebook and Instagram. That they aren’t tagged constantly, that they don’t have to have them removed again and again,” Holten, an online human rights activist, told Mashable.

“We spend so much time soaking up this beautiful internet thinking it would be such a democratic force. No one asked how this can be used for pain. Non-consensual porn is one of the more extreme examples.”

When it comes to revenge porn, terminology is problematic because attacks are not always about seeking vengeance and porn implies consent. That said, the women interviewed here argue that we should focus on the complex ways in which the non-consensual use of images tells women everywhere they’re not in control of their own online identities.

“Women’s spaces keep on shrinking, whether it’s online or in real life. We must not give up our spaces. So to me it doesn’t make sense to stay silent.”

There are cases of male victims, too, but the problem overwhelmingly affects women, particularly when you look outside the Western world. Women’s bodies are objectified and bartered with — in WhatsApp groups, “packs” of archived images stored in Dropbox or Google Drive folders, on Slack channels, and platforms like 4chan and Discord.

“When I was a victim of non-consensual pornography in 2011, I immediately realised how little control you have,” Holten says. Her email was hacked, unleashing a torrent of online abuse. “It gets shared over and over, but you live through the abuse like it’s the first time. So you become a realist when considering how a simple Google search can change how your entire future will look: Will I be able to apply for a job? How will this first date turn out?” It’s a huge concern,” Holten says.

Since launching we have dealt with more than 3,000 cases and removed more than 21,000 images. If you’re in the UK and have been a victim of #imagebasedabuse please get in touch. We’re here to help https://t.co/Wmrqn6LVkQ

— Revenge Porn Helpline (@RPhelpline) July 17, 2018

These kinds of attacks force many people offline. But for Holten it became a battle to regain control of her online identity. She started by creating more content, like accounts on Soundcloud, Foursquare, Academia, that would alter the Google search algorithm. Then she hired a photographer and published a new set of intimate photos, on her own terms. After that, she penned an objection to her generation’s relationship to consent and worked with the Guardian to produce what would become a viral video chronicling her ordeal.

“I certainly do not see what I did as a solution,” Holten says. “Creating new material to counter old material is not a survival strategy. It’s an act that raises awareness about how many are victimised this way and that it can happen to anyone.”

Katelyn Bowden was marking her 10 year anniversary as a bartender when her life was turned upside down, just like Holten’s. Since then, she’s dedicated herself to turning the lives of perpetrators of online harassment upside down, too. Bowden is the founder of BADASS, a group of survivors fighting back against the non-consensual use of intimate images. “We teach victims how to get their images down, how to regain control of an image once it leaks, how to prevent it from happening again,” she says.

BADASS employs guerilla tactics on the internet to fight the spread of intimate images and send out a warning to all the trolls hiding behind anonymity. The group infiltrates revenge porn forums and fills them with noise to distort the conversation. It teaches women how to use reverse image search to find the original source of images, bury threads, and send out takedown notices backed by digital media laws. BADASS also unsuccessfully pushed Ohio state legislators to introduce a bill outlawing the non-consensual use of intimate images in early 2018. Ohio remains one of only a few American states without a bill.

“The best way to stop the share is to create legal consequences for the people sharing them. If you call them out, they will stop. Oddly enough these guys really don’t like being exposed. Ironic,” Bowden says.

BADASS has deterred dozens of trolls, removed hundreds of photos, and added thousands of women to its ranks. But online harassment is still normalised, particularly among teenagers.

For them, the end goal is not sexual gratification. “It’s the excitement of being able to crush [victims] with a click, like they’re nothing,” Holten says.

This is particularly potent in the UK, where a reality dating show, called Love Island, attracted millions of viewers, as well as extensive online harassment against some of its female contestants. Intimate images of three women on the show were leaked online without their consent. Zara McDermott is one of them.

“When I was 13 or 14, I became a victim of revenge porn for the first time. Now is the second time it’s happened to me,” says McDermott. “Back then my friends blamed me, the school blamed me and it wasn’t me who was in the wrong.” 

“It’s always, always, always been about boys saying, ‘Look at who I’ve got,’” says McDermott. “My boyfriend [Adam Collard, another contestant on the show] was flying home from Love Island and a guy was bragging about a group chat that had all the pictures of me, pictures of Megan [Barton-Hanson], pictures of Laura [Anderson] and I just thought, ‘Wow, that’s really disgusting. People find that entertaining.’”

McDermott says the perpetrator is a former partner, who used her for those images and then ghosted her. McDermott isn’t taking legal action and says she hopes he feels “grateful” she isn’t outing him.

“As long as men believe that women don’t have a right to their own bodies, then they will find new ways to try and control them,” says digital rights specialist Ruth Coustick-Deal. “And as the age at which this occurs continues to fall, more people risk being muted entirely from the internet because of their gender. All of this comes back to a simple idea – let’s put some responsibility back on men to behave better.”

If the tactics in the war against the non-consensual use of intimate images involve making it socially unacceptable online and criminalising it offline, the long-term strategy is societal change through education. The target of change is the introduction of compulsory sex-ed and online safety classes that “teach respect for consent, teach the right way to enjoy each other” says Milena Popova, a researcher at the Digital Cultures Research Centre.

The UK is currently in the process of overhauling an 18-year-old guidance for sex-ed in secondary schools. According to UK Education Secretary Damian Hinds, “this new guidance will ensure lessons teach children and young people how to recognise when someone else has not given consent and more importantly why they should not put pressure on someone else to do something they don’t want to.” 

But the educational improvements in UK schools are an outlier. In the U.S., the debate in many school districts is about whether to have any sexual education beyond abstinence until marriage. “Online safety and consent is nowhere near the curriculum in the U.S.,” Popova says.

“As long as men believe that women don’t have a right to their own bodies, then they will find new ways to try and control them”

Get it straight. Our clients aren’t fragile like a flower. They’re fragile like a bomb.

— Carrie A. Goldberg (@cagoldberglaw) January 24, 2018

In the U.S., a recent vote on a bill criminalising the non-consensual use of intimate images was delayed in the state of New York, effectively freezing progress until another voting period in 2019. Carrie Goldberg, a lawyer specialising in digital rights and online harassment, says the delay was caused by a last-minute intervention by Google and the Internet Association, which represents tech giants like Google and Facebook. “Lobbyists from Google convinced the Senate not to vote on it. No vote was held. It was really emotionally devastating,” she says.

The Internet Association, speaking on behalf of Google, defended the move in a statement, arguing that the focus should fall on education rather than prosecution because the criminalisation of non-consensual distribution of intimate images, “may itself disproportionately harm vulnerable persons, especially teens and young adults,” who may end up with a “lifelong criminal record.”

For Goldberg, the problem is that big tech plays a large role in both publicly ignoring the problem and exacerbating its spread. “There’s nothing neutral about algorithms for how a search engine’s results are ordered. They can have a person’s revenge porn come up at the top of their results when their name is typed in. They can be havens for abuse and harassment.”

Facebook also stoked debate after announcing plans to tackle the non-consensual distribution of images on its platforms. The proposed remedy is a service through which people could send Facebook their photos that would need to be hashed. Hashing means adding a hidden digital fingerprint to sexually explicit images so that each time someone attempts to reupload the file, Facebook gets notified and can take it down. Given Facebook’s challenges with transparency and data privacy, it is hard to imagine victims feeling safe enough to share anything with them. The tech giant could benefit from working with survivor and activist groups, like BADASS, to help mediate these incidents and create a safe space for vulnerable people.

While these resources may seem scant, there are even fewer options for women in other parts of the world. In Latin America, East and West Africa, and southeast Asia women are often left to fend for themselves, with no signs of legal or educational support. There, the prevalent violence against women forces them to retreat entirely from the internet — like a sort of “digital purdah,” a space of female seclusion. 

But access to the internet is spreading, and with it the army of women warriors fighting for their right to participate in it on their own terms.

Targeting women’s sexuality is a very successful political tactic to silence them and discredit their image, says Lulú Barrera, a feminist activist in Mexico City and founder of Luchadoras. The consequences can be incredibly severe – from viral hate and mobbing campaigns to violence that translates into the real world.

In a report sent to the UN Special Rapporteur, Luchadoras documented three cases of female public figures — two journalists and one politician — who suffered severe violence after speaking out online against misogyny. One of the women was forced out of Mexico. Barrera says the attacks follow a pattern where the media perpetuates victim blaming followed by subsequent waves of online hate.

“It’s a way to have power over the will of women,” Barrera says.

Luchadoras, which translates as “women warriors,” is an organisation that uses technology to fight for gender equality. “We should not be telling women to stop. We should be showing women how to do it safer. We should be putting attention on the perpetrators.” One of the most important aspects of this is safe sexting. Women ought to consider protecting their identity by hiding revealing marks on their — like scars, moles, tattoos, their face — then deactivating the photo’s geolocation, and using apps — like Signal — which make it more difficult to save and store photos.

Offline, Luchadoras organises workshops that assist women who have never been online before. “We gather periodically and have sessions to familiarise women with devices like laptops, cellphones, social media, open source software, and we try to have a more creative and proactive attitude towards tech,” Barrera says.

Assisting women who’ve never been online is indispensable in areas of the world with low levels of internet inclusivity, such as parts of Africa where more and more people are connecting to the internet, but they are disproportionately male. 

“The situation doesn’t favour women,” says Maryam Ado Haruna who works with the Center for Information Technology and Development (CITAD), a Nigerian organisation using tech to develop good governance. Religious beliefs and cultural trends can contribute to attitudes about who can and should access the internet. “The way parents deny access deliberately and husbands deny wives a— they think our religion, Islam, means that internet is not for Nigerian women,” Ado Haruna says.

Ado Haruna says half of the victims of online abuse are made more vulnerable simply because they have no prior knowledge of tools they can use to be safe online. These inequalities are spreading across the continent. 

“I attribute it to the fact more people get connected, there’s a space people have found where they can harass women further,” says Sylvia Musalagani, a Kenya-based program officer at Hivos – East Africa, a global development aid organisation.

“Women need permission from male members of their families to step out of their homes. So, the internet became a space where they found the freedom to speak to anyone without asking for permission.”

The challenges these women face when going online are frequently excluded from the media conversation “dominated by women in the global North,” says Jac sm Kee, a feminist activist based in Malaysia and one of the founders of Take Back The Tech (TBTT), which uses technology to support female empowerment. 

That conversation is a global and nuanced one. Opening that conversation up to different female actors from different locations renders the regulation of bodily autonomy through religion, nationalism, and gender roles more visible.

“All the tech tools trying to make the internet safer are very tilted towards the West. The biggest threats to women and girls is actually in Third World countries like mine,” says Nighat Dad, a Pakistani lawyer, women’s rights activist, and founder of the Digital Rights Foundation.

A woman won a workplace sexual harassment case in Lahore today, she was brave enough to fight back before ombudsperson herself for a year, she reached to DRF Helpline when she was hopeless & suicidal, team supported her to keep her hope alive through counselling & today she won.

— Nighat Dad (@nighatdad) September 4, 2018

Since 2000, 44 million people have been connected to the internet in Pakistan, which is about 22 percent of its population. Women make up only a fifth of all internet users there.

“Women need permission from male members of their families to step out of their homes. So, the internet became a space where they found the freedom to speak to anyone without asking for permission,” Dad says.

But that digital freedom can have very serious repercussions. Even if a woman chooses to share an image, which is not intimate, like a picture with her head covered, it can still be used as a weapon against her. “It can bring a lot of dishonour to your family. Even if it just shows your face,” Dad says.

This is what happened to Qandeel Baloch, a social media star in Pakistan who was murdered by her brother. Before she was killed, “her male family members began receiving threats, her photos were photoshopped in a sexualised manner, and they went viral. Most of the time, people just resort to victim-blaming and slut-shaming,” Dad says.

“I faced the same ordeal as Qandeel,” says Saba Eitizaz, who was forced to flee Pakistan after becoming a victim of a severe online abuse campaign. While working with the BBC in Pakistan, Eitizaz was targeted for her reporting on several high-profile stories of human rights abuses. After that, she was doxxed, hacked, and repeatedly threatened. 

That’s when she met Dad, who helped her protect her online identity from the character assassination campaign.

“I broke a story about another female journalist, Zeenat Shahzadi, who was allegedly abducted by security forces. She was 24. I could tell this could happen to me next,” Eitizaz says. “First, a storm of sexual harassment that lasted over a month. My social media was flooded by trolls. They started off abusing me with foul language, like ‘whore, bitch.’”

At the time, her social media editor advised her to go off the grid. She disagreed. 

“Women’s spaces keep on shrinking, whether it’s online or in real life. We must not give up our spaces. So to me it doesn’t make sense to stay silent,” she says.

Resolve, kindness, and solidarity is what connects these two women in Pakistan with the global movement fighting for an online space defined not by online harassment, but by irrefutably upholding gender equality. It is difficult to predict which way this global battle will tilt, but women, who refuse to lose control of their online identities, are teaching others about the value of their online voice and data.

“The time has passed where perpetrators go unpunished,” Dad says. 

And she’s right. With every tech-oriented class, every woman practicing safe sexting, every new law passed, and every revenge porn site shut down, women are slowly regaining control of their online identities.

• Written by

  Nikolay Nikolov

• Edited by

  Anne-Marie Tomchak and Brittany Levine Beckman

• Artwork by

  Bob Al-Greene