Here’s How You Put a Stop to Revenge Porn for Good

Did you hear the big news about revenge porn? Kevin Bollaert, the operator of the now defunct revenge porn website, UGotPosted.com, was recently sentenced to 18 years in jail for his role in operating the site. UGotPosted.com featured anonymously posted nude and explicit images of people—most of whom were women—who had not consented to their images being put on the web.  

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More than 10,000 images were posted to UGotPosted.com, but the abuse went way beyond that. Bollaert required posters to link the images to personal identifiers—such as the subject’s full name, location, age, and Facebook profile link—to maximize harm. He created a second website, ChangeMyReputation.com; the subject would have to go there to pay Bollaert a $250 to $350 extortion fee in exchange for her image to be taken down from UGotPosted.com. Bollaert reportedly earned about $900 a month in ad revenue and collected about $30,000 from victims. A jury found Bollaert guilty of six counts of extortion and 21 counts of identity theft. And now he’s going to be behind bars for a long time.

This is great momentum, but there’s more work to be done.

As an advocate and expert on online harassment, I’m excited about the movement that’s taking place right now through the courts, legislative bodies, and leading companies in the tech industry. There’s now a focus on how we can protect individuals’ abilities to participate in online communities free from certain types of harassment, abuse, threats, and invasions of privacy. And in the U.S., we’ve just witnessed the first criminal conviction of a revenge porn website operator.

But that’s not enough.

To turn the tide against revenge porn, we need to make it go way beyond the sites. We need to show abusive exes, hackers, and Peeping Toms that we won’t stand for it when they disclose sexual or intimate images without consent. See, the problem is that, while nonconsensual pornography does violate civil law in every state in the country (meaning an individual can file a lawsuit against another individual for invasion of privacy and breach of confidentiality), in the real world, civil lawsuits to combat revenge porn are no remedy at all. Why would a victim spend a fortune on litigation that will probably result in a judgment a year later that says the defendant has to pay the victim some amount of money—especially when the defendant often doesn’t make much and therefore is that much harder to collect from. Meanwhile, the victim’s naked image and personal information will still be online—and if it went viral, there’s no way to undo that damage.

We need to up the ante on restraining orders and criminal convictions. We need law-enforcement officials who are educated on the laws available to prosecute online abuse, trained on how to investigate crimes committed through the use of technology, and have the tools they need to investigate those cases. We need civil and criminal attorneys to take these cases to court, rather than waiting on victims to do all of the heavy lifting.

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In the past two months, Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook have banned nonconsensual pornography. Another revenge pornographer, Casey E. Meyering, who ran the site WinByState.com, is schedule to go to trial in June 2015. The Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint against revenge pornographer Craig Brittain (who ran the site IsAnybodyDown.com), and the proposed Consent Order would establish government’s position that nonconsensual pornography is an unfair consumer practice. Sixteen states have passed criminal laws prohibiting nonconsensual pornography, 13 in the last year and a half.  

We—a handful of lawyers, legislators, advocates, and industry executives—are chipping away at the problem. But we need your help. Here are some simple, concrete steps you can take to end revenge porn:

1. Join and Support Organizations That Lobby for Better Laws
Work with the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative’s End Revenge Porn campaign to get revenge porn legislation passed in your state.

Contact your state’s branch of the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV) to ask how you can support its work to revise domestic abuse statutes to ensure that those statutes are effective against online abuse.

Reach out to the National Center for Victims of Crime to learn about the State Model Stalking Code and how you can volunteer to bring those revisions to your state.

2.Tell Your State Government That Prosecuting Technology-Related Crimes Matters to You
Contact your state Attorney General, and encourage him or her to join the efforts led by Attorney General Kamala Harris to create an eCrime Unit, sponsor well-drafted laws, and work with tech firms to encourage safer online communities to end cyber-exploitation in your state, too. 

Here’s the thing about revenge porn: You have the power to make a difference. So if this is an issue that matters to you, create some noise.

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Erica Johnstone, a partner at Ridder, Costa Johnstone in San Francisco, has been litigating nonconsensual pornography cases since 2009. She is also the cofounder of Without My Consent, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that empowers victims of egregious online privacy violations to lead the fight against online harassment.