Fake accounts with stolen, sexualised images of teen girls prompt call for action

Disturbing Twitter accounts, featuring stolen photos of more than 60 teenage girls from Cork captioned with degrading and highly sexualised language, have prompted calls for new legislation to protect young people online.
Fake accounts with stolen, sexualised images of teen girls prompt call for action

Disturbing Twitter accounts, featuring stolen photos of more than 60 teenage girls from Cork captioned with degrading and highly sexualised language, have prompted calls for new legislation to protect young people online.

Tackling online abuse should be a priority in the next programme for government, Noeline Blackwell of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre said.

“It’s a big, big worry,” Ms Blackwell said.
 “Even a misogynist must recognise that stealing a person’s identity and setting up fake accounts about them is deeply harmful behaviour and cannot be tolerated.”

“Our legislation pre-dates the internet and it has no capacity to deal well with this kind of malicious stealing of a person’s image, and abuse of it."

The Rape Crisis Centre and other groups, led by The Children’s Rights Alliance have pushed for new legislation to protect against harmful online communications with the office of Digital Safety Commissioner established.

The Digital Safety Commissioner would create a code of conduct for service providers and could compel companies to remove material that contravened that code through the courts.

Tanya Ward, Chief Executive of the Children’s Rights Alliance said that online abuse must be challenged through legislation, but also through education at both primary and secondary school and through regulation.

“The first way for any child to protect themselves is to empower and educate them, to give them the critical skills that they need to respond to these situations," Ms Ward said.

Regulation of the tech sector is also needed at the EU level to compel companies to carry out safety impact assessments and privacy impact assessments before releasing a product to market.

With technology we’re always playing catch-up. If you required companies to carry out these assessments when they were developing products you wouldn’t be playing catch-up. That would be one way to keep children safer.

But Ms Ward believes that Ireland should be careful of introducing criminal sanctions against young people perpetrating these acts.

“Criminal law is the hard edge.

"I would like to see us using the civil law to address these kind of issues - by establishing a digital safety commissioner with a mechanism for complaints.

"I think that legislation needs to be expedited as soon as possible."

Jody Cantillon, partner in the litigation department at Cantillons Solicitors, also believes that new legislation is desperately needed to protect people from online abuse.

“Criminal law is not strong in this area," he said.  “It could be argued that the abuser is guilty of Harassment.

“However, there must be an element of persistence on the part of the harasser. You may be able to prove this by showing that the images were retweeted but this has not been tested in Irish courts.”

Mr Cantillon said that even if a criminal case looked too challenging, a victim could take a civil case against the perpetrator using a number of avenues, although many of them have not yet been tested in the Irish courts.

If the image published was a ‘selfie’, it could be argued that republishing it was breaking the photographer’s copyright.

A victim could also seek damages for the breach of their right to Privacy and Confidence and of their Data Protection rights.

“The internet is a great thing but it also does a lot of damage.

“The situation is going to get worse. Kids now have access to the internet and they particularly need protecting."

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