Teens’ images abused and reposted on social media accounts
Images of more than 60 teenage girls from Cork captioned with highly sexualised and degrading language have been shared across three disturbing Twitter accounts.
“Afraid”, “violated”, “vulnerable”, and “angry” were words the victims used to describe seeing their images abused online.
Two of these accounts impersonated teenage girls, using their photos and real first names while encouraging men to ejaculate on their pictures.
The stolen images were of the girls dressed in sports clothes, going to birthday parties, and black-tie events or occasionally in bikinis — normal pictures of teenagers and young adults enjoying life.
But the comments that accompanied them, or the semen-soaked photos of them posted on the accounts, were far from normal and have been highly distressing to the young females involved.
The third account featured multiple images of about 60 teenage girls, many named by their first names and from Cork.
Legal experts say that legislation has not caught up with technology and this legislative gap allows online abuse to often go unpunished.
Noeline Blackwell, of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, said that legislating for online abuse and establishing a digital safety commissioner must be priorities in the next programme for government.
‘I felt as if my identity had been taken’
The Irish Examiner spoke to two of the students featured on these accounts. Both are currently completing first year in UCC and want to remain anonymous.
Ciara and April, not their real names, were "disgusted" and "horrified" by the accounts.
“I felt completely sick to my stomach when I saw these accounts,” Ciara said.
“One thing that really scared me were the pictures of a girl who is only 17 at the moment. It is terrifying to think of men and/or women viewing underage girls in the manner they were portrayed on Twitter. It’s terrifying to think that I can’t even share a picture of my face without being objectified and completely dehumanised. I haven’t felt comfortable explaining what happened to my parents just because I don’t want them to be scared about it.”
Ciara, 19, said that she has not yet reported the abuse to police but she will consider doing so when she finishes her college exams. But this is not the first time that she has had to cope with online abuse. When she was 14 or 15, “horrible” accounts were made “rating” girls her age.
But the more recent Twitter accounts are "a lot more vulgar” and “really made me feel afraid and vulnerable".
She does not know where the photos used on the accounts were from. They are not on her Instagram and three of them were taken when she was as young as 16.
Either the person has had these photos a while or has really gone looking for them on the internet through perhaps Facebook, although there is definitely a photo that I have no idea how they got a hold of.
“I 100% think it reflects a general misogyny in Irish society. I know one of my friends who had a fake account made of her deleted all her social media and started again out of fear of being exploited again, there were some horrible videos of men reacting to her photos.”
She said that the girls featured seem to be from Cork city and its suburbs and although many of them know each other, they are not all in the same social circle. But they are all about the same age, a number of them went to the same school and many of them are now in first-year in UCC.
“My friends who know it happened are completely disturbed for me and for themselves, they feel sick at the idea that there’s people preying on young girls like that without any monitoring on the internet,” she said.
Her friend April said: “When I first saw the accounts my heart dropped I couldn’t believe it. I was in shock. I felt so violated as if someone had taken over my identity and just sexualized me. In this generation you see things like this happen every so often because of the culture we live in and it’s absolutely disgusting.
"It’s horrible to think that someone would actually get enjoyment out of doing something like that. The night after I saw it I became really sad just down in myself. People actually don’t realise how heartbreaking it is for girls when a man does something like that. You start to think, ‘Are they all like that? Do they just care about my body?’”
She said that the accounts took the photos “completely out of context”.
“We posted those pictures for ourselves as a reflection of our lives and we thought we looked nice in them. Our purpose was not to entertain men in the way they portrayed our pictures. We sent those pictures because we felt confident at the time. We shouldn’t have to hide who we are because we’re afraid of men objectifying us.”
April said that her pictures were taken from her Instagram and VSCO, another image editing and sharing app. The pictures were taken when she was 17, 18 and 19: “Four of my friends who I would have known well were also in the pictures but I knew of nearly all the girls who were posted on that account.”
April and two of her her friends contacted the account directly and reported them to Twitter, but April believes that the account holder removed the accounts within minutes themselves.
She received a message from Twitter about one week later saying that the company would remove the account days after they had already been removed.
April believes that Twitter was “quite slow to react”, especially considering that a number of females complained to the company about the accounts.
A spokesperson for Twitter said: “Twitter has zero tolerance for any material that features or promotes child sexual exploitation. We aggressively fight online child sexual abuse and have heavily invested in technology and tools to enforce our policy. Our dedicated teams work to ensure we’re doing everything we can to remove content, facilitate investigations, and protect minors from harm — both on and offline.”
