Why Did She Send Those Photos?

Before you forward the nudie you’ve been sent, think twice – you might well be circulating revenge porn. And if the thought of violating someone’s privacy doesn’t stop you, you could also be slapped with a R300 000 fine – or earn yourself four years behind bars.

- Catherine French

When I was 25, I swapped nudes with my partner on a pretty regular basis. It felt safe. I trusted him. It was fun, flirty and exhilarating.

Fast-forward a few months and our relationship had run its course. But it didn’t end there. A friend of his was scrolling through his phone, came across my nudes in his gallery and forwarded the photos to a WhatsApp group. And the rest is history. Soon, it felt like almost every person I knew had seen me at my most intimate and most exposed.

I got the same reaction from almost everyone. ‘But you’re a smart woman – why did you even take the photographs?’

How to invalidate the trauma of revenge porn with one sentence.

Victim blaming comes in many forms, and is often subtle and unconscious. ‘I think the biggest factor that promotes victim-blaming is something called “the just-world hypothesis”,’ says Sherry Hamby, a professor of psychology at the University of the South in Tennessee in the US, and founding editor of the American Psychological Association’s Psychology of Violence journal. ‘It’s this idea that people deserve what happens to them. There’s just a really strong need to believe that we all deserve our outcomes and consequences.’

By holding victims responsible for their own misfortune, it’s easy to avoid the truth: that something just as unthinkable could happen to you, even if you do everything ‘right’.

BLAMING THE SENDER