Last week I was contacted by someone, on behalf of a victim, who has been involved in a non-consensual image sharing nightmare that has lasted for 7 years.
To put it succinctly that’s 7 years of finding link, after link, after link, where her privacy and dignity is being constantly invaded. It's difficult to describe to someone, that has not experienced this form of abuse, exactly what this feels like.
It is a form of sexual abuse that the victim has to endure 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and with all the best intentions in the world, it is a practical impossibility for every single image to be removed. As one is taken down, another can pop up elsewhere to replace it.
Everyone must find their own way forward, through an image abuse experience, and I would never be so presumptuous as to steer another person’s decision-making process. I couldn’t talk about my own experience, let alone deal with the images that were created as a result of it, for almost 2 years. By which time the damage had been done, and I knew in my heart that my overall well-being was far more important to me, than spending the rest of my days hunting down image, after image, after image and spending more money than I could afford on legal costs.
Occasionally I might catch someone looking at me in a certain way, and when they do it naturally makes me think “I wonder what they have seen?”, if indeed anything at all. But I would rather move forward with my life, then dwell on a look from a complete and utter stranger – that I will never see again. One of my coping mechanisms is blogging about the subject and trying to make a difference in my own little way.
There are many things I would still like from my future, perhaps even a small family of my own one day…. something that I have been secretly thinking about for many years now. Why would I want for someone to take that opportunity away from me? The face of change and adversity has entered my life, time after time in the past, and in the last week it has done so again. Whilst I would much rather not have to face it, there are few options. I think the same can be said for image abuse, it is a hard and rocky road, which very often feels like it will never end…but one that must be walked, nevertheless.
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