This blog post is short and sweet, which makes for a change as regular readers will be well familiar to my ongoing sleep educing monologues!
Friday the 26th February, wasn’t the best of days for me…. for reasons that I won’t go into now. You’ll probably nod off in any respect, wake up in a few days, and wonder where the time went!
But then I logged onto Twitter (I tend to come and go from social media, which I find works for me, especially during the last 12 months) and saw this post from The Revenge Porn Helpline.
Man, oh man, I cannot tell you how much this post means to me. 5 years ago, this might have made a difference to a ‘David’ that was hurting after his own image abuse experience. It’s not very often that you see the #LGBTQ community recognized in this way, or the many complexities/challenges that we face when it comes to image abuse crimes.
What this team achieves in a day is nothing short of miraculous, and there’s very little (if anything) that is technology driven in terms of tracking, tracing and the actual removal of an image….and they accomplish it with seriously tight resources.
That’s because Image Abuse (in the UK) is not recognized as an ‘important’ issue by our current government, it receives little funding, and very little support. Yes, we have an image abuse act, publicly rushed out back in 2015….. probably because a bunch of ministers wanted to get to lunch early and congratulate themselves on a job well done! But let’s face it, technology advances every second of every day and the 2015 act is prehistoric. It’s literally Jurassic, much like the writer of this blog, only a little less dead! At least for the moment, give it time though :o)
I met Sophie Mortimer, the head of The Revenge Porn Helpline, back in 2019. She’s absolutely lovely, and I wouldn’t hesitate to say to reach out to them. I remember feeling so nervous, and unsure, when I spoke about my experiences to an audience back then. Revisiting an upsetting past is never a nice thing, but sometimes you just have to do it, otherwise everything stays the same and conditions never change.
It would be remiss of me, not to acknowledge the background support that I had at the time…especially from a man that is sadly no longer a part of my life. But whose encouragement and support I will never forget, until my dying day.
Apparently, according to my software, it takes 2 minutes to read this. So you still have enough time to boil an egg, do your hair, and many other things!
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