“Facebook is asking users to send the company their nude photos in an effort to tackle revenge porn,” reported the Guardian the other day. Apparently, this is an “attempt to give some control back to victims of this type of abuse”.

Helpfully, Facebook is also recommending that those who are drowning drink a big glass of water, it’s very empowering. And if your house is on fire, get as much petrol as you can find and pour it everywhere to enhance a sense of self-worth. Should you find yourself surrounded by crocodiles, nothing says “I control my own destiny!” like hacking off your own arm with a Facebook-branded axe and offering your meat to the fangs of flesh-eating lizards with a “Here you go, lads!” and a can-do attitude.

Aaaaaargh.

Beware – beware forever – groups of entirely well-meaning individuals who mistake nifty ideas in a concept meeting for anything at all in touch with reality. No less than the government’s e-safety commissioner outlined the new process to ABC radio. Individuals are encouraged to pre-emptively record the existence of the images on a form with the commission’s website, then send copies of the snaps to themselves on messenger. Once notified by the commissioner’s office, a “community operations analyst” from Facebook will access your personal messenger files and “hash” images to prevent them being uploaded or shared. They will keep the images for “a short time”, shared on a database with Twitter and Google, so no one except the world’s largest online media corporations and the governments of entire countries will possess a record of your most intimate betrayal.

I’m surprised the recommendation doesn’t include CC’ing in both the Vatican and the government of China, just in case there might be anyone left on earth who didn’t have pictorial access to something you find profoundly humiliating. Of course, nothing gets reports of abuse and violation down faster than a structural discouragement to victims that they report abuse.

Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe women who are traumatised by the sharing of their intimate pictures with strangers really will feel empowered sharing their intimate pictures with, um, strangers in order to prevent the sharing of their intimate pictures with strangers. Especially such noble strangers as the selfless public servants who run Facebook.

A New York-based lawyer is quoted by the Guardian as saying she is “delighted that Facebook is trying to solve this problem”.

This level of trust in Facebook from both her and our e-safety commissioner is impressive. As someone who spends their time online, I’m perhaps more cynical. Though I guess maybe Facebook really has changed since the revelations that they took payment in roubles from Russian-funded ads created to sway the American elections. Or the disclosure in the Paradise Papers that two Russian state-owned entities with close ties to Vladimir Putin invested money through Russian-American tech investor Yuri Milner. Or that Facebook have admitted that they host 270m fake accounts and are well-aware of Russian meddling. I mean, that all happened a whole week ago.

And Facebook has an owner rumoured to be considering a run for president of the United States! We all know that when it comes to responsible use of social media, the women of the world have every reason to trust media celebrities running for president. Especially one who built his business by digitising a “hot or not?” game that rated the shaggability of the girls he went to university with. He sure understands image-based abuse. Hand your sexy pictures to him and everyone he knows.

I called an academic researcher working at a revenge porn centre to ask what they thought of the plan. The researcher I spoke to wished to remain anonymous, only because she wanted to be quoted as saying it was “a fucking terrible idea”.

Because maybe – just maybe – it’s more than the images that oblige scrutiny here. It’s the actual douchebags who share them and the platforms that allow them to be shared. And rather than placing our trust in a private corporation to uphold the law, we should go all old-school and convince the police to enforce the numerous laws that already exist on the statutes of every state and territory in Australia that are supposed to protect individuals from stalking, harassment and abuse – in person or online. In my home state of Victoria there are five separate pieces of legislation under which these people can be prosecuted, but to date – and whether it’s through lack of leadership, lax process, ignorance, uncertainty or a culture of unwillingness – the police have not pursued one single case to successful prosecution as a crime. Whether you call it image-based abuse, revenge porn or stalking, these are crimes, and criminals belong in jail.

You shouldn’t need to send naked pictures of yourself to register an abuse. All you should have to do is make a phone call and action should be taken on your behalf.

Personally, I’d be delighted if megasquillion-dollar digital corporations like Facebook actually reinvested their massive profits into employing enough staff to liaise directly with both users and “local law enforcement” to absolve victims of the retraumatising experience of pursuing justice for what’s happened to them and prosecute these individuals themselves.

Or – god help us – the tech giants could make their “hashing” technology available at point of use, so people can have the peace of mind in pictorial conversations with their lovers that their intimacies cannot and will never be betrayed. I’d certainly have my confidence rebuilt in Facebook if they expressed their immense, unprecedented levels of power in acts of service and generosity to the masses who’ve enriched them, rather than waiting around a closed stable door to receive some naked photos of the horse.

Either that, or the platforms must face justice themselves for profiting from crimes, which is what occurs when they host images of abuse. As a victim, it’s really amazing how much more empowering it feels to have someone police laws and prosecute human offenders for you, rather than having to make your own humiliating case as to why you shouldn’t be humiliated.

Until that happens there is no “control” for victims. There is merely a system that violates privacy in the pretence of trying to maintain it.