Unsplash/ Andrew Neel

The way we frame this heinous action is victim-blaming at its worst.

For the longest time I felt like it was my fault. My fault for letting this man form a manipulative relationship with me, my fault for letting him groom me since I was 14 years old, my fault for not realizing he was just using me, my fault for being so lonely that I kept in contact with him for so long, my fault for needing attention.

And of course, my fault for taking the photos.

I found out I was a victim of what’s commonly called “revenge porn” in 2015, when a friend informed me that someone had been using my photos for a fetish Twitter account that shared links of fake profiles with my face and body on them. The account also actively encouraged people to share my images and make up horrific stories about them.

Through tracing the IP addresses of some of the images, we discovered they were posted by a man I’d been in a sometimes flirtatious off-and-on friendship with since I was a teen, who I was never physical with and had only met once.

At that point, the law for “revenge porn” in the UK had only been around for four months. It covers the sharing of images showing people engaged in sexual activity or depicted in a sexual way or with their genitals exposed, with those convicted facing a maximum sentence of two years in prison.

Victims and others are able to report offences to the police to investigate, which I promptly did. But when a case officer came to see me after I reported this violation, and I explained to her in detail what had happened, her response stunned me.

“Well I guess you’ve learned your lesson now then.”

She treated my case as possession and distribution of underage images, believing that this couldn’t legally be “revenge porn” because I was never technically in a relationship with the man who did this to me.

After that initial visit, I sat on the sofa in a state, crying profusely and fearing for my safety, convinced I deserved to die. If the police didn’t see me as a victim, then who would?

It turned out, the answer was very few.

After sharing my story on websites like Elite Daily and Huffington Post, the onslaught of negative comments I received forced me to spend hours in bed, unable to get up. Many people agreed that it was my fault, and that if I hadn’t taken the photos in the first place, this never would’ve happened.

When my colleagues found out, they very quickly went from not understanding and not really caring to cracking blithe jokes. My manager even said that “it was as if she worked with a porn star now.” I quit that job a few months later, when my depression intensified.

My experience as a victim destroyed my life. It triggered severe depression, anxiety, and social anxiety. I no longer felt worthy of anything — friends, family, love, or life. I was suicidal.

My pain was rooted in the humiliation and degradation of the act itself, of course. But it also stemmed from feeling like I was at fault for my own victimhood. And so much of that, I think, has to do with the way my experience was framed.

What the courts and media call “revenge porn” is defined as “the sharing and publicizing of sexual images with the intention to embarrass.”

The dictionary’s definition of the word “revenge” is “the action of hurting or harming someone in return for an injury or wrong suffered at their hands.”

To contextualize this issue in terms of “revenge” is, plain and simple, to resort to victim-blaming. It says it right in the first word: This crime is something that somebody is doing in return for being wronged. The perpetrator, it’s implied, has cause to retaliate.

This framework plays into broader efforts to blame women for the violent actions of men. The refrain of she asked for it fuels those who dismiss women who are raped (her skirt was too short, she flirted too much, she should never have been in that situation), domestically abused (she was too obstinate, she should’ve left him), and on and on. This ideology can most recently be seen powering the “incel” movement, which suggests women deserve to be hurt for not offering sex to any man who wants it.

Like all those women unfairly blamed, I did nothing to ask for what happened to me. Nor did my experience stem from revenge. The story of my perpetrator was, instead, a familiar one: A despicable man did something despicable to me because he thought he could get away with it.

There is, moreover, nothing I possibly could’ve done to warrant his response. Even if there is a messy break-up, a scorned ex-lover, pain, hurt, anger, jealousy — that does not give anybody the right to retaliate via degradation, just as no one should ever have the right to resort to any violent act. (If somebody was to commit a murder because they felt betrayed by that person, would we call it a “revenge murder”? Should there be “revenge assaults”?)

Instead of acting like this act is some sort of tit-for-tat situation between attacker and victim, I ask that we call this crime what it is: image-based sexual abuse. Maybe that way more victims will come forward when this has happened to them, rather than feel like it’s their fault, and that they are too at blame to report it.

Since sharing my story, many women (and a small number of men) have contacted me. Many have discussed how they, too, have been blackmailed by exes regarding intimate photos of themselves — some even felt unable to leave their current partner because their partners had threatened to share photos or videos if they left them.

I’ve given them as much advice as I can give, sending them helpful links to supportive websites like the Revenge Porn Helpline and Victim Support, and tried to lend an ear.

Most have expressed feeling isolated, believing they couldn’t tell their family or friends because it was embarrassing and shameful and their fault, fearing that others would judge them.

But it is not their fault, and it was not mine.

We are not the recipients of revenge porn. We are the victims of image-based sexual abuse. It’s time we be treated as such.