Bicycle theft is a common and intractable crime and yet I’ve never heard a police officer come out and say: “If you don’t want to have your bike stolen don’t ride a bike.”

Perhaps that’s because victim blaming is all too often reserved for crimes against women.



At a parliamentary inquiry hearing into revenge porn on Thursday, Australian federal police assistant commissioner Shane Connelly said: “People just have to grow up in terms of what they’re taking and loading on to the computer because the risk is so high.”

He added: “[They say] if you go out in the snow without clothes on you’ll catch a cold – if you go on to the computer without your clothes on, you’ll catch a virus.”

'Grow up' and stop taking naked photos of yourself, police tell revenge porn inquiry Read more

He denied he was victim blaming, saying that “wicked” people would always take advantage of the naive.

Last I checked, Australia didn’t have morality police. But that’s the position that Connelly seems to have taken. Because revenge porn is essentially a crime of theft and an invasion of privacy. Telling people to stop taking photos of themselves if they don’t want to have them bounced around the internet is the equivalent of telling women not to dress slutty if they don’t want to to get “victimised”. Or not to go to parks alone if they don’t want to get killed. Yes – both these gems of advice also came from policemen. Thanks to these great guys who are supposed to be protecting us.

There is no doubt revenge porn is a difficult crime to monitor and police, but that doesn’t mean we should pretend it’s not a crime. Sharing naked photos of somebody without their consent is a crime whether you know them or not, whether that person shared them with you personally at one time, or not. Revenge porn crimes should be treated seriously whether the perpetrator stole the images without the victim’s consent or whether, at one stage, they had free access to them.

The current row between Apple and the FBI illustrates the complex nature of cyber crime and the intersection of our rights to privacy, online security and access to our personal data by the state and private companies. These issues are some of the biggest of our time.

People take naked photos of themselves for all sorts of reasons – a 2014 survey by Cosmopolitan found that 89% of millennial women have taken naked photos of themselves (and only 14% regretted it). Sometimes women and girls who take naked photos of themselves send them to friends or loved ones, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes naked images are taken of people without their knowledge or consent.

Let’s consider some well-known instances of revenge porn. There was the famous case in 2014 when Jennifer Lawrence and 100 other well-known (mostly) female celebrities had naked photos of themselves hacked and shared online.

Then there was the case of Danish journalist Emma Holten, who had her email and Facebook account hacked by strangers and posted online.



There is also the case of Annamarie Chiarini, whose ex-boyfriend auctioned naked photos of her on eBay – photos she’d agreed for him to take “after three months of relentless pressure”.

How would Connelly’s advice have helped these women?



You can hardly accuse Lawrence, or Holten or even Chiarni – a college professor – of being “naive” or compare their actions to running out into the snow without their clothes on for a lark. Following the leak of her photos, Lawrence labelled the hack a “sex crime” and this is how revenge porn crimes should be treated.

The Jennifer Lawrence naked photo response is the end of the 'shamed starlet' | Jessica Valenti Read more

Of course there needs to be more education among girls and boys about the consequences of sharing naked photos of themselves. But there also needs to be education about the consequences of committing the crime of sharing people’s photos without their consent.

This patronising assumption that it’s only stupid girls who are victims of revenge porn shows a stunning lack of understanding of the issues. It is not the job of the federal police to tell people how they should conduct themselves in the privacy of their own homes or in their personal relationships. Instead of taking his cues from other nations’ morality police, perhaps Connelly could start looking at what countries such as England, Wales and Canada have done to legislate against revenge porn.

Just as I trust my personal belongings locked up inside my home are protected by the laws of the nation, so my personal files on my computer secured to the best of my knowledge should also be protected by law.

In finding solutions to the problem of revenge porn, we might also find solutions to many other cyber crimes. But that will only happen if we stop blaming women for being alive and start treating crimes against them as the serious issues that they are.