‘Why did she SEND THOSE PHOTOS?
When I was 25, I swapped nudes with my partner on a pretty regular basis. It felt safe. I trusted him. It was fun, flirty and exhilarating.
Why did you leave your drink unattended? Why did you go for a run by yourself? What were you wearing? Why were you out so late? Were you drinking? Why did you stay with an abusive partner?
Fast-forward a few months and our relationship had run its course. But it didn’t end there. A friend of his was scrolling through his phone, came across my nudes in his gallery and forwarded the photos to a WhatsApp group. And the rest is history. Soon, it felt like almost every person I knew had seen me at my most intimate and most exposed.
I got the same reaction from almost everyone. ‘But you’re a smart woman – why did you even take the photographs?’
How to invalidate the trauma of revenge porn with one sentence.
Victim blaming comes in many forms, and is often subtle and unconscious. ‘I think the biggest factor that promotes victim blaming is something called “the just world hypothesis”,’ says Sherry Hamby, a professor of psychology at the University of the South in Tennessee in the US, and founding journal. ‘It’s this idea that people deserve what happens to them. There’s just a really strong need to believe that we all deserve our outcomes and consequences.’
