4 days ago
I was 15 when my nude pics were leaked – grown men sent them around at the football club & everyone blamed ME
LIKE many young girls, Jess Davies wanted to impress her school crush and decided to send him an explicit photo of herself.
Little did the 15-year-old know that he would send it around the school and she would become a victim of image abuse.
"That image got bluetoothed around my school, and then it got shared around my hometown, which was a small hometown in Wales, everyone knows everyone," she explained on the Should I Delete That podcast.
Image-based sexual abuse is a criminal offence, it's when someone takes, shares, or threatens to share sexually explicit images or videos of a person without their knowledge or consent, and with the aim of causing them distress or harm.
This can include digitally altered images, also known as 'deepfakes' - something Jess has gone on to lobby the government to include in the Online Harms Safety Bill.
Now 32, Jess has opened up about the trauma it caused and more shockingly, how she was blamed for the abuse.
She revealed that once the photo had circulated in her hometown, it was then shared to grown adult men on the local football team.
Instead of seeing Jess as a victim, whose private photo was shared without her consent, people blamed her.
"Everyone knew my age because it was a small town, and yet, the whole narrative was around how it was my fault," Jess added.
"That I shouldn't have sent it, what kind of girl are you?
"There was never any conversation around why are men in their twenties and thirties passing around a child's image?"
Jess was left as a teenage girl worrying about how to navigate the situation, and she decided she had to laugh it off.
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She revealed that boys in year 7 would run up and ask for a hug as they had seen the image as well.
"I was laughing but secretly, this was humiliating," she said.
In the end, her parents also found out about the image, as her nan was told about it from one of the men on the football team, where the image was being circulated.
Now, as Jess has gotten older, she realises that the way people treated her for the image was not okay and that she was held more accountable than the grown men sharing the image.
It has now led Jess to become an advocate for female rights and sexual abuse.
Her BBC documentary 'Deepfake Porn: Could You Be Next' was used to lobby the UK government to criminalise deepfake porn.
Jess also has a new book, No One Wants To See Your Dick, a guide for surviving the digital age to help us understand and tackle online misogyny and question society's understanding of consent.
