The War Against Revenge Porn

You would think that everyone would side with Carrie Goldberg on this issue. A victim of revenge porn and a lawyer, she has been fighting a lonely fight against cyber crimes, including cyber stalking and revenge porn.

Clearly, she and many other women are victims of such defamatory assaults. If they were children, they abusers could be prosecuted more easily. And yet, it was not until this year that New York State could manage to pass a law outlawing revenge porn. 

Think about it, one of America’s most liberal states, where just about everyone is a feminist, allowed these assaults on women to go on, unmolested. You would think that this would be a leading feminist issue. Along with stalking and other forms of psychological terrorism. And yet, while some women do militate for more stringent laws, for the most part the issue feels like a second thought.

This is so because feminism has gone all in on abortion rights. To the point that it has made abortion its signature issue. To that it has now added workplace sexual harassment… via the #MeToo movement. But, cyberstalking and revenge porn… these seem to be of secondary concern.

Several years ago I was watching a television show on Investigation Discovery channel. The story involved a young opera singer, just out of school, who was stalked, harassed and abused. A man had stalked and threatened her family and friends. When an opera company hired her to sing, the stalker would call in bomb threats. 

Anyway, the local constabulary declared itself to be powerless. By the law’s lights, he had not done anything, and besides they did not know where he was. In time, she hired a private detective-- or perhaps it was a government police agency-- and they managed to track down her stalker. He was living free in Singapore. So they notified the authorities in Singapore. 

Apparently, the Singapore legal system takes a very negative view of men who cyberstalk women. They promptly arrested and tried the man… and sentenced him to several years of imprisonment.

The comparison is striking. It would be good if movement feminists could take up this cause and work with Carrie Goldberg… who, seems today to be an army of one.

Anyway, the New York times reports on what happened to her. After breaking up with a man she met on OK Cupid, the started his campaign to punish her for rejecting him:

Four months in she ended the love affair, and he launched a grotesque inversion of it, bombarding her with texts, emails and phone calls, sending mendacious messages to everyone she knew on Facebook, even filing a fake police report that landed her in jail. Goldberg moved apartments, spent more than $30,000 in legal fees and lost the respect of her boss and co-workers. However, it was his threat to distribute naked photos of Goldberg, including a sexually graphic video he’d filmed without her knowledge, that caused her the most distress, not least because there was no way the law could stop him. Back then, the dissemination of nonconsensual pornography — the preferred term among activists for what’s often referred to as “revenge porn” — was legal in New York State, and it remained so until earlier this year.

Think of this, Roe v. Wade has been the law for nearly fifty years. Obviously, cyber crimes are of more recent vintage. Still, it was not until last year that the movement to end them started taking root:

Such experiences are alarmingly common. In 2017 the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit organization formed in 2013 to fight online abuse, found that more than 10 percent of social media users are victims of revenge porn, with women twice as likely to be targeted as men. These statistics aren’t an enormous surprise given that many people these days meet their romantic partners online — 39 percent of heterosexual couples and 65 percent of same-sex couples, according to a recent study by sociologists at Stanford University and the University of New Mexico — and go on to conduct a great deal of intimacy by way of smartphone and computer, whether sexting or video-chatting. What is most worrisome, Goldberg makes clear, is that until our legal system catches up with these new realities, our culture’s unchecked reliance on communications technologies, combined with the ever-collapsing distinction between so-called “real life” and “what happens online,” will remain a paradise for men (and they are mostly men) who traffic in the nonconsensual distribution of sexual imagery, decimating the lives of adults and, increasingly, teenagers and children.

And yes, if I could offer any advice, I would recommend that people stop sending pictures of their genitalia over the internet, to anyone at any time. And yet, the fact that someone has sent such a picture does not mean that the recipient should have the right to distribute it to the world at large. 

Goldberg herself took up the cause and applied her own legal talents to it:

In 2014, with little more than the resolve to become “the lawyer I’d needed,” Goldberg quit her job at the Vera Institute of Justice, rented a tiny, windowless office in a shared work space in Dumbo and hung a shingle as a victims’ rights attorney specializing in sexual privacy. In the five years since, her firm — now 13 people strong — has removed more than 30,000 nonconsensual images and videos from the internet, jailed more than a dozen offenders, and successfully sued the New York City Department of Education on behalf of a teenage girl who was gang-raped by classmates in her school’s stairwell and then suspended for lying. Goldberg also helped craft a dozen states’ revenge-porn laws and promote the first federal bill aimed at protecting victims of revenge porn. 

Among the problems is something called the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which absolved internet providers of responsibility for user-posted content. Evidently, the law will need to be changed. Free speech does not allow defamation, slander or libel. It should not permit revenge porn or cyber stalking:

Goldberg reminds us that “the internet was a very different place” in 1996, when the Communications Decency Act was signed, with a small provision called Section 230 declaring that interactive computer services were not publishers and therefore weren’t liable for user-posted content: “There was no Google, Reddit, YouTube or Twitter. Mark Zuckerberg was in middle school, and Amazon was an exciting new website that only sold books.” She believes that the “free speech purists and tech heads” who claim the law enables the internet as we know it today are missing the forest for the trees. Section 230, she writes, “is the No. 1 reason the internet is a safe space for peddlers of fake news, graphic death threats, conspiracy theories, Russian propaganda, racist slurs, Nazi hate speech, anti-L.G.B.T.Q. vitriol, vivid promotions of violence against women, instructions for how to make your own bomb and phony dating profiles offering sex in someone else’s name,” which is to say it’s the “enabler of every … troll, psycho and perv on the internet.”