ILLUSTRATION FERNANDO SAFONT
In September Paige Mitchell, a lesbian from Stevenage, became the first woman to be found guilty of putting explicit images of her ex on Facebook. This crime, codified in new “revenge porn” legislation, resulted in a suspended six-week sentence, with Mitchell narrowly avoiding a jail sentence following her guilty plea.
Revenge porn carries a hefty two-year sentence if it can be proved that the sharing of private, explicit/sexual materials, either photos or videos of another person, without their consent and with the purpose of causing embarrassment or distress, has taken place. The sharing of such images became illegal in April of this year in response to a rise in the number of incidents reported to the police.