The CryingSHAME OF

Image-Based Abuse

“I want the photos to go away.”

It was a phone call I received one balmy Sunday afternoon a few years ago from Neeta (not her real name), a woman whose nude and sexually explicit photos were posted on the internet without her consent. Her erstwhile husband had coerced her into letting him shoot her intimate images over the years that they were married. Sometime after they divorced, the images appeared online. A mutual acquaintance had told her I might be able to help her find a recourse. 

The images had been in circulation on the internet for at least a year. Neeta was articulate, composed and spoke fluently. The range of ramifications on her were among a laundry list faced by most victim-survivors of image-based sexual abuse (IBSA) or what is commonly known by the misnomer “revenge porn” – acts of capturing, publishing or distributing (or threatening to do so) sexually explicit, nude or partially nude images or videos without the consent of one or more persons in the frame. She said she fled to another city and changed careers. Her new social circles and coworkers eventually found the images. Every second person who knew her was aware of them. There was relentless judgement, victim-blaming, humiliation and even an instance of a male colleague gleefully showing her the photos on his phone at their workplace. A matter of respite was that her family was supportive, perhaps because she had been in an arranged marriage with the person who shot the images and was suspected to have either inadvertently exposed them or intentionally distributed them. Unmarried women and girls are often told they brought it upon themselves by entering a relationship outside marriage, allowing their partners to shoot intimate images, or sending them such images.

Neeta had received a strong recommendation from our mutual acquaintance. Nevertheless, she searched my name online and contemplated for weeks before contacting me. Incidents of IBSA and their ramifications are traumatising; victim-survivors have apprehensions about trusting anyone to help them without aggravating their distress. She spoke of scrubbing the images and the accompanying stigma off the Internet and her life. I gave her the lay of the land, explained the processes of redressal, and suggested that she be prepared for the journey to be protracted, expensive, frustrating and re-traumatising. Justice, I warned, may be elusive.

IBSA content goes by various names in India — hidden cam porn, revenge porn, sex scandal, homemade video, leaked photos/ videos, sex CD, MMS scandal or MMS. The last two are a reference to the Multimedia Messaging Service format in which IBSA content majorly proliferated over mobile phones in the early 2000s, and CD or compact disc was another mode of distribution in the 2000s. IBSA is illegal in theory, but not perceived as a serious sexual crime. It is tacitly accepted as a reality of everyday life, so commonplace that over the years it has constituted a plot point of some works of cinema.

“I feel like a snake that has been almost stoned to death. And they continue to throw stones at it just to see if it is dead.” 

“I know I will never be free of this. They will never let me be happy, they will never let me forget. If I show the slightest bit of recovering from this ordeal, they will make sure they rake the issue up again and break my spirit.”

These are the words of two out of an undetermined number of women who were allegedly raped, sexually assaulted and abused by Prajwal Revanna, an erstwhile Member of Parliament from Hassan in Karnataka. About 3,000 videos shot over a few years by Revanna, presumably as a weapon to control and silence the victims, surfaced in April 2024. The two women refer to what is arguably the most chilling aspect of IBSA: the victimisation and denial of dignity never stop.

Some flee their homes, change their identities, careers and lifestyles. Some consider suicide. The activists in the Hassan district who supported the victim-survivors said they found the phones of the women and their families switched off, their homes locked, and their whereabouts unknown. In 2010, in what came to be publicly known as the Karavali MMS scandal , a student in Karavali filed a police complaint against her former boyfriend because he posted their intimate images and videos online. A few months later, a prospective employer conducted an antecedent check on her, found the police report, and rescinded the job offer while commenting on her “calibre” and “conduct”. In another incident, a manipulated, nude video of a homemaker in Kerala was posted on a WhatsApp group of the employees of a shop run by her husband. Despite her claim that she was innocent, her husband evicted her from their home, served her a divorce notice, and cut off her access to their children. A forensic investigation later revealed that the video was manipulated. Research conducted by various scholars in the past decade as well as the work of activists and advocates against gender-based violence shows that the harms of IBSA for victim-survivors are constant, profound, often life-long, and affect all aspects of their lives. 

Victims-survivors are fired from their jobs, lose their clientele and their professional reputations, causing financial ruin. They may get evicted from their homes, discriminated against while searching for homes to buy or rent, expelled from school, or put in a position where they are forced to drop out. IBSA also brings with it social ostracism, public humiliation, victim-blaming, abandonment by friends, family or partners, jeopardised relationships, and trust issues in future relationships. There is little recompense for the rupture of the lives of victim-survivors. In some parts, it leads to honour killing — the killing of a family member who is believed to have brought shame to the family. It is done in order to “redeem” the family’s “honour” as viewed by society.


Investigative journalist Rana Ayyub, widely lauded for her political coverage, became a target of a campaign in 2018 to discredit her. A sexually explicit deepfake video of her, that is, a pornographic video that was manipulated to show her in it, was circulated online. The attackers posted her mobile phone number on Twitter along with a screenshot of the video, an act of exposing real-life identities and personal information known as doxxing. The tweet stated that she was “available”.

She recounts, “People started sending me WhatsApp messages asking me for my rates for sex. I was sent to the hospital with heart palpitations and anxiety, the doctor gave me medicine. But I was vomiting, my blood pressure shot up, my body had reacted so violently to the stress.”

IBSA can spiral into further harassment, abuse and violence, both online or offline. It increases the risk of doxxing, extortion (for money or silence), bullying, stalking, physical or sexual violence, and physical, verbal or sexual abuse. 

After the videos of Prajwal Revanna’s alleged acts were released on the internet, the identities of the victim-survivors were revealed by social media users, also an act of doxxing. This reportedly led to the harassment of victim-survivors via social media and texts on the phone, and humiliating interactions offline. The News Minute reported, “People have identified the women, met their relatives and shown them circulated material, viciously ensuring that even those who have not seen the videos watch them. Malice is constantly directed at them in the garb of concern. “Oh, are you alive? Someone told me you had tried to kill yourself. Have you seen the pictures? It is you, isn’t it?” These are the queries posed to the women.”

Many victims censor themselves online and offline and avoid the use of social media or the internet in general. Ayyub describes the immediate and long-term effects of her experience, “From the day the video was published, I have not been the same person. I used to be very opinionated, now I’m much more cautious about what I post online. I’ve self-censored quite a bit out of necessity. Now I don’t post anything on Facebook. I’m constantly thinking what if someone does something to me again. I’m someone who is very outspoken so to go from that to this person has been a big change.”

Studies show that mental health issues experienced by victim-survivors of online IBSA mirror those caused by offline sexual abuse. Post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts and other mental health effects are common among victim-survivors, especially those always living in anticipation of being re-victimised. The incident and its aftermath run in undercurrents, even in safe situations.

IBSA also unmasks the identities of anybody who is deemed as straying from the straight and narrow. For example, queer persons, or practitioners of ethical non-monogamy or BDSM, who choose to keep their sexual preferences and identities private, are made vulnerable to more stigma, judgement, harassment and discrimination.

The Cyber Civil Rights Initiative in the US surveyed 1,606 responses from victim-survivors of IBSA in 2014, which show largely the same gamut of ramifications on them. No statistical study or survey that documents the impacts on victim-survivors in India was found at the time of writing. So, I created this random sample of about 50 news reports of IBSA incidents in different parts of the country published since 2013. It shows that suicide or attempted suicide by victims is the most frequent impact. However, this may be because of the limitations of the sample. Fifty reports do not capture the complete picture of this rampant issue. It may also be an indicator of two things. One, the news media chose to report the impact of IBSA mostly when it led to suicide and not when there were comparatively less severe consequences. Two, it is challenging to report the adverse experiences of victims-survivors, so they are under-reported. The lack of robust data renders the problem invisible and underscores the urgent need for research on IBSA’s impact in India. This will help us understand the true scope of the problem and develop effective support systems for victim-survivors.

Search engines, social networking sites, free email and other commonly used services on the internet track their users to collect, store and commodify their data, a phenomenon known as surveillance capitalism. As a result of the pervasiveness of this surveillance, it is not uncommon for victim-survivors who change their identities to discover their new identities linked with IBSA content online. In an article entitled “From Non-Consensual Pornography to Image- based Sexual Abuse: Charting the Course of a Problem with Many Names”, researcher and digital rights advocate Sophie Maddocks writes, “Maintaining a ‘good’ online identity helps users to do almost anything – from ordering a taxi to entering another country… The assumed truthfulness of visual information, combined with sexist double standards towards women, makes it especially difficult for female victims to rebuild ‘good’ online identities after their intimate photos have been leaked… If they do stay online, the ‘real name’ policies of social networking sites further expose and endanger victims. Even after they have legally changed their names, many are hunted down by cybermobs. On the internet, intimate image abuse has become a form of disempowerment that victims cannot easily defy.”

“Please I need her nude pics and vids” read the title of a thread on a popular adult forum in India. The thread is in the “Requests” section where members post IBSA content, raise requests for it, and attempt to doxx the women in it. A pseudonymous user started the thread by posting a photo of a beaming woman dressed in a turquoise and silver saree, “I know her, pls share her images & nudes if you have. I’ll reward you.”

“Who is she?”, another user asked. 
 
“Her videos came 4 years ago. She was a professor.” 

The thread ended with another user providing a link to a Twitter video, posted on an account that stated that it solely posts “18+ adult” content. The video showed the same woman in a sexual act with a man in a dimly lit room. It also carried the watermark of a large, international network of pornographic websites, indicating that it was posted on one or more of its sites.

The thread on the forum garnered as many as 45,000 views in nearly 9 months of its existence. Two replies posted on Twitter revealed that she was a lecturer at a college in a certain town in Tamil Nadu. One of the replies also identified her by name. The Twitter account, now suspended, had a significant following of around 18,000.

The most-viewed thread on the forum at that time, titled “Desi Girls Leaked Photos Collection”, containing thousands of photos of women raked in more than 5 million views in less than 5 days. The women are clothed, nude or partially nude. Many photos are sexually explicit. In South Asia, the terms “collection” or “album“, and elsewhere terms such as “pack“, are used to describe the pooling of images and videos, often accompanied by identifying information such as names, addresses, schools, or workplaces. Collections are often sold for a small fee, either directly to the buyer or uploaded to private groups or channels on messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram, where users pay to access them. Groups of users work in tandem on forums, messaging boards etc. to find and collect these images, videos and personal information, primarily targeting women and girls. Such threads are full of users encouraging, praising and thanking each other for contributing this content. This participation earns them social validation in the community and increases their ‘reps’ (reputation points) displayed on the forum. The threads often contain graphic descriptions of sexual acts users fantasise about performing on the women and girls depicted. Some descriptions are also violent. In essence, all the users of the forum are both distributors and consumers of IBSA content.

In January of this year, deepfake images depicting American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift in sexually explicit scenarios were widely circulated on social media. A research firm traced the images to a specific community on the message board 4chan, which is known for its controversial content. Community members had generated the images during a ‘game’ in which they used freely available image generation tools to create obscene and even violent deepfakes targeting female public figures.

A BBC investigation in 2022 uncovered a thriving marketplace on Reddit where hundreds of pseudonymous users traded thousands of non-consensual sexually explicit images and videos of women for profit. They posted degrading comments, sought out and shared victims’ personal information, and issued them threats of rape or extortive demands for sex or more sexual imagery. The scale of such activities is staggering. As Prof Clare McGlynn, an internationally recognised expert on the legal regulation of pornography, sexual violence and online abuse puts it, 

The platforms Reddit, Discord, Meta (previously Facebook), X (previously Twitter), Telegram, Instagram, Github, LinkedIn, Spotify, Snapchat and Kik, and others have been named over the years in the Dirty Dozen List. The list is an annual campaign by The National Centre of Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) in the United States “calling out twelve mainstream entities for facilitating, enabling, and even profiting from sexual abuse and exploitation.” IBSA content is distributed on social networking sites, forums, messaging boards, instant messaging apps and content aggregators, all of which are large-scale, hyper-networked platforms that amplify the content that users’ connections engage with. Many of these entities prohibit “non-consensual intimate images” (NCII), and offer removal mechanisms. (See here and here.) However, enforcement is often lax and takedowns slow.

Pornographic websites are another critical link in the downstream distribution chain. Some sites intermingle non-consensual content with pornography produced with consent. Some exclusively host IBSA content, sometimes accompanied by victims’ identifying details. A particularly insidious subset of these websites, called extortion websites, extorts money from victims in return for content removal. To maximise their content supply, some sites reward user submissions. Others do not source their own content. They indiscriminately scrape (that is, automatically extract large amounts of content from) other websites or mirror (that is, make a complete copy of) other websites that host IBSA content. Almost none of them pauses to verify the age or consent of the persons in the content, despite often claiming otherwise in their terms of service. 

All the entities in the downstream distribution chain either host the content themselves (for example, pornographic websites) or direct their viewers to other services (for example, Telegram channels that link to cloud-storage such as Terabox and Momerybox). These services that host IBSA content include peer-to-peer file distribution, cloud-storage, file-sharing and transfer, or image/ video-sharing services. Some of these are large hubs of IBSA and other illegal content such as child sexual abuse material. To monetise the hosted content, these entities display advertisements, charge subscription fees, or both. Additionally, cloud storage and image/video hosting sites may pay them based on the number of views amassed, called a pay-per-view model. The apparent linkages between some of these services and the sale of IBSA content will be explored in greater detail in a later part of this series.

The dark web, another point in the downstream distribution chain, hosts extortion and defamation websites, deepfake porn websites, web camera footage showing sextortion, dumps of sexually explicit images and videos that are extracted from hacked email accounts, social media accounts, webcam footage, and more. The dark web is a hidden part of the internet accessible only through a special browser.

IBSA content distribution networks are highly resilient. If one source of distribution gets shut down, another one is set up with only a little effort or cost. The networked effects of these distribution channels ensure that the new outlet becomes quickly and easily available and that IBSA content is constantly fed back into its supply chain. Channels distributing IBSA content on Telegram, Discord, WhatsApp, among others, urge their members to join back-up channels in case the original channel is removed. 

Even after IBSA content is removed from its primary sources, it persists in a variety of online archives and web caches of search engines, until the cache updates itself and the archive receives a request to remove it.

Offline distribution of IBSA content involves a complex network of individuals and businesses. Technicians who repair mobile phones and dealers of discarded or second-hand devices play a central role, extracting IBSA content from the devices they handle. They either use the content for extortion or sell it to another link in the chain, say, extortion gangs. Other kinds of dealers download IBSA content and distribute it offline through sideloading it on mobile phones and physical media such as memory cards and USB drives, for a fee. Videos of rape and sexual assault are also sold and bought offline. The offline market facilitates trust-based transactions within closed networks of buyers and sellers, much like the illegal drug trade, enabling the trade of IBSA content for profit or personal gratification. Rape videos eventually reach the internet, as demonstrated by the Shame The Rapist campaign launched in 2015 by activist and survivor Sunitha Krishnan. Individuals driven by vendetta or a desire to share such material with their friends for ‘fun’ also contribute to the offline distribution chain.

Public discourse often reduces IBSA to a tale of morality and propriety centred on the actions and choices of the victim-survivor. In this framing, the victim is depicted as immoral, gullible or negligent and the perpetrator as the ex-partner who leaked nude photos because of being ‘instigated’, ‘provoked’ or ‘upset’. In reality, IBSA is a flourishing criminal enterprise driven by profit and stigma foisted on the victim-survivors, perpetuated by a vast network of organisations and individuals.

Charlotte Laws, whose daughter Kayla’s topless photo was posted on the website IsAnyoneUp.com, spent two years in a bid to bring to justice the website’s owner Hunter Moore. The sole purpose of IsAnyoneUp.com was to non-consensually post nude and sexually explicit photos with the victims’ social media profiles. The website profited by displaying pornographic advertisements and selling merchandise. Moore, who called himself a “professional life ruiner” and the “king of revenge porn”, was arrested in 2014 as a result of Laws’ efforts and a lengthy FBI investigation. The website was shut down.

The previously-mentioned young woman ‘A’ says that her former boyfriend made repeated threats over a few months to post her intimate images online if she did not reinstate their relationship. Her mother noticed a marked change in her behaviour, that she “was not being herself”. When she confided in her mother, her parents were upset with her. However, they ultimately supported A, intervened and made her ex back off. This case, alongside those of Neeta and Kayla show that victims survive and cope far better on being accepted as the victim in the situation by their loved ones as opposed to being blamed for bringing the incident onto themselves. They also require immediate and ongoing emotional, psychological and moral support when an incident happens or is threatened (See endnote 2).

Shame is a means of social control and the governance of social behaviour. In a shame-based culture, a woman’s sexual conduct is inextricably linked to a family’s and community’s honour. That makes it challenging for even supportive families to shield victim-survivors from societal backlash, and the families that do support them suffer some of the same harms as victim-survivors. 

IBSA is a pervasive global phenomenon that upends the lives of victim-survivors and robs them of their dignity. The methods of its perpetration have remarkable similarities across cultures and regions in the world. However, India presents a particularly challenging environment in terms of preventing and remedying IBSA. Identity theft is committed by criminals who cycle through numerous phone numbers, physical addresses, bank accounts and forged government-issued IDs. Internet tariffs, smartphones, and equipment such as tiny wireless spy cameras are affordable, and can be easily purchased in grey markets without leaving a paper trail. Culturally, privacy is an alien concept. Nosy neighbours and their invasive activities are commonplace. So are community diktats that curb individual freedoms and personal choice even within private spaces and deeply intimate interactions, preventing individuals from taking steps to protect themselves from their private images being shot or exposed. Someone who demands and values privacy is assumed to have something to hide, and therefore, up to no good. The Supreme Court of India in the Puttaswamy judgement (2017) recognised privacy as a fundamental and inalienable right while the Central Government, oddly for a democracy, opposed it. Most democratic governments would dither to take a stand in a court of law that its citizens do not have a certain fundamental right even though they may lay “reasonable restrictions” and curb their rights. In a society where personal privacy is often equated with suspicion, victim-survivors face additional hurdles in reporting crimes and seeking justice. 

While there have been incidents of elected representatives watching pornography in the legislative assembly, the Indian government blocked hundreds of pornographic websites over the years, including many that display consensual pornography or offer sexual services. It also blocked pornographic comics featuring Savita Bhabhi, an entirely fictional character. In March 2024, it blocked 18 online streaming services that displayed professionally produced adult entertainment for their “obscene and pornographic content.” However, numerous websites freely displaying IBSA content are not on the block lists. Blocking them from being accessed in India still leaves them accessible in other parts of the world, and even in India via circumvention measures such as virtual private networks (VPNs). A more comprehensive approach, including the shutdown of channels and websites hosting IBSA content and the prosecution of their operators, is necessary to effectively combat this issue.

Like all sexual abuse and violence, IBSA is about power and control. Its currency is stigma. The dual, patriarchal notions of honour and shame ensure that IBSA victim-survivors are socially punished based on morality and propriety, and the perpetrators are not. Researcher and social entrepreneur Kalpana Vishwanath wrote in “Shame and control: sexuality and power in feminist discourse in India” in 1997, “…though women’s bodies define their identity within the discourses of shame and purity, we don’t know how this structures their lives other than in terms of male and family honour. Women’s bodies and sexuality are circumscribed within these discourses… This idea of shame is located within the body, within how the female/feminine is viewed within Indian culture—as simultaneously impure and dangerous.” A shame-based culture is what commodifies the non-consensual images of someone in the mundane act of taking a shower or the natural act of having sex. The real crying shame is the normalisation of dehumanising acts such as IBSA, rampant and lucrative enough to form the trading commodity of a flourishing, underground industry.

1. Pornographic websites, message boards, cloud-storage sites, identifiers of social media profiles and pages, and other services that host IBSA content have not been named or hyperlinked in this article in order to avoid providing access to harmful content and disseminating it. In general, we have taken due care to not include URLs or direct references to harmful or potentially harmful content.

2. Source: Luisa Ortiz Pérez, Ph.D, Co-founder of the Vita Activá helpline, excerpt from the transcript of a session at Rightscon 2023: https://zenodo.org/records/13378310 . Redacted and edited for brevity.

“People will come and tell us, “I just discovered that my intimate images or my intimate content or part of my intimate texts have been released… without my consent.” And the first thing that happens is that people are destroyed. So 99% of the work that we do is de-escalate.

It is super important to understand that when a person is experiencing that particular level of aggression, the body is behaving in a similar way as if the aggression was happening physically… The release of adrenaline and cortisol is equivalent to the one that would happen if somebody is confronting you in an aggressive manner.

The body goes into fight or flight mode. Everybody talks about this response mode, which is the simplification of when somebody is causing me harm. I would either open the door and run or confront them and fight with a troll. What people don’t talk about is the third possibility, which is the most advanced level of reaction to fear, which is inaction or passivity, most commonly known as freeze. When the body goes limp, when one goes completely on survival mode, because your body is taking all of the energy that it has to contain and to protect your heart and probably to protect your basic functions.

The body is thinking that you have a lion in front of you and the lion is gonna come and take a bite at your body. Most of the people that come to Vita Activa are in that mode.

It is almost impossible to operate a keyboard when you’re in that particular mode because of the level of adrenaline… Somebody gets a hold of your password… [or] of your images. Somehow, you don’t know where your phone is. And just to be able to type your password or your email address on a keyboard is almost impossible because your motor skills are reduced by stress.

Your reaction skills and your reasoning skills are reduced because your body is in survival mode. That is a point where it’s super important for you to receive not only empathic but also very care- and trauma-aware support to walk you out of that particular mode and into one where you can make decisions independently.

However, and this is what we call the seven-minute gap, in that seven minutes is the moment when you either call the police or you either call a friend or you wanna change your password and you just start operating in a space where you really are not 100% in command or your abilities.

De-escalating, bringing the person back to where they can actually decide, understand and comprehend what is happening is essential… Those that don’t receive that support and, for instance, are confronted by a lawyer [or] an engineer, [or] by a partner who is blaming them, or by a person who is harming them. Those people are the ones who actually will come out with very long-lasting effects.”

3. This article does not use the term “blackmail” because of its racist connotations. The term “extortion” has been included instead, sometimes along with the term “intimidation”. In addition, the term “pornographic deepfake” may be considered harmful like the term “revenge porn” for some of the same reasons. This article uses the term “sexually explicit deepfake” instead. 

4. The series of articles is focussed on women and gender-diverse victim-survivors and does not cover sextortion involving cis-gender men as targets.