An Obscenity Lawyer Explains Why Teens Are Being 'Sextorted'

A British police force in the northeast of England just announced that a quarter of all cases they've investigated under revenge porn laws involved minors. In some cases, the children were as young as 14. In one case, a 15-year-old girl took a picture of her friend's breasts as she slept at a sleepover and sent the image to others via Snapchat. In another, a teenager blackmailed his 14-year-old girlfriend into sending him explicit images by threatening to tell friends she had performed sex acts. When she sent the pictures, he showed his friends anyway.

Despite this, only two of 25 cases investigated by the police force ended up in front of a judge, demonstrating the limits of revenge porn laws when it comes to protecting victims. Disturbingly, police went on to warn that teenagers should beware of 'sextortion'—where victims are blackmailed into performing sex acts on camera, with the footage used to blackmail them into performing more acts.

Sextortion first hit the news back in 2014, when a case involving a former Miss Teen USA Cassidy Wolf made headlines. Wolf's former high school classmate Jared James Abrahams attempted to coerce her into sending nude images after he hacked into her computer webcam to take photos. It subsequently emerged that Abrahams had hacked a dozen girls to obtain explicit images. It's not just girls who are being affected. In the UK, 17-year-old Daniel Perry committed suicide in 2014 after being duped into an explicit Skype chat.

Myles Jackman is a lawyer specializing in cases involving pornographic and obscene content. In Jackman's view, social media is an ugly facilitator of a human urge that has existed since the beginning of recorded history. "Human societies have always shamed people for their sexuality, so the idea of extorting someone based on past sexual behaviour isn't new. But the technology that enables it simply makes it more current."

In other words, the basic impulse to humiliate and inflict pain upon others by exploiting their sexuality isn't new, but apps and social media make it so much easier. "Nowadays, you don't have to develop your photographs at the store. The fact we have instant messaging systems—so you can take a picture and distribute it within nanoseconds—means that crimes like sextortion will only be on the rise."

Another problem is that the legislation around revenge pornography isn't particularly strong. "Often we're in a grey area legally, because the threat to release explicit images doesn't necessary constitute revenge porn, but may fall under blackmail laws."

Watch: Inside the Torturous War to End Revenge Porn

In the UK, teenagers may actually be falling prey to a legal loophole that governs sexual consent. "The age of sexual consent in the UK is 16, but the age which you can be depicted in sexual poses is 18. So if two 16-year-olds took pictures of themselves naked, they'd be creating child pornography. If they sent the pictures to each other, they'd be distributing child pornography."

While this may seem counterintuitive to many, the fact remains that if you're a British 17-year-old with a naked picture of yourself on your phone, you're in possession of child pornography—a criminal offence which could put you on the Violent and Sex Offender Register, unable to travel to many countries abroad or ever work with children.

Jackman's advice to teens? "Really, this cuts into fundamental stuff about agency, about how people view their bodies, so I wouldn't feel comfortable saying, 'You shouldn't ever take pictures of yourself,' because the law is genuinely twenty years out of date with regards to social values around sexuality and technology."

That said, in a situation involving minors or when non-consensual activity is taking place, Jackman would urge teens to speak to the authorities. "Whenever anything non-consensual happens, you should always tell an adult and go to the police. But the real problem here is that often those making the threats of sextortion are friends, classmates, boyfriends, or girlfriends. Is the victim really going to feel comfortable going to the police? That's what terrifying about this scenario."

The solution? Well, it's not necessarily to just crack down on the social media companies. "We need to start taking responsibility for our own social problems, and understand what's causing people to act in this way. We need to educate, and to have a conversation with our children about consent and sexual shaming. Because simply blaming social media for the problem doesn't make sense.

"Social media is made up of people. Social media corporations didn't make you do this—you did it."