‘I want girls to think before they share nude images’: Teen whose naked photos appeared online goes public to raise awareness

When Shaunna Lane’s best friend suggested she should do a photo shoot to boost her confidence, after much thought, the naive girl, who was a teenager at the time, decided to strip down for a series of arty nude shots.

And she was so thrilled with the photos that she decided to share them with her then boyfriend.

Her confidence was completely destroyed when the pictures were circulated around the world via a revenge porn website.

Rocked by public humiliation, Shauna, from Harlow in Essex, who is now 22, became too scared to leave her home after being targeted by hundreds of internet sex trolls, who inundated her with crude messages and even threatened to rape her.

‘My privacy, my intimacy, my body had been completely violated. The pictures were taken and shared with trust.’ Shauna said. ‘I’ve felt embarrassed and ashamed, but I was wronged and there should be some justice for that.’

Now she is sharing her story and the pictures in question herself as part of her campaign against revenge porn.

She explains: ‘I want to raise awareness about revenge porn – it’s a life-ruining problem that needs to be policed.’

‘My images are out there for everyone to see, you can search and find them. What difference does it make if the images appear in a newspaper or on a news site if they’re already everywhere else?

‘I don’t mind if it makes another girl stop and think before sharing intimate photographs.’

The rise of ‘revenge porn’

In 2011 Henry Moore, 27, is thought to have created the first ever so-called revenge porn site called IsAnyoneUp that featured naked selfless alongside victims Facebook profile shots, visitors to the site knew exactly who they were looking for and how to contact them.

While many women had fallen victim of revengeful exes posting onto the site many claimed their images had been posted as a result of their social media and email being hacked.

Moore, who became known as the most hated man on the internet, profited more then $13,000 a month in advertisement from the site, which he dubbed Nakedbook, before it was shut down by an anti-bullying charity, BullyVille, in 2012.

But the precedence had been set, and soon after anonymous revenge porn pages began to pop up across the internet and social media.

There are few statistics relating to porn revenge cases in Nigeria. However new findings by American-based PewResearch revealed that nine per cent of American mobile phone users had sent a suggestive picture of video, while 20 per cent had received one.

The figures had risen from 2012 – when six per cent of phone users had sent a text which was sexual in nature, also called a sext, and 15 per cent had received one. Only three per cent of people admitted they had forwarded a sext.

Read more