But as Emily’s story has proven: cyber stalkers have simply switched tactics, taking to sharing their images via Instagram DMs and Facebook Chats from anonymous accounts. At the height of the coronavirus crisis cases actually continued to rise, and respondents of one Glitch survey reported a 27% increase of online abuse during Covid-19. Since then, the problem has only continued: a third of women said they had been subjected to cyber flashing in 2022.
The severity of flashing, both IRL and cyber, should not be underestimated. Many offenders who start committing these non-contact crimes subsequently go on to commit sexual assault and rape – one particularly shocking case is that of Sarah Everard’s murderer Wayne Couzens, who was found to have a history of flashing. In 2015, Couzens was accused of flashing in Kent, but police failed to investigate. In October 2022, he appeared in court on other indecent exposure charges prior to Sarah’s murder.
On these occasions, police failed to adequately investigate the matter and so lost any opportunity to apprehend, convict, punish or rehabilitate Couzens, who was a serving police officer until his recent conviction. Sadly, this doesn’t come as a surprise. Police and law enforcement can be notoriously slack on convicting these types of offenders. Despite the vast majority of women experiencing sexual harassment, including indecent exposure, just 772 cases of flashing offences were prosecuted between April 2019 to April 2020.
Maybe it’s for this reason that women are reticent to report the crimes. It’s traumatic enough without having to experience the system failing you on every possible level. It certainly didn’t cross my mind to report the cyber flashing incident on the train platform that morning. After all, the very nature of internet offences means that they are almost completely untraceable, making any kind of identification even less likely than an in person flashing.
Following an in-person flashing, police at least have the opportunity to increase their presence in the area and, with any luck, it could be captured on CCTV and there might be witnesses who can provide a description of the perpetrator. While none of these would make the victim’s trauma any better, there’s the sliver of hope that future attacks could be prevented by the police. The anonymous nature of cyber flashing, on the other hand, turns every man into the potential perpetrator.
Up until March 2022, there were no laws against cyber flashing in the UK – but as part of the landmark Online Safety Bill, it is finally considered an offence, with a perpetrator facing up to two years in prison for sending unsolicited sexual imagery to someone via AirDrop, social media or otherwise.
However, some have criticised the law and suggested it will still be difficult and distressing for victims to get justice, since they will need to prove the that the intent behind the act was “for the purpose of their own sexual gratification or to cause the victim humiliation, alarm or distress”. This has previously been a loophole in brought cases of revenge porn, for example – since the perpetrators argue that no harm was meant by it.
As Emily says in the trailer for her documentary, this is about more than stopping the sending of unwanted sexual imagery – it’s about stopping the behaviour before it becomes something even more horrifying, like in the tragic case of Sarah Everard. “It’s about catching these people before they do the worst thing,” she says.
Emily Atack: Asking For It? is available on BBC iPlayer now.