In a new BBC documentary, Emily Atack has shared her experiences with cyber flashing – the unsolicited sending of sexual imagery online. Here, GLAMOUR explores this vile digital trend, and whether the government's Online Safety Bill is doing enough.
It’s 8.55am on a weekday in November 2019 and I’m on my way to work, trudging up the train platform at London Victoria while texting my sister about our plans to meet later on that day.
Out of the blue, a turgid, purple-tinged penis flashes up on my phone: “AirDrop: ✊🍆💦” would like to share a photo”. Mortified, I slam down on the “decline” button and then remember that cyber flashers get off on watching their victim’s reaction. I put on my best poker face and continue texting my sister, but in reality, my heart is pounding and I daren't look up.
Unfortunately, I’m far from the first person to be cyber flashed. In fact, a report by the University of Leicester recorded 33% of women had been cyber flashed and a UN Women report found that 86% among 18-24-year-olds had experienced sexual harassment in a public place, including over a third who had been sent unsolicited explicit images.
And now, actor and comedian Emily Atack has opened up about the vile messages she regularly receives in a new BBC documentary, entitled Asking For It?, in which she details her experiences of online sexual assault and cyber flashing – something that in the past, she blamed herself for. Emily told Stylist that her public image and sex-positive outlook has often made her vulnerable to harassment from men.
She said: “I noticed, particularly in lockdown, that there was a huge rise in the amount of d*ck pics I was being sent. My whole life I’ve kind of struggled with male behaviour towards me, but this was something even more intense. When I’m being sent videos and sexually violent language, I’m being sexually harassed every single day of my life, at home, with my phone in my hands.”
She added: “My physical safety is something I think about every day. I live alone so every bump in the night that happens, I sh*t myself. I have men sending me horrible messages every day of my life and I feel very vulnerable thinking, well, next they’re going to turn up at my front door.”
The main way these images are being sent is through AirDrop – a file sharing feature built into iPhones that allows anyone to flick across photos, videos, voice recordings and other media to any other iPhone in the immediate vicinity. It’s an incredibly useful tool and I use it everyday for work, which is why I had my permissions set to public and the cyber flasher was able to ‘drop’ his ‘dick pic’ onto my screen before I’d even had my morning coffee.
You might have thought that lockdown would have solved the issue of cyber flashing. After all, AirDrop only works with iPhones in the immediate vicinity (the two phones must be less that 30 feet away from each other).
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.
It’s traumatic enough without having to experience the system failing you on every possible level
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.
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