In 2011, nude photos that 19-year-old Emma Holten took for her then boyfriend were stolen and shared on the internet, often with private information also included, such as her address, phone number and link to her Facebook account. When she reported this to the police in Copenhagen, where she lives, she soon realised that they had neither the infrastructure nor the technical expertise to find the perpetrator(s).
They even told her that the images “weren’t so bad”. “I guess this means that I wasn’t engaging in sex or that I wasn’t fully naked but topless,” she recalled.
More than a decade after they were first leaked, Holten still doesn’t know who stole her photos. Even today, the images keep resurfacing on different websites. Holten’s experience led her to become an activist against gendered abuse, and particularly digital image-based abuse, which tends to be tagged with the name ‘revenge porn’.
