> BUT THAT LEFT another question. What if the case did go to trial? Even if she could convince a jury—which would mean explaining the complexities of how identity is both hidden and revealed on the internet—could she get them to care? Cyberharassment is still an unappreciated crime. Gary Ernsdorff, a prosecutor in King County, where the Allens live, said that people often don’t think it’s that big a deal—it’s just online, after all. Or they blame victims for sharing intimate images in the first place. What, Van Engelen wondered, would a jury make of the Allens’ saga? Would they think Steven had gone too far in exposing the affair? Would they blame Courtney for the videos? Though Van Engelen saw the Allens as victims, she realized a jury might not.
> Many people assume that cyberharassment is easy to avoid: They believe that if victims hadn’t sent a naked photo, then that person would have nothing to worry about. But experts say this assumption is essentially a comforting fiction in a world in which we’re all potential victims. A 2016 survey found that one in every 25 Americans online—roughly 10 million people—had either had explicit images of themselves shared online against their will or had been threatened with such sharing. For women younger than 30, it was one in 10. The same survey found that, photos or no, 47 percent of Americans who used the internet had been victims of online harassment of some kind.
No, those are not the conclusions to draw from this article.
You might start with:
- do not send information you do not wish to be made public to others
- online harassment can have devastating consequences
- authorities are prone to respond to bogus information multiple times even though it should be clear to them who the victims are
- there is no effective way to stop such harassment in a timely manner
On the plus side, it could have been worse, fortunately no SWATting or such happened, but it easily could have.
It’s a nobrainer about images but I for one could not stay sane if i had to explain to every new employer that there is overhead in hiring me in the form of violent emails from a stalker.
This isn’t a shruggie and be done with it story.
I'd call this a fundamental rule of online interaction.