Welsh women have described feeling violated after finding their photographs being shared and requested by men on internet chatrooms. The threads on web forum Reddit are home to scores of men who ask for and trade explicit pictures of unsuspecting women.
Some of the threads are public, and are often only live for a few days before they are taken down. Others are set to be private and only people approved by moderators can view the photographs and take part.
In the chatrooms, people post photographs of women and ask if anyone knows who they are or have other photographs of them. There are offers to trade photographs and explicit photographs are posted.
Seren Jones, a 20-year-old teaching assistant from south Wales, found her photograph being shared. She wrote: “I’ve never been more disgusted and violated by something in my entire life. “
She said the page she found her image on had 1,900 members who traded pictures and videos for their own pleasure. “Some charge money, some give away pictures that they have in exchange for someone else’s. It’s completely degrading.
“What’s worse is that the owners of the page have hundreds of folders labelled with the names of women and their pictures… It doesn’t matter how old you are, who you are and what you look like. They have everything.”
WalesOnline was contacted by a 31-year-old teacher from south Wales, who did not want to be identified and we are calling Ellie. She discovered a photograph of herself on a chat threat called ‘r/WelshGirls’ with her name and town and users asking for explicit pictures of her to ‘trade’ or ‘share’.
The thread listed pictures, asking “Anyone know [girls name], from [girls hometown.” Other posts included ‘Any got Ystradgynlais girls to trade or w**k over dm me’, or ‘Any Port Talbot/Neath/Swansea girls? New phone nothing to trade’ and ‘Rhondda swaps’.
Ellie said: “I’m one of the lucky ones, as they were only asking and they couldn’t come up with any information or any photos about me. But the other people, there quite a lot of them, they’ve not been quite as fortunate.”
One user had collected a database of hundreds of photos that had been exchanged, all being used as currency to swap and share in order to gain new photos, all being shared without consent. Ellie said: “I felt frightened [when I saw my name], because I haven’t had my full name on Facebook, I haven’t got a surname, because I’m a teacher, so this person knows me.”
She said: “I obviously reported it to Reddit, It was like every time I had a break in work I was pressing the buttons and nothing was coming back. I was clicking harassment, indecent images, I even clicked on minors because there’s no guarantee there’s none on there.”