![]() ![]() “Women are prizes to be passed around, shared and traded like a dystopian version of Pokémon. “It’s one of the most dehumanising aspects of intimate image abuse that we see,” says Zara Ward, senior helpline practitioner at RPH. In this case, collecting means posting, collating and trading intimate images of women. It is just one example of what a report last month by the Revenge Porn Helpline (RPH) has termed “collector culture” – something the RPH identifies as “an emerging trend”, “increasing at pace”. Photograph: JGI/Tom Grill/Getty Images/Tetra images RF/Posed by model Sites such as AnonIB post pictures searchable by users’ locality. In the past few months, it has gone behind a paywall. It was shut down by Dutch police, but has since reappeared and is currently hosted from a Russian domain. Four months later, she found her own pictures had been added to the site.ĪnonIB has used various names over the last few years – always some kind of variation of “image board” and “anonymous”. “How could it be allowed?” But worse was to come. Disgusted that it existed, but also confused,” she says. There were also lots of “requests” for pictures of certain women – often called “wins” (“Any wins on XXXX?” “There must be more of this slut out there.” “I can now look her boyfriend in the eye knowing I’ve seen his missus naked.”) The thread for Ruby’s town (population 55,000) stretched to 16 pages and with each intimate image of women and girls, there were comments with as much identifying information as possible by local users – names, surnames, the schools they had attended, who their relatives were. “And when I say ‘local’, it wouldn’t be ‘London’ or ‘Birmingham’, a city of any size would have smaller, specific categories, like ‘Birmingham University students’,” says Ruby. ![]() AnonIB was categorised by country – the US has the most entries, the UK is next – but then broken down by region, city and local area. ![]()
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