‘They said: aren’t you that porn star?’ The woman hunting down image-based abuse

‘They said: aren’t you that porn star?’ The woman hunting down image-based abuse

Mia Landsem, whose ex spread an intimate photo of her online, now spends hours each day helping others get images removed

“Faces of exes,” Mia Landsem read out loud, as she clicked on a link to a forum exposing intimate images of ex-girlfriends, her frowning brow illuminated by a three-screen computer. On the 25-year-old’s neck, underneath wisps of blond hair, are tattooed reminders in Norwegian to be “brave” and “don’t give a fuck.” An internet security expert by day, by night she has made it her mission to hunt down and report such images from her apartment in Oslo. “I try to focus on the worst ones,” she said. “I can maybe get a few groups removed in a day, but then 20 more appear.”

Digital image-based sexual abuse – a catch-all phrase that includes deepfake pornography, so-called “upskirting” and “revenge porn”, a term rejected by activists for implying the victim has done something wrong – is a global problem on the rise. Almost three out of four victims are women, according to a 2019 study by the University of Exeter. But there are male victims and female perpetrators.

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