The ManicaPost
A BBC investigation has found that thousands of young women in conservative societies across North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia are being shamed or blackmailed with private and sometimes sexually explicit images. Daniel Silas Adamson looks at how smart-phones and social media are colliding head-on with traditional notions of honour and shame.
In 2009 an 18-year-old Egyptian girl, Ghadeer Ahmed, sent a video clip to her boyfriend’s phone. The clip showed Ghadeer dancing at the house of a female friend. There was nothing pornographic about it, but she was wearing a revealing dress and dancing without any inhibition.
Three years later, in an act of revenge after their relationship had ended, the boyfriend posted the video to You Tube. Ghadeer panicked. She knew that the whole situation – the dance, the dress, the boyfriend – would be utterly unacceptable to her parents, to their neighbours, and to a society in which women were required to cover their bodies and behave with modesty.
But in the years since she had sent the video, Ghadeer had also taken part in the Egyptian revolution, taken off her hijab, and started to speak out about the rights of women. Outraged that a man had attempted to publicly shame her, she took legal action. Although she succeeded in having him convicted for defamation, the video remained on You Tube – and Ghadeer found herself attacked on social media by men who sought to discredit her by posting links to it.
In 2014, sick of the abuse and tired of worrying about who might see the film, Ghadeer made a brave decision: she posted the video on her own Facebook page. In an accompanying comment, she argued that it was time to stop using women’s bodies to shame and silence them. Watch the video, she said. I’m a good dancer. I have no reason to feel ashamed.
Ghadeer is more outspoken than most Arab women, but her situation is not unusual. A BBC investigation has found that thousands of young people – mainly girls and women – are being threatened, blackmailed, or shamed with digital images from the innocently flirtatious to the sexually explicit. Obtained by men – sometimes with consent, sometimes through sexual assault – these images are being used to extort money, to coerce women into sending more explicit images, or to force them to submit to sexual abuse.
Revenge porn is a problem in every country on Earth, but the potency of sexual images as weapons of intimidation stems from their capacity to inflict shame on women – and in some societies, shame is a much more serious matter.
“In the West, it’s a different culture,” says Inam al-Asha, a psychologist and women’s rights activist in Amman, Jordan. “A naked picture might only humiliate a girl. But in our society, a naked picture might lead to her death. And even if her life isn’t finished physically, it is finished socially and professionally. People stop associating with her and she ends up ostracised and isolated.”
This is one of a series of stories looking at a new and disturbing phenomenon – the use of private or sexually explicit images to threaten, blackmail and shame young people, mainly girls and women, in some of the world’s most conservative societies.
Most cases of this form of abuse go unreported because the same forces that make women vulnerable also ensure they remain silent. But lawyers, police, and activists in a dozen countries have told the BBC that the arrival of smart-phones and social media has sparked a hidden epidemic of online blackmail and shaming.
Zahra Sharabati, a Jordanian lawyer, told the BBC that in the last two or three years she has handled at least 50 cases involving the use of digital images or social media to threaten or shame women. “But in the whole of Jordan,” she says, “I think the number is far higher – not fewer than 1,000 cases involving social media. More than one girl, I think, was killed as a result of this issue.”
Louay Zreiqat, a police officer in the West Bank, says that last year the Palestinian police cybercrime unit handled 502 online crimes, many of which involved private pictures of women. His compatriot Kamal Mahmoud, who runs an anti-extortion website, says he receives more than 1,000 requests for help every year from women across the Arab world.
“Sometimes the photos are not sexual. . . a photo of a girl not wearing a hijab could be scandalous. A man could use this photo to pressure the girl to send more photos,” he says. “The Gulf countries are facing blackmail on a huge scale, especially girls in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain. Some girls tell us, ‘If these photos are made public, I will be in real danger.’”
In Saudi Arabia, the problem is so serious that the religious police have set up a special unit to pursue blackmailers and to help women who are being threatened. In 2014 the then head of the religious police, Dr Abdul Latif al-Sheikh, told a Saudi newspaper, “We receive hundreds of calls every day from women who are being blackmailed.”
Further east, Pavan Duggal, a lawyer with India’s Supreme Court, talks of a “torrent” of cases involving digital images of women. “My guesstimate is going to be that we are seeing thousands of such cases (in India) on a daily basis,” he says. – Online.
