Since the U.K. passed a national law banning revenge porn last April, 206 people have been prosecuted for the crime, according to a new report.
However, the trend of posting nude or sexualized images of someone without their consent continues to rise. Between April and December of 2015, 1,160 revenge porn reports were filed in 31 of the 43 police bureaus in England and Wales, states Crown Prosecution Services. 61 percent of the reports, though, did not result in prosecution—either because there of insufficient evidence or because victims declined to prosecute. According to the BBC, the youngest victim was an 11-year-old child.
Under the law, the maximum sentence for revenge porn is two years—and in its first year, both men and women were convicted, with the overwhelming majority of victims being female.
The U.K.’s national revenge porn law has been called a model for the United States, which currently lacks a federal law under which perpetrators of nonconsensual pornography could be prosecuted.
This July, Congress introduced the Intimate Privacy Protection Act—pending legislation that could send American revenge porn perps to jail for up to five years. The federal U.S. law has been in the works for two years, with Congresswoman Jackie Speier closely collaborating with the nonprofit Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, and with revenge porn survivors, to draft the legislation.
