After Amy Hart appeared on Love Island, men started sending her unsolicited pictures of their penises online.

After joining the show in 2019, her social media following grew to 1 million, and she said she was constantly being labeled a “dick pic”.

The 31-year-old told Sky News: “You go through stories on Instagram and stories you’ve been tagged in will pop up.”

“These people are labeling a lot of women in the public eye so they can say ‘everyone on this list saw my penis’.”

In 2017, journalist Sophie Gallagher received 120 photos of strangers’ erect penises via her iPhone’s AirDrop feature while riding the London Underground.

Despite turning off her Bluetooth settings and working on fixing the problem ever since, she now receives similar images on social media and email.

“This is by no means unique to me,” the 32-year-old said. “Anyone in the public eye — celebrities, politicians — is constantly bombarded with it.”

After the passage of the Online Safety Bill on January 31 this year, cyber flashing became a criminal offense in England.

Today, for the first time in the UK, a man has been sentenced for this crime. The practice has been illegal in Scotland since 2009.

Nicholas HawkesThe 39-year-old, of Basildon, Essex, admitted two counts of sending photos or videos of genitals to cause alarm after sending unsolicited photos of his erect penis to a woman and a 15-year-old girl via WhatsApp on February 9 guilt, pain or humiliation.

“Forcing women to have sexual contact”

Kerry Daynes, a consultant forensic psychologist, said men who carried out cyber flashes fell into two categories.

“There is a small group of men who do this out of the fantasy that the women involved will be aroused by it,” she said.

“But the vast majority see it as a form of male domination, as a way of coercing women into sexual contact with them, causing them pain, shock, horror or fear.”

Recalling her experience, Sophie said she felt “anger” which then turned to “shame, guilt and embarrassment”.

“I’m embarrassed that people might think I’m just looking at these pictures on my phone on TV,” she said.

Professor Clare McGlynn, a law professor at Durham University who is advising the government on the new law, said both indecent physical exposure and online flashing can create the same fears for victims.

“It’s the same hurt, the same intimidation, the same fear of what’s going to happen next – just in a different way,” she told Sky News.

She also said network flickering is often more difficult to escape.

“You can’t live without the internet. It’s more difficult because our phones are in our hands every day. We need our phones and laptops for work, school, private life, banking, shopping, etc.”

But while Professor McGlynn and campaigners said the first sentencing showed “good progress”, prosecutions may still be difficult.

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2023 Laws on so-called “revenge porn” changed This way the victim only needs to indicate that they do not consent to their image being shared.

However, cyber flash legislation requires proof that the offender intended to cause pain or obtain sexual gratification and acted recklessly with regard to causing pain.

Amy said: “The law is a huge improvement but it needs to go further and be based on consent. Because to me they can say it’s a joke and then it doesn’t matter.”

Professor McGlynn added: “It makes no sense that we have two different standards for two very similar offences.

“Sending someone a dick pic without consent should be a crime.

“The reason is, no matter what the person’s intentions were, it’s still harmful to you.”

She said the different legal standards showed the government “does not take online flashing as seriously as it should” and “fails to realize it can be just as harmful as sharing intimate images of people without their consent”.

“On the New Generation of Drunken Girls in Short Skirts”

Amy and Sophie say they have blocked users, deleted photos and turned off certain settings to avoid seeing unwanted images – but this rarely solves the problem.

Sophie said: “I turned off AirDrop and that has solved the problem, but what happens next? Technology is constantly evolving, so the next step will be deepfakes, artificial intelligence, new social media platforms.

“The argument that we should ‘stop using social media’ is a new generation of drunken girls in short skirts argument.

“It blames the victim rather than the perpetrator and minimizes the importance of our online lives and our right to live safely online.”

Amy added that some men threatened to show up at her home.

Now living with her boyfriend and one-year-old son, she said: “I can’t tell in real time where we are and what we’re going to do tonight because it’s not hard to figure out where I live.

“Especially now that I have a baby — I do feel unsafe sometimes.”

Is cyber flashing a “gateway” crime?

last month a report Former police officer Wayne Couzens has revealed he tried to show violent, extreme pornography to colleagues and allegedly shared pornographic images with young women.

this Libby Squire’s motherPawel Relowicz, who was kidnapped, raped and murdered in Hull in 2019, stressed that he had looked through a window in the weeks before killing her Seeing women and breaking into their homes to steal intimate items.

The defendant sentenced today in the Essex online flash case was already a registered sex offender, having been convicted last year of having sex with a child under 16.

Ms Daines said non-contact sexual offending was often a “gateway” to physically violent offences.

“It’s often a gateway offense or an offense that occurs in conjunction with other sexual offences, but sometimes it’s on its own,” she said.

“We’re still trying to figure out who will operate in a virtual world and who will operate offline, for whom simply imagining the victim’s reaction is not enough.”

Professor McGlynn believes that while recent cases have “brought non-contact crime into the spotlight”, they are not just a “gateway” or “red flag”.

“It’s impossible to say one factor caused the other,” she said. “There are many ways in which individuals’ criminal behavior overlaps, which means you have to take the crimes themselves seriously.

“Exposure and online flashing are intimidating and threatening behaviors by men, so we should take them seriously – and not just because we think they lead to more ‘serious’ offending.”

The platform needs to do more blurring/occlusion

All four women said social media platforms need to do more to prevent people from seeing harmful images – whether from strangers or people they know.

They fear that because the burden of proof for the new offense is so high, a “gap between reality and rhetoric” will mean police and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) will be reluctant to pursue cases.

Professor McGlynn said other provisions in the Online Safety Act meant regulator Ofcom’s guidance on what platforms should do was “weak”.

“They don’t have to block or blur nude and explicit images because the Cybersecurity Law doesn’t tell them they have to,” she said. “It’s a complete misunderstanding of the harms – the harms were sent to them – and just because you can delete them doesn’t mean everything is okay.”

Meta said that on WhatsApp, media sent by anyone who is not in the user’s contacts will be automatically blurred, but this is not the case for people the user has already contacted.

Instagram said it made changes to direct message requests so “you won’t receive any images or videos until you accept their chat request.”

Apple says there are settings to prevent others from seeing and sending content to the device on AirDrop, as well as a “Sensitive Content Warning” option that appears before users open media that may contain nudity.

Sefer Mani, of the East of England CPS, believes the first case of flashing in Essex “shows that the new law is working”, adding: “Flashing is a bizarre crime. Everyone should feel safe wherever they are. I urge anyone who thinks they have been a victim of cyberflash to report it to the police and know they will be taken seriously and their identity protected.”

A government spokesman added that the Cyber ​​Security Act was a “deterrent” to cyber flashes, giving police “the clarity they need to deal with offenders and keep people safe”.

An Ofcom spokesman said “strong measures” had been proposed to technology companies and consultations on further enforceable changes were “in a timely manner”. The consultation is expected to be completed by the end of this year.