School holidays are here and there's no better time to review the safeguards you have in place to protect your children from online predators and sexploitation. Here, we give you some handy tips, resources and links to help keep your family safe these holidays.

A new way to prey on women. 

"Holocaust #2 but instead of jews we target women"

Collective Shout welcomes the opportunity to contribute to Online Safety legislative reform. We support intentions to consolidate and harmonise current laws and to ensure streamlining and consistency in a range of digital offences. We are especially pleased to see plans for an expansion of protection against cyberbullying, cyber abuse, image-based abuse and seriously harmful content. As the digital landscape is in a constant state of flux, new opportunities arise – and with them new dangers. This necessitates updated legislation to ensure a safer online environment prioritising human rights and community welfare.

MTR + Melinda Liszewski address Social Policy + Legal Affairs Committee

We were recently contacted by a small, anonymous and dedicated group tackling image based abuse. This guest blog post is written by one of their members to help shed light on the insidious world of non-consensual sharing of sexualised images on the internet. 

The app's creator pulled the software siting ethical concerns

Companies and individuals who share revenge porn will face hefty finds under legislation which has cleared the senate.

Laws against so-called revenge porn have passed the Senate, with penalties of up to $525,000 for corporations and $105,000 for individuals set to be introduced for the non-consensual sharing of intimate images.

The legislation has support from across the political divide, but Labor said it did not go far enough.

"The non-consensual sharing of intimate images is exploitative, it's humiliating and it's a very damaging form of abuse. It needs to be treated as such," Labor senator Deb O'Neill said.

The Nick Xenophon Team, with the support of the opposition, the Greens, passed an amendment making revenge porn a criminal offence.

Under the civil penalty regime, a victim or someone authorised to act on their behalf could complain to the eSafety Commissioner.

The commissioner could then act swiftly - armed with the hefty penalties for perpetrators, social media services and content hosts - to have the images removed and to limit any further sharing.

Read the full article here.

We were approached for comment by the Geelong Advertiser earlier this month:

Grassroots activist group Collective Shout is “frequently hearing stories from adolescent girls of sexual harassment from their male classmates, sexist bullying, requests for nude images, unsolicited sexual images,” spokeswoman Caitlin Roper said.

Ms Roper said the “discussion is often centred on why women take sexual images rather than why men distribute these images without consent to punish and humiliate women.”

“This is not unlike much of the discourse around rape and sexual assault, where women are again being held responsible for the criminal acts of men and expected to modify their behaviour in order to avoid being victimised,” she said.  Read more here.

Geelong females are being targeted in a pornographic online forum posting sexual images of women and girls without their consent, reported the Geelong Advertiser this week:

A recent post on the image-sharing forum, which shows revenge porn, seeks “good ones” from Geelong and Werribee alongside images of a female in states of undress.

Another post, from December, seeks nudes from Geelong and Werribee of a specific woman who claimed to work in the sex industry.

The site has users from around Australia, and even requests for images of girls who attended certain schools.

Users share images taken from social media platforms including Snapchat.

We were approached for comment:

Grassroots activist group Collective Shout is “frequently hearing stories from adolescent girls of sexual harassment from their male classmates, sexist bullying, requests for nude images, unsolicited sexual images,” spokeswoman Caitlin Roper said.

Ms Roper said the “discussion is often centred on why women take sexual images rather than why men distribute these images without consent to punish and humiliate women.”

“This is not unlike much of the discourse around rape and sexual assault, where women are again being held responsible for the criminal acts of men and expected to modify their behaviour in order to avoid being victimised,” she said.

But we cannot adequately address the rise of image based abuse, or so-called ‘revenge porn’, without considering the significant role of pornography and its toxic messages about men, women and sex.

Mainstream pornography is a “distortion of respect based sexuality”, reinforcing notions of male dominance and aggression and female sexual submission. It fuels a sense of entitlement in men and boys to the bodies of women and girls, who are portrayed as always ‘up for it’ and as existing for men’s use and pleasure. In porn, women’s humanity is diminished.

Pornography is the primary tool of sex education for young people. We can’t underestimate its power in fuelling sexist attitudes towards women. When boys’ introduction to sexuality is the filmed sexual abuse and humiliation of women in pornography, it has an impact on how their real-world interactions with women and girls, and we are seeing it here.

Victims are being encouraged to report images to the Office of the eSafety Commissioner so they can seek “rapid removal” of the material.

Read the full article here.