Contributed by: kellyseal on Monday, January 31 2022 @ 09:21 am
Last modified on Thursday, May 19 2022 @ 09:05 am
Dating app Bumble said that it is actively campaigning to make cyberflashing illegal in England and Wales, as it continues to fight for policies to protect women on dating apps.
The term cyberflashing is used when someone (typically a woman) receives an unsolicited explicit photo via a messaging app or Airdrop. According to a study by YouGov in the UK, 41 percent of women aged 18 to 36 have been sent an “unsolicited photo of a man’s private parts.” This is illegal in many places, but not currently in England or Wales.
In its own research, Bumble found that 48 percent of women ages 18 to 24 had received an unsolicited and explicit photo just in the last year, with 25 percent saying they felt violated because of it. A majority of almost 60 percent said they felt less trusting of others they interacted with online after the experience, and one quarter said that this occurrence has increased over the course of the pandemic, according to Mashable[*1] .
This isn’t the first time Bumble has fought for legislation to curb the practice of sending explicit photos over dating apps. The company advocated for a bill making it illegal in Texas and won, and now it has put forward similar legislation in Texas and California, and hopes to eventually make it illegal across the United States, as well as in the U.K.
Cyberflashing has become a growing problem on dating apps, so the platforms are taking complaints more seriously and adding security features to discourage bad behavior, such as the ability to instantly report and block a user. Bumble even added a feature called Private Detector that blurs out potentially explicit photos, so the recipient doesn’t have to view in order to reject and report the user.
Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd has made the issue part of her overall mission to protect women online, especially those using dating apps. "Cyberflashing is a relentless, everyday form of harassment that causes victims, predominantly women, to feel distressed, violated, and vulnerable on the internet as a whole. It's shocking that in this day and age we don't have laws that hold people to account for this," she said in regard to the company’s current campaign in England and Wales, according to Mashable. "This issue is bigger than just one company, and we cannot do this alone. We need governments to take action to criminalise cyberflashing and enforce what is already a real-world law in the online world."