Bumble is campaigning to make cyberflashing illegal in England and Wales

Cyberflashing is a term that describes the act of sending non-consensual explicit photos via airdrop or messaging app.

The violation is not currently illegal in England and Wales. Bumble wants to change that.

The dating app is launching a campaign called #DigitalFlashingIsFlashing pushing for the criminalisation of cyberflashing.

Per YouGov data, 41 percent of women aged between 18 and 36 "have been sent an unsolicited photo of a man's private parts." Researchers have found that women are often overwhelmingly the target of this gendered act.

Mashable has previously reported on the impact of using minimising language, such as "unsolicited dick pics" to describe cyberflashing, causing survivors to question the seriousness of the violation and whether it was "bad enough" to warrant the trauma they feel.

Research carried out by Bumble found that 48 percent of women aged 18 to 24 had received a non-consensual sexual photo in the last year alone, with 59 percent reporting they felt less trusting of others online afterwards, with one in four stating they feel violated.

Journalist Sophie Gallagher has interviewed nearly 100 women on the record about their experiences of cyberflashing, most recently reporting on how lockdown hasn't stopped cyberflashing. (Bumble's research shows that more than one in four women say cyberflashing has increased during the pandemic.) While interviewing her for my book Rough, Gallagher told me, "The evidence clearly shows that such online sexual violence does not sit in a separate arena to its offline equivalents. It exists on a spectrum of harm."

Gallagher said that it's certainly not a case of cyberflashing being 'less damaging' because it's an online violation. "And let’s be clear, the harms — which include everything from humiliation and distress to fear, changing behaviours such as routes home or how they engage with their smartphones — are no less extensive than those experienced with old school flashing," she added.

In 2019, Bumble introduced a feature called "Private Detector," that alerts users when someone sends them an explicit photo and all photos containing nudity will be blurred. Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder and CEO of Bumble, also successfully campaigned to make unsolicited explicit images illegal in Texas. Bumble is also pushing for similar legislation in California and New York. 

The #DigitalFlashingIsFlashing campaign will call on the UK government to acknowledge the need for a new law in England and Wales criminalising the sending of non-consensual explicit images. Cyberflashing has been criminalised in Scotland for more than a decade.

Bumble plans to work with U.N. Women to hold cross-party parliamentary consultations with lawmakers and experts. Wolfe Herd said in a statement that the dating app has been taking steps to tackle cyberflashing for years, citing Private Detector and the Texas cyberflashing law.

"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. "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."

Professor Clare McGlynn QC of Durham University, an expert in cyberflashing, said that cyberflashing is not a small act. "It is a form of sexual intimidation that can have devastating impacts on women and young girls," she said in a statement. "For some women, cyberflashing is worse than being flashed in the street — with the offender unknown, no-one seeing what is happening, and it feeling like an invasion into the very personal space of your phone which is impossible to ignore or forget."

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