The sharing of a set of explicit videos of a Maltese woman through social media channels which came to light last week was one of the more significant stories from a social perspective to emerge as of late.

The situation concerns a young Maltese woman who woke up one weekend to find that at least nine intimate videos of her which had been saved on her phone had somehow ended up online. By the following Monday, they were being shared with her friends and people across the country, leaving the woman distraught.

Things came to a head when one of the videos made it onto a television screen in the middle of a restaurant in Msida after a member of the Siggiewi Football Club allegedly cast the video onto the screen during a team dinner.

The act inside the restaurant was filmed, with a room full of men watching – and laughing at – the video.  When this came to light, there was widespread condemnation, and the launch of a police investigation.  The restaurant meanwhile dropped its sponsorship of the football and the team’s coach offered his resignation.

The action following this incident was appropriate, and we hope that the police will be in a position to carry out justice in the case.

However, the discussion on this topic cannot stop here.

One of the uncomfortable facts here is that had somebody from the aforementioned football team not inexplicably decided that it would be appropriate to cast the videos onto a television screen in the middle of a restaurant, then it is unlikely that this story would have ever made it to the media’s front pages.

This leads us to wonder: who knows how many other, maybe less widely shared but equally humiliating, cases like this happen in Malta?

Let’s not make any bones about it: what this case is is an example of digital sex crime.

This is a form of crime which goes far beyond one’s telephone screen: it can have long-term consequences for its victims, especially from a mental health perspective.

The Malta Chamber of Psychologists explained in a statement following this incident that the experience of image-based abuse can be so distressing that women interviewed about such experiences reported effects similar to those commonly reported by rape victims.

The fact is that gender and control are the core of such abuse.  There is an element of rampant misogyny in finding the sharing of private explicit videos somehow funny, or even thriving off the drama that these videos create. 

Another overriding reaction to this scandal was people questioning why a woman would take such videos of herself in the first place.  The simple response to this is that, quite frankly, anyone can do what they want with their body and to even suggest that “well, maybe she shouldn’t have filmed herself in the first place” is like telling a rape victim that they shouldn’t have dressed the way they did in the first place.

One of the most important things however which must be taken away from this is that – irrespective of who leaked the video or of how it was leaked – watching or continuing to share any explicit videos that a woman says she didn’t consent to filming is simply abhorrent.

One of the best ways to eradicate this type of crime is simply to stop spreading any such videos.  So stop searching for them, and start supporting the victims by never sharing them.