‘I Was Powerless’: Serbian Women Detail Devastating Impact of Revenge Porn

Confiding in her sister and a friend, the three of them composed an email to the porn site asking for the video to be taken down. Pornhub, which has over 130 million visits per day, obliged. But days later the video was back under a different heading.

She wrote again, and the video has since disappeared, but Marina lives with the threat that it may resurface at any time. Pornhub did not respond to a request for comment.

“I don’t talk about it with a lot of people,” Marina said. “I feel like everyone would judge me if they knew and blame me for not reporting him or doing more about it.”

“I want to cry when I think about it even today. Somehow, it reminds me how powerless I am, or was.”

Marina was one of 28 women in Serbia interviewed by BIRN about their experiences of revenge porn; some said intimate videos of them had circulated on Telegram groups with tens of thousands of members, others on porn sites.

Coupled with months of monitoring of Telegram groups and data from police and prosecutors, the picture that emerges is one of systematic failure on the part of the Serbian legal system to protect the victims of revenge porn, a form of gender-based violence.

Victims are exposed to blackmail, public shaming and emotional trauma. Few have the resources to fight back.

Today, explicit photos and videos of Serbian women are being shared on at least 16 Telegram groups, BIRN has found, the biggest of them boasting almost 50,000 members.

“You feel like the whole world will collapse if anyone sees it, finds it, passes it on further,” said another victim, a 28 year-old woman from the Serbian capital, Belgrade. “I was horrified for a month; I was shaking at every message and call.”

None of the victims quoted in this story are identified by their real names in order to protect their privacy.

Infographic: BIRN.

A safe place for abusers

The term ‘revenge porn’ refers to the sharing of private, sexually explicit photos or videos of another person without their consent, often with the purpose of causing embarrassment or distress. Some activists specialised in this area say a more accurate term would be ‘image-based sexual abuse’.

Using advanced search bots, BIRN spent several months monitoring Telegram and was able to identify 13 active groups sharing private, explicit material, with several thousand users posting daily.

Infographic: BIRN.

At one point, a video of Jelena was in there too.

Jelena told BIRN she had been in a committed relationship when she began suspecting that her boyfriend had hidden cameras in the flat they shared.

“We were spending time in that flat, having sex in the bedroom, and he was filming it all and watching it later,” she said. Her boyfriend confessed and showed her all the footage.

“There was footage on those files from every day for the last year, and it wasn’t just with me but various other girls,” she said. Her boyfriend threatened to publish the videos if she reported him to the police; undeterred, Jelena did go to the police, twice. But on both occasions officers doubted her account and refused to search the apartment, citing a lack of evidence.

Then a friend called her to say there was a video of her being shared in a Telegram group.

“He published videos in a closed group where you can only enter if you have an invite,” Jelena told BIRN.

Users enjoy complete anonymity; messages are sent almost every minute, some with photos or videos apparently taken from porn websites, but others with material that appears to be private.

There is no information on how the content was created or whether the people they feature have given permission for the files to be shared. Often there is some information, however – links to the Instagram profiles of the women, or their Viber or WhatsApp numbers.

The result is often a barrage of messages to women from anonymous men asking for sex.

Infographic: BIRN.

Telegram’s Terms of Service prohibits the sharing of “illegal pornographic content on publicly viewable Telegram channels”. The platform has an email through which users can report such content.

This investigation, however, shows that some Telegram groups in Serbia are violating those rules with impunity.

In a written response to BIRN, a Telegram press officer wrote that “since its launch, Telegram has actively moderated harmful content on its platform – including the publication of revenge porn.”

“Our moderators proactively monitor public parts of the app as well as accepting user reports in order to remove content that breaches our terms.”

Legal issues

Revenge porn, on its own, is not defined as a criminal offence in Serbia.

In order for police or prosecutors to get involved, the case needs to involve elements of blackmail, harassment, or stalking. Otherwise, victims have to initiate a private lawsuit, within three months of discovery of the content.

That’s what a police officer told Ivana to do, after she went to the police aged 19 to report an ex-boyfriend.

Their breakup had unleashed months of stalking that became so intense that Ivana had to move apartment and block her ex-boyfriend on all her social media profiles. But he continued sending emails and contacting her family, before finally threatening to release intimate video of them together.

The threat was real; one night, Ivana recalled, she suddenly received 100 friend requests on Facebook from strangers, many featuring offensive messages. What followed, she said, were “a few days of torture and crying, worrying about who would see it.”

With the help of friends, Ivana set about removing the video from various websites. Then she went to the police.

“The inspector listened to me. He did not blame me for anything, especially because I told him about the violence in the relationship and said that he would call him [the ex-boyfriend] but that there was not much he could do,” Ivana said. “I had to file a private lawsuit, if I wanted, because he was posting the video without permission.”

After the officer spoke to the ex-boyfriend, the harassment stopped.

“If there’s any message a woman can take from my experience, it’s that no one has the right to do this to anyone and that no one ‘deserves’ something like this,” Ivana told BIRN.

Mirjana Stajkovac, a high-tech crime prosecutor, said that revenge porn should be defined as a criminal offence under Serbian law.

“Everyone has the right to send their intimate material to others. But it has opened new doors for misuse. And then the person suffers consequences that can be devastating for their mental health and the members of that family,” Stajkovac told BIRN.

In May 2022, the Autonomous Women’s Centre, an NGO, submitted an initiative to the Serbian Justice Ministry asking that revenge porn be included in the criminal code, but nothing came of it.

The Centre says that it receives at least one call per week from women of all ages who have been affected by the problem.

Many of the women who shared their experiences with BIRN said they had been in committed relationships and trusted their partners when they agreed to be photographed or filmed; they said they believed it to be a “one-off” and that the material would be deleted.

Olivera had lived with her partner for years and has a child with him.

When he asked to take photos of her naked, she did not hesitate; they were building a life together, and she trusted him, she said.

“I didn’t think anything negative for a single moment,” Olivera told BIRN. “He bought me all kinds of halters, bras, panties, SM gear, socks, you name it.”

They would look at the photos together and she believed he deleted them. But he hadn’t.

After nine years, Olivera ended the relationship. Six months later she received a message from her ex containing screenshots of photos of her, published on a porn site. He sent the same pictures to her mother, brothers, friends and male relatives.

Olivera went to the police; eventually she was given full custody of their child and her ex-partner was banned from approaching or contacting her in any way. “A very ugly, sad and unpleasant situation, but I got over it; life goes on,” she said.

Minors

Mirjana Stajkovac, a high-tech crime prosecutor, said that revenge porn should be defined as a criminal offense under Serbian law. Photo: Stefan Milovojevic.

Some of the women interviewed by BIRN were minors when they became victims of revenge porn.

Katarina was 15 years-old when she began dating an 18 year-old from a small town in Serbia. They talked about sex, but Katarina told him she wasn’t ready and believed he understood.

After a few months, they went to Serbia’s Tara Mountain, where Katarina came down with a fever. She drank a cup of tea and fell asleep. Today, she believes her then boyfriend drugged her.

She remembers nothing from the night, but after they broke up a few months later, video of her appeared on countless porn sites and in Telegram groups. Katarina had no idea the video had ever been made.

“You can see me on the video, but not him, nothing but his genitals,” she told BIRN. “He wrote to my sister saying he did it to re-educate me, because how dare I break up with him.”

Alongside the clip was Katarina’s full name, her home city, Instagram profile and phone number. Katarina went to the police, several times, but her complaints fell on deaf ears.

“They said I was exaggerating because we were still in a relationship, so maybe he couldn’t wait any longer because he is a man, and he has needs,” Katarina said, recalling the police response.

“More than three years have passed and I started to fight with the problems in my head only now when I moved to another city. The consequences are permanent, and nobody reacted.”

With a staff of four, the Prosecutor’s Office for High-Tech Crime is the only one dealing with such cases; they review reports of revenge porn on a daily basis.

One of the cases it is handling, concerning Telegram, has been dragging on for roughly two years but is being investigated as child pornography, not specifically as revenge porn, BIRN has learned.

The Telegram group ‘Nislijke’ [Nis Women] was initially exposed by one of its victims, Stasa Ivkovic, who took to Twitter to say her picture and social media profile had been circulating in the group, focussed on the city of Nis. Police arrested the group’s administrator, Nemanja Stojiljkovic, in March 2021, but the case is still ongoing.

“Many of the victims I talked to are very upset,” said Stajkovac. “Most of these people cry while giving their testimony, which is very upsetting for me as well. I really trust them.”

Victims, she said, should save the evidence as soon as they detect that something has happened – screenshots of messages, pictures, posts, and profiles from which content was sent.

“In every possible way, please, they should screenshot everything and not sweep it under the rug, believing it will pass. It will not pass, and the consequences can be dire.”

Victims should go to their nearest police station and hand over their phone for expert examination, she said. And take any witness they might have who could corroborate their account.

“These actions taken by these people are criminal acts for us, and we will not look at it lightly as a phenomenon in a society that should not be sanctioned,” Stajkovac told BIRN.

“Those people will not relax so easily and think that they can do whatever they want. If the predator feels that someone is on his tail and chasing him, he will make a mistake, and we will catch him in that mistake.”