As I see it | It’s exploitation, it’s abuse – but when will online sexual violence against women and children be taken seriously?

Over the past several months, I have worked on a collaboration with four other newsrooms in Asia about image-based abuse, which received the support of the Sydney-based Judith Neilson Institute. Many of us began conducting interviews at the end of last year, without knowing exactly where they would lead us. But it didn’t take long before we realised how pervasive and concerning this issue is, and how it has been ignored by many platforms, such as social media and chat apps, as well as the general public.

In one of my first interviews for the project, Laura (not her real name), a woman in her 20s from Hong Kong, told me she had been gripped by fear and anger when she found out from a work colleague that an intimate video – which had been taken without her consent about 10 years ago – was on a pornography site.