When I think of the impact that technology has had on my own trafficking experience, it is overwhelmingly a negative one. This includes social media, AI, surveillance software, and more. So I am sceptical, to say the least, that tech can, or will, save trafficking survivors from experiencing further exploitation. It did the opposite for me.
Technology immortalised my trauma. I have dealt with harassment and threats for over half my life because part of my childhood trafficking experience was put online. It didn’t matter how I acted. I faced abuse when I didn’t speak about what I had been through, and I face abuse now that I’ve opened up about it. People all around the world think they have licence to harass me. It’s exhausting.
Trafficking is a difficult trauma to heal from, even if you are in a private, safe, therapeutic, and supportive environment with all the best care available. And, where I was allowed to go at my own pace in privacy, I have healed. That’s not true of the violence that was uploaded online. My trauma routinely resurfaces on the internet when I least expect it, churning me back into those painful moments instead of letting me move forward with my life.
The internet endangers my physical mortality.
Imagine being forced to watch and re-watch one of the most excruciating things you experienced as a child. Then imagine being mocked and threatened for it by people you’ve never met. The original wound compounds each time it happens, and because you know you can’t prevent it from happening again, you live riddled with the anxiety of waiting for it to return.
I have dealt with this relentless secondary abuse ever since my assault was uploaded. That’s 15 years of stalkers, death threats, vile messages, harassment of myself and my loved ones, and much more. To list all the ways I’ve been attacked would take hours.
The harassment skyrocketed four years ago when I started speaking publicly about how technology has compounded my trauma – rather than remaining silent and letting others speak for me. The misogynistic backlash to my voice was immense. I’m not sure when my childhood image was first put into an AI deepfake – it’s been shared so widely that it’s impossible to tell – but this type of abuse, among others, significantly worsened when I began to speak for myself.
Yet I keep speaking. I have grown exhausted of hateful people online always threatening to doxx me, and of well-meaning people unintentionally spreading misinformation about my case or proposing solutions that I don’t agree with. Not speaking for myself was another form of my agency being stripped away. My trauma was being used to forward agendas I believe are unhelpful or outright harmful.
Nobody has the right to do that.
The algorithms of abuse
Tech and the internet continue to facilitate harm in my life.
Because of internet harassment, my family and I have been terrorised at our home, schools, and workplaces. We have experienced real-world, physical violence multiple times. My image – both real and faked – is constantly at risk of resurfacing. I have received frantic messages from strangers saying they went searching for some of my writing or other work, but instead found a video of what they think is me being abused. They have told me how sorry they are that my assault at age 14 is online once again.
At times they were right. Other times it wasn’t my own assault, but videos using my name next to words like “rape” or “torture” or “crying” or “destroyed.” My pain has been SEO’d. The violence my body endured has been algorithmically optimised for eternal consumption.
When employers, relatives or I search for my name, thumbnails or titles about child abuse sometimes get included in the results. It makes my stomach churn. I feel nauseous and an icy feeling of pain grips my chest, knowing that people see this torture alongside my name, and that my own trauma is being used to bring more eyes to the trauma of someone else.
I’ve been able to have some of the worst videos using my name removed with the help of a pro-bono lawyer, but many remain and new ones pop up without warning. One, which my lawyer only managed to get removed after months of effort, was of a young boy being abused.
My pain has been SEO’d. The violence my body endured has been algorithmically optimised for eternal consumption
I am not the only one suffering under additional layers of trauma because of tech like social media. There are many like me, and there is little any of us can do about it. Every survivor I know who has shared their story publicly has dealt with this potentially deadly harassment. Sometimes they are gang stalked, which is when hateful people band together to go after an individual or a group of people. Social media makes it easy for them to find each other, and to find their target. It’s a form of violence that is flourishing largely unchecked online .
They want to shut us up. That’s their goal. Abusive people attack and attempt to discredit survivors who dare to speak out in order to deter others from doing the same.
I can’t help but imagine what the people who originally exploited us must think when they see us being attacked publicly. I suspect it emboldens them to continue hurting others without fear, because they know that their victims will be the ones put on public trial, threatened, disbelieved, ridiculed, and punished. The most heartbreaking messages I get are from survivors who are afraid to speak publicly because they have seen what happens to those who refuse to remain silent.
Online, forever
For all of the money poured into ‘spreading awareness’, the reality is that survivors still have no real recourse for any of this. Not for the stalking, harassment, doxxing, and abuse campaigns that tech and social media companies facilitate and perpetuate. Not even for removing our abuse from the public archive.
Platforms advise users to block malicious accounts, but trolls get around this by simply making new ones. Platforms also offer ways of flagging abuse, but review systems move slowly and the harassment continues as long as it stands in line. These ‘solutions’ are pathetic – inadequate to the point that they cannot be taken seriously.
When we take matters into our own hands and contact companies directly to get images and videos taken down, we are often met with silence. The websites hosting and profiting from our abuse do not like to return our calls.
All of this gets even harder when the images are deepfakes. The law does not allow someone to claim ownership over a faked image of themself. And if ownership can’t be claimed, there is no legal justification to ask for it to be removed. This is true even when deepfakes are being deployed to harass, intimidate, and impersonate. My identity and image has been stolen from me over and over again in this way, and I have had very little power to do anything about it.
This is, by the way, something we’re all vulnerable to by this point. Creating deepfakes isn’t the realm of hackers anymore – anybody with a credit card can do it. We no longer have control over the production and distribution of our likeness on the internet. Even powerful, wealthy celebrities like Taylor Swift have fallen prey to having images manipulated into sexually explicit imagery. For a few dollars anybody can be a perpetrator, and anybody can become a victim. While lawmakers look away, this type of image abuse is becoming more common.
The added trauma of fighting back
The gruelling difficulty of this fight adds yet more layers of trauma. Not only must I discover my abuse online, and not only must I force an unwilling company to engage with me over it. If the company finally agrees to remove it, I must then keep checking to see if they have actually complied. I’ve had to intentionally search for my abuse, over and over, just to find out if it has been taken down yet. The visceral terror of having to do this is paralysing. And every time I found it still there was another twist of the knife in the wound.
I was hopeful this might finally change when a child protection organisation approached me with a solution. They told me about a tech tool that would help keep the images and videos of me being abused as a child off of the internet, and that they would be taken down swiftly if they were re-uploaded. I was reassured that if I provided consent for my childhood photos to be used for facial recognition technology, described to me as “photo DNA”, I’d be able to breathe a little easier.
My loved ones and I were grateful for any hint of hope, but it also felt like a violation in and of itself to have my childhood photos entered into a database for this purpose. I gave them what they needed, but it felt like something private and sacred has been stolen from me once again.
This feeling intensified as I came to understand that this tool wasn’t as good as they claimed. I don’t know how many attempts it has successfully prevented, but I now know that it doesn’t catch all of them. My abuse continues to be re-uploaded, and at least some of the time it is not taken down immediately, as I was reassured it would be. It doesn’t feel like nearly enough.
Privacy is sacred
Tech has facilitated, enabled, perpetuated, and profited from these additional layers of trauma piled upon myself and other victims, and has done nothing substantial to protect us. Given my experience, it is now very difficult for me to believe that further violations of our privacy by tech companies – including in the name of safety or preventing trafficking – will actually keep us safe. Being told to trust my privacy to an industry that has harmed me so much is gaslighting.
We shouldn’t put our faith in tech to save us. We shouldn’t give them money to try. Money should instead be given directly to survivors, survivor-led organisations, and communities disproportionately impacted by trafficking. Poverty is one of the biggest root causes of trafficking, and this money could be spent on tangible needs like housing, mental health and trauma care, affordable and safe childcare and healthcare, and household bills.
This would be a far better solution than buying the high-tech equivalent of snake oil.
