WHEN NICHOLAS HAWKES was jailed for 66 weeks last month, he became the first person in England to be imprisoned for cyberflashing after it was made illegal under the Online Safety Act in January. Hawkes sent unsolicited photos of his erect penis to a woman and a 15-year-old girl. For all those who’ve been working tirelessly to see this law passed, his sentencing felt like something to celebrate. To say I’ve been at the receiving end of ‘dick pics’ is an understatement, I can’t count how many thousands I’ve been sent over the years – and I campaigned with Grazia to help criminalise them.
You might think that now cyberflashing is illegal and we’re starting to see the first stories of real justice being ser ved that grotesque messages sent to my Instagram DMs would have started to die down. But now I’m pregnant, the abuse has morphed into something else. Dick pics have been replaced with men messaging to make vile comments about my body. They say things like, ‘Put your bump away love, no one wants to see that.’ Every day I receive countless hostile messages from men; the other day a guy messaged me to tell me he’s ‘so sick of innocent men being attacked’. It’s frustrating to see some men being so defensive – and that’s a mindset we really need to change.
It shows that while the conviction is a huge step in the right direction, there is still so much work to be done. To really make cyberflashing and misog ynistic online abuse a thing of the past we need a cultural shift. Education around consent is key. There needs to be more discussion between boys and girls around these topics from a young age. But also the entire narrative that is pushed about women needs to be looked at. That women are liars, we are at
