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What would you do if you
found out that someone had posted naked pictures of you online, without
your permission? It's known as "revenge porn", and in the age of mobile
phone cameras and sexting, more and more people are becoming victims.
Some are fighting back.
Hollie Toups remembers in vivid detail the day that changed
her life. The 33-year-old Texan was at work last year when a friend
called to tell her there were naked pictures of her on a website."I left work and came home and ran upstairs and opened my computer," she tells me at her home in the small town of Nederland in south-east Texas. We're sitting on the same couch where she first typed in the address of the site - Texxxan.com.
A few clicks later Toups was looking at topless photos she'd taken for an ex-boyfriend when she was 24. And not just photos - posted alongside them were her name, links to her Facebook and Twitter accounts, a Google map of her location and a stream of comments.
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We don't want money, we want them to be held accountable”
Hollie Toups
"If you take every negative emotion, it was all of those at once," she remembers. "As you're looking, people are in real time commenting on your photos, saying things like you need to be raped."
"I was in tears for days," she tells me. She was afraid to leave the house, and when she eventually did, she was approached several times by men who had seen the photos.
"You're being judged and shamed," she says. "It erases the unspoken boundary of strangers, people think they know who you are and what you want, they approach you at will."
Toups initially suspected her ex had posted the photos. As the term "revenge porn" implies, it's the most common way images end up on these sites.
But among the photos posted online were some she had taken but never sent to anyone. Somehow her photos had been hacked or stolen.
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