Par David Chapel
Published on
It all started from Twitter on Tuesday. Several messages shared on the social network caught our attention. They reported “nudes” to Evreux posted on Snapchat.
Revenge porn
A snap is a photo or video message sent from the Snapchat app. Their particularity (since imitated by Instagram and Facebook), these messages are ephemeral. In theory, because all you need to do is screen (take a screenshot or film the activity on your phone’s screen) to archive or share these documents.
Nudes, finally, are images or videos that present a naked person. A naked selfie, more or less erotic, even downright pornographic. These are very fashionable among young lovers 2.0. Especially among girls, between 15 and 20 years old – running in the footsteps of the ever more trashy Miley Cirus, Rihanna or Kim Kardashian.
A little game without consequence a priori unless the recipient decides – for one reason or another – to break the trust, the intimacy and to share these documents, to make them public. We will then speak of “revenge porn”, this “pornographic revenge” or “pornographic” revenge which consists in sharing sexually explicit content without the consent of the person(s) concerned with the aim of making it a form of ” revenge “.
No bother 27
The Snapchat account “No Peaches 27” launched a call to collect this type of video and received a good number of them to make stories (a series of videos), like the one it broadcast for 24 hours on Tuesday, where we see about twenty teenage girls for almost 5 minutes. Most teenagers in Évreux have heard of this story, some had even seen the previous one(s). Because “No Peine 27”, based it seems in Rouen, is not at its first attempt. His first account having been blocked. He opened another: “If my account is blocked, I will do one again after Ramadan (sic)”, he warns, confident. His nickname suggests that he risks nothing.
Obscene images scroll across the screen. We sometimes see the faces. The surnames, first names and the names of the high schools ofEvreuxof Vernonof Gisors… superimposed are young girls, aged 14 to 16 or 17 years old.
Two suicides in Normandy
The dissemination of such pictures is not without consequences. It has already made victims in Normandy. In June 2017, in Grand-Quevilly, a 13-year-old girl killed herself by jumping from the seventh floor.
She had been threatened to see intimate photos broadcast just before her suicide. A year earlier, another 15-year-old girl committed suicide by throwing herself under a train, near Lisieux, after photos of her naked were broadcast in her school.
And we will say again that Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram is the public square, the schoolyard. That everything written, filmed, recorded, photographed and posted on any Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat account is or will be public – whether you like it or not. Even if your account is private. Once published on the web, the slightest document and (especially) its viral copies are indelible, unrecoverable. You might as well want to get back on deck after jumping off it… Even tied to a rubber band.
A complaint and an investigation by the Évreux public prosecutor’s office
On Tuesday, the prosecution was to open an investigation after the head of an establishment in Évreux filed a complaint. Meanwhile on Snapchat, “No Peine 27” published a new video with new teenage girls…
Justice: an admission of powerlessness
The Évreux prosecutor’s office has confirmed that it has opened an investigation into these images of naked teenagers which circulated on Snapchat. In addition to the difficulty “to constitute and qualify the facts, at least an invasion of privacy or an incitement of a minor to debauchery, which are crimes”, underlines Eric Neveu, deputy public prosecutor in Évreux, in this kind of case, justice comes up against another stumbling block. “The thing is complicated insofar as Snapchat does not respond to the injunctions of French justice, concedes the assistant prosecutor. As much within Europe, cooperation is going well, as much with the United States, the principle of reciprocity is not systematic. It depends on the type of offense and in this case we are facing a problem of freedom of expression which is defined by one of the articles of their constitution”. A state of affairs that sounds like an admission of powerlessness.
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