‘I Was Powerless’: Serbian Women Detail Devastating Impact of Revenge Porn

Confiding in her sister and a friend, the three of them composed an email to the porn site asking for the video to be taken down. Pornhub, which has over 130 million visits per day, obliged. But days later the video was back under a different heading.

She wrote again, and the video has since disappeared, but Marina lives with the threat that it may resurface at any time. Pornhub did not respond to a request for comment.

"I don't talk about it with a lot of people," Marina said. "I feel like everyone would judge me if they knew and blame me for not reporting him or doing more about it."

"I want to cry when I think about it even today. Somehow, it reminds me how powerless I am, or was."

Marina was one of 28 women in Serbia interviewed by BIRN about their experiences of revenge porn; some said intimate videos of them had circulated on Telegram groups with tens of thousands of members, others on porn sites.

Coupled with months of monitoring of Telegram groups and data from police and prosecutors, the picture that emerges is one of systematic failure on the part of the Serbian legal system to protect the victims of revenge porn, a form of gender-based violence.

Victims are exposed to blackmail, public shaming and emotional trauma. Few have the resources to fight back.

Today, explicit photos and videos of Serbian women are being shared on at least 16 Telegram groups, BIRN has found, the biggest of them boasting almost 50,000 members.

"You feel like the whole world will collapse if anyone sees it, finds it, passes it on further," said another victim, a 28 year-old woman from the Serbian capital, Belgrade. "I was horrified for a month; I was shaking at every message and call."

None of the victims quoted in...