Olimpia Coral Melo got famous for all the wrong reasons – then used all the sexual attention she never sought to help other Latinas reclaim their bodies and dignity online.
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It was a decade ago – Coral Melo was just 18 – when a video of her having sex with her then-boyfriend was shared on social media across her native Mexico.
Her ex-boyfriend denies ever sharing the material and Melo fell into a deep depression then tried to kill herself over the unwanted online exposure.
Before crashing still lower, she vowed to get even.
And in 2020, following years of her assiduous campaigning, Mexico duly outlawed so-called revenge porn, promising justice for women – and it is overwhelmingly women – whose explicit images appear online without their consent.
Her work and namesake law have changed Coral Melo’s life, and that of many other wronged women in Latin America.
“Victims across Latin America are rising up,” Coral Melo told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
In homage to her efforts, a series of groundbreaking reforms – known collectively as the Olimpia Law – was approved this month by the Argentine Congress, while rights groups are pushing for similar legislation in Honduras, Guatemala, Ecuador and Chile.
But she wants still more, saying the landmark laws fall short in execution and that social media must step up, too.
“We see a constant obstacle: the challenge of obtaining proof,” she said. “Companies (also) could be doing more to stop objectifying and sexualising our bodies.”
Three years after the Mexican Senate voted to criminalise “revenge porn”, data analysis by the Thomson Reuters Foundation shows that victims still face multiple obstacles pursuing justice.
In 2022, 9.8 million women in Mexico experienced online harassment – a third of them were targets of digital sexual violence, according to the National Statistics Institute.
Of all women and girls who experienced online harassment, 4.3% were threatened with publishing or selling sexually explicit videos and photographs of them.
For Coral Melo, much of the responsibility lies with the platforms and their lack of cooperation with authorities. Plus societal expectations of how women are supposed to look and act.
“A big obstacle is the hypersexualisation of women,” she said. “Companies are still making money through these markets of sexual exploitation.”
Crime without punishment
Efforts globally to stamp out revenge porn have had mixed results, facing obstacles such as a lack of police training, public exposure of victims whose names are published in news reports, and slow government action.
The explosion of artificial intelligence has complicated attempts to curb the crime, rights experts say, as many anti-revenge porn laws do not punish superimposing a person’s face onto explicit imagery.
A similar story is playing out in Mexico.
Most online sexual violence falls right under the radar in a country where 94% of all crimes go unreported, according to the anti-corruption think tank Impunidad Cero (Zero Impunity).
Last year, just 11% of victims of revenge porn informed police or a public prosecutor, a Thomson Reuters Foundation analysis of cyber harassment data by the National Statistics Institute found.
An even smaller percentage informed authorities, family or peers, largely due to social stigma and the ridicule victims can face, said Vianney Martín del Campo, a lawyer specialising in gender and sexual digital violence.
“It’s a cultural thing: the victim is the one who is shamed and whose body is exhibited, instead of the aggressor,” she said.
Available statistics from two of Mexico’s 32 states show that few of the reported cases end in punishment.
Between 2020 and February 2023, 97 investigations were opened under the Olimpia law in Mexico City – but only three men were sentenced, according to the city’s attorney general.
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In the southern state of Yucatan, no sentences have been reported from the 36 cases that were opened pre-July of this year, statistics by the state attorney show.
Many women drop the cases due to ‘revictimisation’, said Martin del Campo, as they must share the content with authorities and relive the harassment they have suffered.
The lawyer also accused some police of victim shaming, further alienating women already wary of the justice system.
“They get tired, and many times abandon the process. Sometimes authorities ask them why they gave the boyfriends their photos, blaming them for what happened,” she said.
Brick wall
Another key obstacle is social media itself – platforms like Meta and X, which experts say often fail to divulge who lies behind the rogue profile distributing illegal content.
If abusers use fake or anonymous profiles, only social media platforms can provide police with vital tracing information such as location, an IP address, email, or cellphone number.
“During the investigation, the police send an email (requesting evidence) to the legal areas of the platforms located in the United States, but they never answer. I don’t think they even see the emails,” said Martin del Campo.
“That’s where cases end.”
Coral Melo has witnessed cases in which platforms take up to a year to delete harmful content or simply refuse to remove accounts, saying there has been no breach of their guidelines.
Meta and X did not respond to requests for comment.
A growing movement
But there are positives.
The Olimpia Law is now moving through Latin America – a region where 60% to 76% of women and girls have experienced gender-based violence, according to the UN’s Economic Commission.
In October, Argentina for the first time decreed that digital violence was a specific type of violence against women.
No small matter in a nation where one in three women have suffered digital violence, according to Amnesty International.
“A woman will be able to … request, by identifying the URL where the harmful content is, for the content to be taken down and a judicial court to be issued,” said Florencia Zerda, member of Organizacion Genero y TIC, a gender digital rights organisation that pushed for the law in the country.
A complementary Belen Law is under discussion with the hope that perpetrators could face three years in jail for making or sharing sexually explicit footage without consent.
The law pays homage to 26-year-old Belen San Roman who died by suicide in 2020 after a former partner extorted her by divulging intimate pictures.
Given that reform which has already gone through relies on platforms to take down harmful content and prosecutors to then investigate it, Zerda said she expects to see a rerun of the mixed results encountered by some women in Mexico.
Argentina, however, is also weighing deeper change – including adding digital violence to the school sex-ed curriculum – a step that may shape the mindset of future generations and ward off the crime before it even happens.
“Penalties and punishments won’t work if we don’t prevent these actions with education for all society,” said Zerda.
– Thomson Reuters Foundation
– TheStar