Police probe ‘cruel’ Slane girl pictures posted online
A teenage girl has been hospitalised after explicit pictures of her were posted across social networking sites in what has become a huge scandal across Ireland.
Photographs of a 17-year-old girl performing oral sex, taken in the grounds of Slane Castle during an Eminem concert outside Dublin on Saturday, have been circulated online causing major controversy.
The pictures went viral after they were posted to social networks, and even trended on Twitter before Twitter, Facebook and Instagram moved to try and block access to the images.
Those engaging in the cruelty were not anonymous underground trolls, they were young people in school and college
Angela Nagle, Irish academic
A spokesperson for Twitter said it did not tolerate “child sexual exploitation”, adding: “When we are made aware of links to images of or content promoting child sexual exploitation they will be removed from the site without further notice and reported to the National Centre for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC).
“We permanently suspend accounts promoting or containing updates with links to child sexual exploitation.”
‘Sedated in hospital’
A Facebook spokesperson explained: “We have built a large and highly trained team of safety experts who review these reports and take action, including escalating serious cases to the police.”
The spokesperson said despite this there will unfortunately always be “a tiny number of malicious people who are intent on harming others, online and offline”.
A number of Instagram users said their accounts had been disabled for posting the images online.
According to reports, the teenager is so distressed by the online images that she has had to be sedated in hospital.
A police spokesman they had spoken with the girl involved: “We would ask the media to respect the privacy of the people involved and their families”. In the Republic of Ireland, the age of consent is 17 and indecent images relate to under 17s.
Internet users have been accused of sexism for mocking the girl and revealing her identity.
#Slanegirlsolidarity
A campaign in support of the girl top trended on Twitter in Ireland on Tuesday night, under the hashtag #slanegirlsolidarity, women spoke out calling for an end to “sexist shaming” of the young girl.
Angela Nagle, a Dublin researcher into internet misogyny, told Channel 4 News that the attitudes expressed by many young Irish men in question were that “the girl deserved it”.
“What is striking about this story is how common it was to see young people with their full names and their college, school or workplace displayed publicly beside some of the most shockingly misogynist sentiments you could imagine,” she explained.
“Those engaging in the cruelty were not anonymous underground trolls, they were young people in school and college, proud to publicly say that the girl deserved all she got.”
The scandal follows recent high profile debates over online behaviour and the risk abusive trolling can pose to vulnerable teenagers using websites like Ask.fm
Ms Nagle added the she believes it is important to ask where this cruelty is coming from and why this has happened, adding “Anything less will fail to address the root of the problem and strengthen state powers of intrusion and censorship”.