Stop Blaming The Victims

Following Emma Watson’s UN speechon gender equality, she received threats on the internet from people declaring that they would find her private photos and leak them to the world. Although it was later declared a hoax, this threat is no laughing matter. This potentially career ruining action was taken against actresses such as Jenifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Kristen Dunst, Anna Kendrick, and many other famous women. Response to these leaks always includes victim blaming; comments included things like “She shouldn't have taken the pictures to begin with,” and “She shouldn't have kept them on her phone if she did not want them to be seen” fill comment threads on articles, even the ones that specifically explain why the hackers who released the photos are the only ones to blame for the incidents.

For some reason, many people who have heard about this situation do not seem to agree that everyone deserves their own privacy, celebrity or not. When their privacy is taken it is often seen as the victim’s fault, never the fault of the one who took their well-deserved privacy from them. In this world, these celebrities – especially the women – cannot have the privacy they need, even on their phones. One article stated that “We are neverallowed to forget how the rules are different for girls.” The price of their fame is that these women seem to lose their equally deserved right to privacy and then are blamed when it is taken from them. If they take pictures like the ones that were stolen from their phones, they are at risk of them being found by any stranger who knows the basics of hacking. Although some have argued that devices meant for “Mass communication” should not be used to take pictures like these, mass communication was not agreed to by the sender or the phone owner, and these pictures should never have been released for the world to see.

We need to stop blaming the victim of these crimes and realize how incidents like these can damage or ruin an actress’s career. They often cannot escape this incident or wipe it from other’s minds; they would never have chosen for this to happen to them, and they are not to blame. Anyone who views the pictures or laughs about the idea of another actress, such as Emma Watson, having her private pictures released, is contributing to the damage and abuse caused to these actresses. Those people, along with the hackers, are to blame for the problems created by the leaked photos, not the victims. We need to respect the privacy of these actresses, and should stop the spread of their private photos around the internet. We all deserve and need our privacy, famous or not, and should not be blamed when it is taken from us.