A 16-year-old girl in Perth, Australia, a good student and popular in school, took a naked photo of herself while standing in front of a bathroom mirror. She sent it via Snapchat, so that it would automatically disappear in seconds, to her 17-year-old boyfriend, with the words: “I love you. I trust you.”
The boyfriend took a screenshot before it disappeared and shared it with five of his friends. They in turn shared it with 47 of their friends. Within a few days, more than 200 people in the school had a copy. Someone uploaded it to a porn site, naming the girl and her school; over three months, with the help of online searches directing people to the site, the photo was downloaded 7,000 times. The family moved to a different city, but students there found the image as well, so the family fled to a different state in Australia.
Paul Litherland, a former Australian police officer who worked on the case, told me that the photo was posted on porn websites all over the world, so the girl felt she could never escape. She refused to attend school. She self-medicated with drugs. And then, at the age of 21, she took her life.