Revenge porn: one woman's story

A Central Okanagan woman is sharing her story about being the victim of revenge porn, alleging her ex-fiance posted sexual photos of her online without her permission after their break-up.

The woman is in her 40s and works as a counsellor, and CBC News has agreed not to reveal her identity for the sake of her children.

She was in what she thought was a healthy relationship with a man living in the U.S. They were together for four years, and were engaged before the relationship ended badly.

She said after the break-up her ex-fiance posted the nude photos on Twitter and tagged them with her own business account on Twitter.

"There is no way I would've ever anticipated this would've happened," she told CBC News.

"I think I spent half an hour in shock, really in this surreal moment of, 'Did this just happen?'"

The woman contacted Twitter immediately, asking for the photos to be removed, but says the pictures stayed up for 36 hours.

"I don't know in that 36 hours who else saw them, what they did with them, if they've been re-shared."

'This is not okay'

The woman said she had taken the photos of herself, and shared them with her then-fiance, who was living in Texas at the time, and he was also sharing photos of himself.

But she says regardless of who took the photos, and how and why they were shared, she is not to blame.

"This is not about some woman's poor choices in partner or some woman's poor judgment or promiscuity or anything like that," she said.

"This is about putting the focus where it belongs, which is this is not okay and it needs to be not okay on a really big scale."

The woman has filed a complaint with her ex's employer and is looking into taking legal action in the United States.

At least a dozen U.S. states have laws dealing with revenge porn, but there's no mention of revenge porn within the Canadian Criminal Code.

C-13, aproposed law that covers the sharing of sexual photos without consent, has yet to be passed by the Canadian Parliament. Critics have raised concerns about how other parts of C-13 would affect privacy rights.