Sextortion (sex+extortion) employs non-physical forms of coercion to extort sexual favors from the victim. Sextortion refers to the broad category of sexual exploitation in which abuse of power is the means of coercion, as well as to the category of sexual exploitation in which threatened release of sexual images or information is the means of coercion.
As used to describe an abuse of power, sextortion is a form of corruption in which people entrusted with power – such as government officials, judges, educators, law enforcement personnel, and employers – seek to extort sexual favors in exchange for something within their authority to grant or withhold. Examples of such abuses of power include: government officials who request sexual favors to obtain licenses or permits, teachers who trade good grades for sex with students and employers who make providing sexual favors a condition of obtaining a job.
Sextortion also refers to a form of blackmail in which sexual information or images are used to extort sexual favors from the victim. Social media and text messages are often the source of the sexual material and the threatened means of sharing it with others. An example of this type of sextortion is where people are extorted with a nude image of themselves they shared on the Internet through sexting. They are later coerced into performing sexual acts with the person doing the extorting or are coerced into posing or performing sexually on camera, thus producing hardcore pornography. This method of blackmail is also frequently used to out LGBT people who keep their true sexual orientation private.
Sextortion can have devastating effects on young victims from all walks of life and it is easy to become a victim.
Online perpetrators might gain your trust by pretending to be someone they are not.
They lurk in chat rooms and record young people who post or live-stream sexually explicit images and videos of themselves, or they may hack into your electronic devices using malware to gain access to your files and control your web camera and microphone without you knowing it.
A video highlighting the dangers of sextortion has been released by the National Crime Agency in the UK to educate people, especially given the fact that blackmail of a sexual nature may cause humiliation to a sufficient extent to cause the victim to take their own life, in addition to other efforts to educate the public on the risks of sextortion.
Here are some things you can do to avoid becoming a victim:
Never send compromising images of yourself to anyone, no matter who they are—or who they say they are.
Turn off your electronic devices and web cameras when you are not using them.
If you are receiving sextortion threats, you are not alone.
Stop all contact with the offender.
Avoid the urge to share too much information as this could make you vulnerable to hackers.
Report the crime to police immediately and turn to your friends and family members for help.
File a complaint against sextortion online or at your nearest cyber crime cell. You can also anonymously file an online complaint against such offence on the national cyber crime reporting portal cybercrime.gov.in
Don’t delete anything. Keep it all. It’s no longer your shame to bear. It’s now your ammo.
Meet with a law firm that knows how sexual extortionists operate.
Always remember, you are the victim of a malicious abuser who is relying on your silence to continue the assault. Offenders in such crimes thrive on the victim’s silence and lack of clarity in the law.
So, don’t be ashamed, afraid and terrified. Act now as your ‘silence’ will never bring ‘honour’ to you.