Meet Jenna. This is her story about being filmed non-consensually during sex. Although the incident happened three years ago, the traumatic effects of experiencing image-based sexual abuse (IBSA) linger to this very day. In sharing Jenna’s story, we seek to not only illuminate the severe repercussions of IBSA but also validate the pain that others who have encountered similar forms of abuse grapple with.
*All names have been replaced by pseudonyms to protect the victim-survivor’s anonymity. The victim-survivor also gave us her explicit permission to share her account and make minor structural amendments to enhance the general coherence of her story.
The Beginning
I must have you know that these words describe the most vulnerable state I have been in 21 years of my life. Writing this statement pains me and puts me through the trauma again, as I attempt to put what has happened into proper sentences. It pains me that I am required to expose myself to a panel of judges who I have never met and especially to the person who abused my trust and vulnerability.
I cannot show you the betrayal when someone you are intimate with films you secretly. Or the extent that my perpetrator’s selfishness and complete disrespect for my consent has caused irreversible damage to me. I can only try to show you snippets of it, and hope that anyone reading this, including Alex, my perpetrator, would grasp and take seriously the debilitating effects that sexual crimes have on victim-survivors. I do not want your sympathy, I only want your understanding.
I am not sure which part of the sex Alex had decided to film. If my suspicions are right, the first video was likely taken on the night of 10th April in 2021. This was a few days after he had gotten his position as chairman of his University’s Hall. He seemed rather anxious, awaiting the election results of his executive members. During sex, he wanted to check his phone for the results. I was aware that he was using his phone and allowed it because I empathised with his anxiety and understood how important the results were to him. It did not occur to me that he would exploit the trust I had in him. I consented to having sex, him using his phone to check the results, but I clearly said no to filming.
I gave an inch and he took a mile.
The next day, after some difficulty, when I managed to get him to unlock his phone to check my suspicions, I saw two videos of my bare butt in his album. I was in disbelief, consumed by anger and fear when it dawned on me that he had filmed me.
To paint the scene, we were both stark naked. My nudity juxtaposed by my frantic deletion of the videos highlights how insanely vulnerable I felt and how, in a split second, any semblance of trust I had for him evaporated. The room had become a crime scene and I had become a victim.
To date, I am still gripped by the paralysing fear that I would not have known about the footages had I not checked his phone. I also think about the catastrophic possibilities if I had not found out. Both videos were taken when I was facing away from him. Alex knew I was in a compromising position–one in which I was unable to see him use his phone–and took advantage of that.
Upon getting home, I was at a loss. While consulting my friends, over text, on whether to make a report, I was asked “What do you want?”. On one hand, I knew what Alex did was criminal, unscrupulous, and deserving of punishment. However, I was confronted by the uncertainty of making a report and the potential consequences to his future. It was ridiculous to have considered his future prospects–he chose to neglect my interests after all–but I could not abandon that thought because it was a possible consequence of the report.
While confiding in my brother and his girlfriend, the first two people I told about being filmed in person, I broke down for the first time.
There is an inexplicable pain when you break the news to people who love you. You feel guilty almost, seeing the concern in their eyes, knowing that they feel the heartbreak as much as you do.
They advised me to make a report and accompanied me to the police station where I was still confused about whether making a report was the right decision.
At the Police Station
It is practice for female police officers to take the statement of victims of sexual crimes. After waiting for a while, the female officer hurriedly gestured to me to go over. She asked if it was okay for a male officer to take my statement instead, for she was trying to wrap up her current case and was supposed to go off duty then. I was not exactly given a choice, noting the frustration in her voice. While the male officer who took my statement was perfectly civil, this added to my sense of helplessness.
During the statement, I detailed the filming to the officer. The officer asked me, “What is the purpose of lodging this report?”. The officer likely saw the confusion on my face, and asked, “Is it to ensure that there are no more videos?” I nodded. Having to answer what my purpose of making a report was ludicrous – isn’t it simply that a crime had been committed?
The officer then had to make several calls to the investigating officers. In doing so, he repeated the details of my case on the phone call over and over again. I heard, at least 5 times, about how I met Alex on the night of 10th April, how I did not consent to recording and how there were 2 videos–one in the ‘recently deleted’ and one in the ‘recents album’. The officer, in response to the clarifications on the call, mentioned that “there was no threatening” and “there was no dissemination”.
This is just due process, and clarifications are necessary. However, constantly hearing about the details just hours after the filming happened, and hearing insinuations that my case was not that severe was very difficult. I felt restless and uncomfortable as I looked over my shoulder to my brother for comfort.
There was a lady who took her statement concurrently beside me. She reported that a stranger had been filming her while she was in the market. My brother’s girlfriend told me that if being filmed in a public space while fully clothed was enough to cause someone such distress, my case demanded stronger action and I made the right decision to report.
I clung onto these words for comfort.
The Aftermath
What happens after sitting through a 2-hour statement at the police station? You go home, you try not to cry in front of your parents, and you eat your dinner. You bathe, trying to feel better, and you try to catch some sleep. It doesn’t work, your mind is too frantic–you end up dozing off at 4am. Waking up the next day, you attempt to distract yourself with things you used to do daily, but your mind wanders off.
I had to actively seek for updates after the report weekly. Till now, I have yet to receive substantial updates from the police, other than the fact that they have seized Alex’s devices and that he has admitted to filming.
After a month of inaction and no updates, it got disorientating–did this really happen to me? My patience was running low. I could not make sense of my suffering while life moved on as per normal for Alex. It disgusted me when a mutual friend of ours told me Alex was doing a photoshoot for a hall event.
Envisioning him using a camera made me want to kill myself.
I could not sleep and lay on my bed while angry tears fell–What else could I do? That night, I decided more had to be done. I drafted an email to his university and sent it the morning I woke up. I was shocked that the police did not inform his university and regretted knowing that I could have reached out to the university a month ago.
Notwithstanding that, I felt like I was finally making headway. It felt good to finally receive prompt replies and timelines from an authority. My anxiety eased a little, seeing that this was not going to be dealt with lightly. News that Alex had been evicted gave me a momentary sense of relief. One of my punches had finally landed. It satisfied a sense of vindictiveness that grew in me. I wanted people to know that he had done something wrong. I thought that evicting him would force him to explain to his mother about what he did, for him to face the ensuing disappointment. However, this momentary victory came crashing down as he was evicted the day that many people were moving home from hall. It would be as though nothing happened once again. As though his filming me was inconsequential.
I began beating myself up for not contacting his university earlier, and threw myself into despair by self-reproach. I hope you do not take these feelings of vindictiveness unkindly. I derive no pleasure from wishing ill upon Alex and wish I could focus on something else, move on, live and let live. However, these feelings are simply corollary to the prolonged pain and indignance. They are inevitable as long as justice has not been served, for it threatens the core of my being.
Knowing that he has not received any punishment makes me doubt the voice in my head that says that what he did was wrong. It makes me question my worth. While waiting on the formal punishments to affirm that voice in my head, I have to seek solace in vengeance, almost like a gimmick to distract myself from the lack of response from authorities.
At the end of the day, I am only fighting to say no, to hold Alex accountable, and his fallout is secondary but necessary.
Something that I heard about Alex’s statement made me laugh during my statement-taking with his University. I heard that he asked why he was given 2 counts when he had deleted one of the videos. As my friend put it astutely, just because you buried someone poorly does not mean you did not murder that person.
Alex had been described as “forthcoming” by admitting that he had filmed. I wonder how much that can be attributed to the fact that I had receipts of his admission, and how much of that reflects actual remorse. Would someone truly remorseful wonder why he was given 2 counts instead of 1 for something he did? I can’t be sure.
Around the same time, my sister fell victim to sexual harassment at work. The offender was given a warning. My parents were unaware of what had happened to me but knew what was going on with my sister. Their responses were, to say the least, unsupportive. The inaction and mishandling of her case made my blood boil.
For months, I had deliberated the issue over and over, frustrated by the system and the wait, the lack of action. For months, I lay in bed wide awake at night. I was so tired but there were so many things to address–plans for what was next, emotions to process, trying to make sense of my anger and suffering. I felt sick to the core that this issue had become the centre of all my conversations and occupied my mind, every second of the day. I was sick of the name Alex. I felt sick of bringing heaviness to my loved ones
Ramifications
There is a paradox between me wanting to leave the filming behind and having to remember every detail for investigations–an incongruity between caring for my mental health and dealing with the due process. Before making the report, I told myself that this whole process would be long. But no amount of mental preparation was enough to foresee the ensuing days and nights of anxiety and helplessness.
I break down randomly, unable to rationalise what is happening–I had been taken advantage of but nothing is being done about it. Often, I feel breathless and weak. The filming happened weeks before my examinations. Sitting in front of my laptop with the notes opened, while my mind wandered off to what Alex did to me was a frequent occurrence. I often think about how if he had spared a thought for me, how different my life would be. How I hated thinking about him. How we make choices and Alex had made an irresponsible one.
I notice myself being very angry a lot. Within a split second, Alex had made me a victim, forced to navigate the legal system and authorities. I had to make difficult choices–do you want to report and accept the intrusion of strangers for an indefinite amount of time? or let things go and accept the humiliation?
I am angry because of how invasive this whole process has been. From taking hours to record my statement, struggling to focus in school while being overwhelmed by the uncertainty and anxiety, to constantly pressing for updates in fear of being forgotten and, now, taking time off my internship for a hearing and to write this statement.
Without any closure for a long time, my anger becomes an ugly thing, with nowhere to release it. I sometimes notice my anger in conversations with my friends, family and myself. I catch myself closing off and becoming irritable. I am still relearning that a victim is not all I am. That I am not my anger, that I am worth something regardless of the outcome.
I am frequently ambushed by the fear that I said something detrimental to my case, such as when the officer asked if Alex and I were in a romantic relationship or just met for sex. I always answer the latter, because how else do I explain the relationship between us, if it was not romantic? What Alex and I had was an arrangement of sexual exclusivity, but both of us did not want to be involved in a committed relationship. We were free to date other people, clearly setting physical boundaries. We spoke about being confused about physical intimacy and feeling attached. Once, I had confided in him and expressed discomfort at being vulnerable. He assured me and made me feel like I could be vulnerable with him.
My point is, Alex was not a simple stranger to me. Setting these boundaries together and him wanting to be there for me formed a sense of trust. To say that we were mere strangers who met for sex occasionally would not be an accurate depiction of the nature of our relationship. As much as I hate to admit it, alongside the anger, I had felt a sense of loss. I had to process grief from the sudden death of a friendship with someone I had felt intimate with. Being physically intimate is a huge thing to me and Alex was the 2nd person I have ever been intimate with, for a prolonged period of time. I struggled with reconciling the anger and any feelings of adoration I had for Alex. Though I had braced myself for a possibility that he would break the arrangement, I had not braced for his complete lack of respect for my consent.
Undoubtedly, it is not my fault that this happened to me. Alex’s lacking morals caused this to happen, but shame and doubt are often irrational. Sometimes, at my worst moments, I would doubt myself and wonder what it was about me that made me so unworthy of respect. I also felt embarrassed of how needy I had become, often needing emotional support and assurance from my friends and siblings.
I notice myself being more wary with people, even those I have come to trust for years. Talking to friends sometimes left me feeling worse, as they did not respond with the proper sensitivity I needed or were not able to hold space for me. I often hold back from reaching out because there is simply nothing they can do about the slow process. I try to assure myself that not everyone is out to get me and that I need to learn to trust again. But that fails and it is not a surprise that it does. After all, that was what I thought about Alex. I tried to have faith and he filmed me naked, unaware, trusting.
Any piece of related information was capable of triggering emotions in me, leaving me dazed for hours on end. Despite feeling worse by reading more, I found myself unwittingly reading articles related to university students who had committed acts of voyeurism– because I needed a sense of what outcome I could expect, a sense of certainty, anything to put my racing thoughts to rest.
Recently, I read about Jonathan Angga Dharmawan Jie, an NUS student who filmed two unsuspecting women while they were showering, to "gain a sense of accomplishment", having been "a bit tipsy" after downing some alcoholic drinks. He was given a suspension of his candidature from Oct 30, 2019 until May 7, 2022, a notation of the period of suspension in his academic transcript, mandatory counselling, supervised community service, as well as rehabilitation and reconciliation sessions with a facilitator.
Perhaps I am not privy to nuances of the case, and I am happy to stand corrected by the more experienced panel of judges, but from the facts alone, suspension for 3 years seems light for causing not one but two women life-long trauma. Suspension does not have a proper deterrent effect at all, for its temporary nature suggests to offenders that they just need to lie low for a few years before everyone will forget their names and they can resume their education.
I fully believe that offenders deserve another chance. But to focus on the potential of their lives now is getting ahead of ourselves. Before we can even get there, the punishment must meet the crime and offenders must be held accountable for their actions and the hurt they have imposed on the victims’ lives.
Being a first-time offender should not play too heavily into mitigation–we are not talking about a 5-year-old playing with the stove, you do not need to try it out to know that it is wrong. On the contrary, we are talking about consent, sexual voyeurism–topics which have been and are still hotly discussed by masses. This is a man who became hall president, held a scholarship and underwent 3 years of legal education. Alex is old enough to know better. The “potential” that Alex showed should not be a mitigating factor, but as reasons to hold him to higher standards of decency and accountability.
The idea of Alex filming others as a professional videographer and people trusting him without knowing that he has done this affects me deeply. I know it is unhealthy and unrealistic for me to hold onto that anger forever and a part of me genuinely hopes that this does not harden Alex but serves as a wake-up call. However, without proper recourse from authorities and appropriate punishment that both punishes and deters him from future offence, I cannot let this anger go, for I would have gone through everything for nothing.
I am imploring you to make right what has been wrong for the past 3 months. To give hope to victims that their dignity and interests are cared for. To send a resounding signal to people who gain a sense of accomplishment from taking advantage of unwary victims that they need to hold themselves accountable for the decisions they make.
Idealistically, we would have morally upright students who learn to respect consent from taking classes. However, given the outrageous influx of voyeurism and non-consent cases, it is clear as day that education alone is insufficient for a long-term change. I beg you to stop enabling these offenders and recognise the necessity of heavier sanctions like expulsion.
Please, do not diminish the gravity and validity of our suffering.
~
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