This article references image-based abuse.
“Have you seen this?” Maya’s friend asks, leaning over to point at her phone and uttering the words guaranteed to fill any woman with gut-wrenching dread: “Your photos are all over this website.”
Maya scrolls tentatively, panic rising from her stomach as she absorbs what she’s seeing on the screen. She recognises the images. They’ve been taken from her Vinted account. “It’s like the dark web of Vinted,” her friend adds, explaining how she came across the ‘Vinted Sluts’ site via TikTok.
“It was unsettling,” 28-year-old Maya tells me of the experience, recalling how she’d previously received unsolicited sexual messages from men on the second-hand selling platform but never expected to find herself on a site like this. “I felt vulnerable,” she says, adding that the site made her social media accounts and location easily identifiable. “I’ve been stalked online and sent perverted messages. I’m always watching over my shoulder now.”
Maya isn’t alone in this experience. Last week, a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary exposed how women’s photos are being taken from Vinted – which has 16 million users in the UK and over 100 million worldwide, most of whom are women, according to statistics – without consent and uploaded to external websites. ‘Vinted Sluts’ has been shut down since the show was filmed, but this likely isn’t the end.
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Digging into the depths of the internet to find more women who’ve been victim to the likes of ‘Vinted Sluts’, I connect with 21-year-old Deimantė, who suspects her images have fallen into the wrong hands. “I had no idea this was happening,” she tells me. “When I first started receiving unsolicited sexual messages on Vinted, I didn't think much of it. It’s just ‘creeps being creeps’.”
“I uploaded a screenshot of one interaction to Reddit thinking it would make people laugh,” Deimantė recalls. “Almost immediately, my inbox was flooded with women warning me about groups where people post photos of women from Vinted for sexual gain.”
“The more I read, the more I panicked. I started looking for these groups, desperate to know if I’d been posted, desperate to know if my worst fear had become reality. I felt disgusted,” she says. Like many of the women I spoke to during this investigation, she asks: “Why are men using Vinted to sexualise women?”
“The intention of Vinted is to share, buy, and sell clothing, but what we see here shows and illustrates the way in which technology is weaponised against women and girls,” says Elena Michael, Co-Founder and Director of Not Your Porn, a UK-based campaign group fighting to make the internet a safer place.
“The online space is incredibly hostile towards women and girls. A wider conversation has to be had about the role every platform plays in facilitating a culture of entitlement to our bodies,” she adds. “If we're not tackling this behaviour online, that will only perpetuate this attitude in the offline world.”
“The protests all over France showed that Gisèle is not alone. Every victim deserves to have that support.”
It’s this entitlement to women’s bodies that seems to be the driving factor behind sites like ‘Vinted Sluts’, with many believing that porn addiction is to blame. “Women literally can’t exist in any space without men fucking harassing and sexualising us,” one woman wrote in a Reddit thread, as another added: “These porn-addled men will always find a way to be creeps.” Similarly, someone else wrote, “porn addiction goes so fucking far and yet people act like porn doesn’t cause any harm.”
Earlier this year, the government announced plans to make the sharing of intimate images without consent a ‘priority offence’ under its Online Safety Act. The move – reiterating the legal requirement that social media platforms proactively remove and stop this material or face fines – is a step in the right direction. But what is an ‘intimate’ image? And, could the question mark surrounding this be a loophole for further objectification of women and girls online?
“We define an ‘intimate image’ as an image that is either sexual, nude, partially nude, or of toileting,” the Law Commission says, adding: “The definition of ‘intimate’ should exclude images where they only depict something that is ordinarily seen on a public street.” Taking that into account, of all the images I encountered in my investigation, there are very few that would satisfy the government’s ‘intimate’ image criteria.
A quick scroll through the ‘Vinted Thots’ Reddit thread is evidence of that. Numerous posts are labelled ‘Not Safe For Work’, yet when I click on them, I see innocuous images being sexualised to an extreme degree. In one, a woman (whose face has been partially cropped out) wears a white top with blue jeans. Her nipples protrude slightly through the top, but there’s no nudity, no cleavage, no exposed breasts – by the government’s definition, there’s nothing ‘intimate’ about this image. Regardless, one comment on the post reads: “Buy it, wank with it, and return it.”
For women there’s really been just two permitted positions: either you’re the cool girl who loves porn or the one who thinks it's violent.
Other posts show women wearing what could be described as more ‘revealing’ outfits – mini dresses, crop tops, bikinis etc. There’s nothing inherently sexual about the images I find. They resemble those you might upload to an Instagram Story, and they’ve clearly been shared on Vinted to show how an item fits IRL.
Instead, they’re being used as an excuse to point the finger. “Don’t post yourself on Vinted like that,” is one comment I read in response to a woman seeking advice in a Reddit thread. “You need to take some accountability,” another one asserts, “that is a choice you are making, and the result will be that creeps will find those photos.”
“It's completely outrageous to suggest that women are to blame for their Vinted images being abused, and it is just another form of victim blaming,” Not Your Porn’s Elena replies when I tell her about some of the comments I’ve read.
“No one is responsible for their own abuse,” agrees Rebecca Hitchen, Head of Policy and Campaigns at the End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW). “Responses to abuse that tell women and girls to change their behaviour online or ‘come offline’ are unrealistic in an era in which our lives are largely lived online, and wrongly place the burden on women to limit their freedoms.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, even when women aren’t sharing images of themselves, they’re still being sexualised without consent. “I uploaded a photo of some heels to Vinted and had someone ask if I’ve ‘ever inserted a heel into myself?’” says Chloe, another woman I connect with.
During our conversation, the 35-year-old recalls being offered “extra ££” to model underwear she’d uploaded to the selling platform. In a different exchange, a man asked if she wanted to receive images of him masturbating over her uploads. “You assume the other people on the app are sellers or buyers like you,” she tells me. “But after my encounters, I believe Vinted is attracting some users who sign up to satisfy fetishes and sexual desires.”
All of the women I spoke to reported their concerns to Vinted and, while the platform did take steps to rectify these issues, Maya, Deimantė, and Chloe say not enough is being done. “There needs to be more of an authentication process,” Chloe stresses. “Users can confirm an account by email alone, so if they’re banned all they need is a new email address. Telephone numbers should be linked to accounts to stop banned members from easily creating another.”
When I put all of the above to Vinted, a spokesperson for the platform assures me they’re working hard behind the scenes to make the platform a safer space. “We have multiple robust measures in place to detect the creation of multiple accounts,” I’m told. “We don’t share the extent of these publicly for security reasons, but it means we are very successful in identifying these accounts and taking the appropriate actions.”
“We don’t want our members to have these experiences and we are taking the allegations seriously,” the spokesperson adds of the ‘Vinted Sluts’ exposé. “We immediately reported the website mentioned in the documentary, which led to its shutdown. We encourage members to report any listing or situation that would violate our rules, so we can take action. Users found to be violating our Terms and Conditions face various actions, including a potential permanent ban. We are also constantly working on additional measures to bring even more protection to our members and their transactions, so we can keep Vinted a safe, secure, and friendly platform for everyone.”
We're calling on the government to take urgent action.
The infiltration of what should be a harmless second-hand selling platform speaks to a wider issue we already know to be true: violence against women and girls starts small. As small as screenshotting an image of a twenty-something in a t-shirt.
“Online abuse is a form of violence against women and girls that is deeply harmful and growing at a rapid rate,” says EVAW’s Rebecca. “Our lives are largely lived online now, and abuse perpetrated against us online is no less devastating, terrifying, or real.”
“That’s why we are calling for the law to force tech platforms like Vinted to prevent abuse of its users via an Image-Based Abuse Law,” Rebecca continues, pointing to the petition GLAMOUR has launched alongside EVAW, Not Your Porn, and leading expert Professor Clare McGlynn (more on that here). “[Having this law in place] would strengthen routes to justice, create takedown orders on platforms and perpetrators, hold tech companies accountable for profiting from abuse, and educate the public on sexual consent and healthy relationships in the digital age.”
Until that law comes into place, it seems as though the burden is once again on women to keep ourselves safe. “It's not pleasant to think about, but at this point it feels out of my control,” Deimantė says of her photos being out there. “I believe this can and will continue to happen, regardless of the platform. All I can do is adjust what I post, like not showing my face,” she adds, echoing Chloe’s sentiment: “I still use Vinted but don’t post photos of myself purely to avoid the unwanted attention.”
At the end of our conversation, Deimantė tells me she’s trying to reframe the experience – after all, it’s not women who should feel embarrassed and ashamed by this. “I have bigger concerns for the men doing all this,” she says. “I pity them. They clearly have such sad lives.”
GLAMOUR is campaigning for the government to introduce an Image-Based Abuse Bill in partnership with Jodie Campaigns, the End Violence Against Women Coalition, Not Your Porn, and Professor Clare McGlynn.
Revenge Porn Helpline provides advice, guidance and support to victims of intimate image-based abuse over the age of 18 who live in the UK. You can call them on 0345 6000 459.
The Cyber Helpline provides free, expert help and advice to people targeted by online crime and harm in the UK and USA.
Campaigner and influencer Cally Jane Beech is being honoured as GLAMOUR’S Activist of the Year at our annual Women of the Year Awards for courageously taking a stand against digitally altered, sexually explicit ‘deepfakes’ of women and girls. Here, she speaks to GLAMOUR about her experience of deepfake abuse, how motherhood influences her activism, and why she’s calling on the government to protect all survivors of image-based abuse.
