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Video transcript

 Hello, welcome to Chayn’s deep dive on technology-facilitated gender-based violence, sometimes called tech abuse. I’m Francesca.

 And I’m Carolina. Francesca and I both deliver Chayn’s services for survivors. Before she joined Chayn, Francesca supported many survivors of sexual violence while working in the Rape Crisis movement in the UK. And I have done lots of different work in the theatre space focused on trauma and healing, as well as in migrant justice.

 At Chayn, we want to talk more with survivors about tech abuse. We think it’s a really under-explored issue, and we dedicate a lot of time to thinking about what it is, what its impacts are, and how we can recover.

: Yes, definitely. And because the resources that we create for survivors are digital—aka they are accessed online—we think it’s important to acknowledge how violence can also happen in an online space. So we want to explore how digital spaces can therefore be sites of harm, but also for healing.

: For sure. That feels like an important thing to come to these conversations with! So today, we’re going to talk about deepfakes. Deepfakes are images or videos created using artificial intelligence technology to look like us. This conversation is prompted by a story Carolina saw online in The Guardian newspaper. The article really highlights how deepfakes can be weaponised, and leave survivors with really long-lasting impacts.

: Absolutely. When I read this story, I was thinking about how important it is as it illustrates the modern tools abusers can use to exploit and control. Today we’re going to unpack this together, and think about what recovery and healing can look like after experiencing deepfake abuse.

 Just a content note that we’ll be discussing details of tech abuse, harassment, and deepfake abuse in this conversation, so we invite you to take as much care as you need, and pause or stop listening wherever you like. If any time you need to ground in the present moment, we have lots of different grounding exercises over on our trauma support platform, Bloom.

 The article we’re focusing on today features Helen’s story, about how deepfake images were created of her, leading to a horrific violation of her autonomy and her sense of self.

: Helen was stunned when, during the winter of 2020, a friend arrived at her house with some news. ‘What he told me was stranger than I could ever have imagined’ - she recalls. He told her that he’d encountered images of her on a porn site—images that were manipulated and faked, images of Helen’s face on other people’s bodies—galleries of pictures uploaded to this website by someone claiming to be Helen’s boyfriend.

: Helen didn’t understand how this could’ve happened, or why. She’d never shared any intimate pictures of herself with anybody. When Helen was told all of this by her friend, she began shouting the same things on repeat—”

That’s impossible. What have I done to deserve it?”.

 She describes how the sounds were coming from her body, that she was unable to really hear what her friend was saying, only catching words and phrases. Helen was shocked, and deeply confused.

: It sounds like it was really incomprehensible to her, she couldn’t understand it. And her body went into a deep panic. So scary. Before we carry on, let’s talk a bit about deepfakes. Before AI was common, deepfakes were created using Photoshop or other photo editing software. With the boom in AI, the last few years have seen a

 in deepfakes. It’s sometimes called ‘morph porn’ or ‘parasite porn’. Typically, for a deepfake, someone will take our identifiable image, very often of our face, and put it onto another image or video, using AI technology that can make the resulting picture or video look very, very real.

: The original image may have been shared with consent or it could’ve been stolen from social media accounts and then superimposed onto pornographic material. This can be done by using sexual 

 non-sexual images. Many survivors have experienced non-sexual images being turned into highly graphic or sexual images as a part of their abuse - and this was Helen’s case.

: There have been some really high profile examples of deepfake abuse, including to the singer Taylor Swift in 2024, the Hollywood actress

 in 2018. But it can happen to anyone, not just famous celebrities. You may have heard about this too—maybe it happened to someone you know, or maybe you’ve been taking steps to protect your own images.

 It happened to Helen. The same night her friend had told her what happened, she sat down to look at the images he told her about. Helen said that some of them were like grotesque Photoshop and were obviously fake. But others looked more realistic. Some of them showed violent sex. All of them were profoundly unsettling. She knew that whoever had done this had used various tools to create them. But, at the time, Helen had no idea there were specific apps out there where people can make faked pictures and videos in an instant.

: Helen quickly worked out that the perpetrator had downloaded selfies and pictures of herself on holiday from her social media or from Googling her name. They then used those images to make the deepfakes. Though shocked and numb, she took screenshots. Later on, she called the police.

: Helen talks about her feelings during that process, feelings that will be shared by lots of survivors of deepfake and image-based abuse. She felt deeply violated, but completely uncertain about what the police response would be like. Her experience felt intangible in some way—she hadn’t been physically assaulted. The pictures weren’t hers, but they were 

: Exactly. Helen found it difficult to explain how images that weren’t “real” but had been digitally manipulated could have such a massive affect. She was having nightmares, she felt exposed, like everybody in public knew about what had happened, she was incredibly anxious. She felt haunted.

: When I read Helen’s story, it made me think of traumatic experiences that just come completely out of nowhere. This feeling of like, “Who did this? Who sent this my way? Why?”. And not having any answers for those questions, so there’s such a profound sense of powerlessness in that. There’s nobody to fight against, or to direct the rage and the despair at. Helen felt like a character in a story, one that had no escape.

: And where does she escape to? It’s the online world. These are not physical spaces. Things are stored in the cloud, in the air, it feels totally intangible. Where are these pictures? Who has seen them? Will they be there forever? It doesn’t matter that the image has been manipulated, that it isn’t “real”—on the internet, so much is real even when it’s a forgery or a fake. 

The impacts on her life are real. The feelings are real.

: After a few hours feeling numb, slightly aimless and unsure of what to do next, Helen was able to call the police. When she did speak with them, they were empathic. But in the UK in 2020, making intimate deepfakes was not a crime. She was told that, if the pictures had been emailed to her as a form of blackmail, there may have been a case to pursue. But nobody had threatened her—she didn’t even know the pictures existed until her friend told her.

: That sense of powerlessness is really strong, it really came through to me as I read through Helen’s words. It feels like there isn’t that strong understanding of how serious deepfake abuse is, and the severe impacts it can have on survivors’ lives.

: Helen felt very alone. She wanted and needed to talk to her friends and family but she felt deeply ashamed, like she had somehow brought it on herself. She felt what lots of survivors feel after their experiences of abuse, like it was 

 fault. And what do we always want to come back to, Francesca?

: That abuse is never, ever the survivor’s fault. It can take time to connect with this truth, but it’s a deeply important one. You are not to blame.

: Absolutely. We must hold onto that. Helen’s friends were kind, but they didn’t understand the gravity of what had happened. Some of her friends said things like “someone must have really fancied you to have done that”. Most people in her networks hadn’t even heard of deepfakes before. Because the understanding around deepfakes is so limited, people’s reactions can be very harmful too. That’s why services who do ‘get it’ are so important, like Bloom and our community here at Chayn.

: Another response Helen experienced was the people around her focusing on how she could have kept herself safe, rather than focusing more on how we can stop this type of abuse. As Helen said—”even if I had been sharing nudes, it wouldn’t have given someone else the right to share them with the world”.

 This is so important. This is really connected to wider responses to gender-based violence, where the focus is often on survivors taking actions to “be safe” or “prevent” violence, rather than trying to eliminate violence through focusing on abusers and 

 choices and actions. What else could Helen have done?

: Exactly. It feels like such a victim-blaming narrative to focus on what survivors should or shouldn’t do to keep themselves from abuse. There certainly are steps that we can take to keep ourselves 

 online, like changing our social media settings so that only people we’ve approved can access our images and information. We’ve included some links and resources on this on Bloom that you can explore if and when you’re ready.

 There are steps we can take in our digital lives for sure. But this doesn’t mean that it’s solely our responsibility. The fact is, nobody has any right to harm us and we’re not responsible for other people’s choices. We shouldn’t have to hide, make ourselves small, or edit ourselves online just out of the fear of being abused.

: Helen was also worried about the divide between her generation and the generation of her parents and her older relatives. Would they understand what deepfakes are? Would they understand how technology can be used to digitally manipulate images, and just how convincing some of that technology can be?

: Exactly. My parents for example, have sent me many manipulated images believing that they were real and believing in that information. It wasn’t sexual content, but my point is about the danger of having fake content spread across the internet and the effects of it in people’s lives— from how we shape perceptions to how this type of technology can control and manipulate us all.

: Yes, and on top of that we still have cultural stories of blame which can often feed into a really strong sense of shame, even though it’s not our shame to carry. In many societies, deepfake abuse may have harmed our reputations or our families reputation — even though they’re not “real” intimate images of us.

We might feel like we’ve let others down, including the places we work or study, our religious communities, or our families. These barriers—whether generational, cultural, or structural—can make it even harder to talk to people about the abuse.

: Exactly, and it’s okay if we cannot separate our shame from the shame handed to us! It’s possible to logically accept that it’s not our shame to carry, that we’ve internalised it from the outside, and still feel it. This can be very overwhelming, frustrating, and confusing but our emotions are complex.

: Definitely. Give yourself grace and compassion as you navigate through your feelings. Sometimes, a place to start can be trying to make some space for whatever feelings are coming up. If you feel able to, you can write them down.

: Helen also talked about the power of writing in her process. She said that she couldn’t change what had happened to her image without her consent, but she could try to reclaim control through writing and creating. So she wrote and filmed a poem about her experience and shared it on her socials, with a petition calling for the criminalisation of deepfake abuse. We have some activities focused on journalling over on the Bloom platform that you can check out if you want to explore what writing could look like in your process (

: Yeah, I thought she talked so beautifully about how she wanted to show that she wasn’t humiliated and wasn’t going to just shrink and disappear from online life. And this showed such growth and healing, because at first she felt so traumatised and frozen by it. Helen got a lot of support from the people around her, including complete strangers. Some people yet again demonstrated a total lack of understanding of the impact of deepfake abuse, asking her things like ”If someone painted a nude picture of you it would be flattering, why is this so different?”.

: Infuriating. We know—as does Helen—that speaking out publicly may not be something you’re able to do, or want to do. And that’s totally okay. Every person is different and our responses are our own. But know that you’re not alone. There are ways to find support, community, and connection. That might be in person, or anonymously online.

: Helen never found out who had made those manipulated images of her. When we’re left with a nameless and faceless perpetrator, this can leave us feeling really powerless and suspicious of anyone and everyone. The website the images were hosted on was taken down shortly after she found out about their existence. We know that, for a lot of survivors, it can be incredibly difficult to get images removed from the internet. It can be such a retraumatising and exhausting process. We’ve included some resources about how to do this on the website, so do check those out if that’s something you’re navigating through right now.

: Helen found art and creating connection really key for her healing process. If this is an experience you’ve had, do take time and space to think about what you need for yourself as you move forward. We have a course dedicated to rebuilding ourselves after experiencing image-based abuse over on Bloom, and it has sessions focused on healing our relationships with our bodies, with technology, and our sense of self.

FJ: Yes, and as part of that course we have a Bill of Rights we always like to come back to here at Chayn. It’s adapted from Rock Pool’s Sexual Violence Recovery Toolkit, and it lists the things we deserves for ourselves in our lives—including online. Carolina, will you read some of them out loud with me?

 Of course. We’ll link to the full resource on Bloom, too, so you can check it out.

: I have the right to take and share photos.

: I have the right to take and share videos.

: Thank you, Francesca. That was a really nice way to end our conversation today. If you know anybody else affected by the things we’ve talked about today, feel free to share this with them. Knowledge is power, and we want to bring more awareness to deepfake abuse and its impacts.

: Absolutely. Carolina, shall we take a couple of breaths before we go back into our day?

: Yes, let’s. It’s been a heavy chat!

: Thank you so much for joining us, see you again soon.

Helen was told by a friend that he’d seen videos of her on a porn site. But these videos weren’t real, they were deepfakes—images or videos created using artificial intelligence technology to look like us. In this conversation, we explore the impact on Helen and why the effects of deepfakes are very real, even when the images are faked.

Stolen faces: How fake images leave real scars

Helen was told by a friend that he’d seen videos of her on a porn site. But these videos weren’t real, they were deepfakes—images or videos created using artifi

Stolen faces: How fake images leave real scars

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