Presenter whose intimate pics were leaked fights back

TV presenter Jess Davies was just 15 years old when images of her in her underwear were shared around her town.

She had exchanged photos with a boy she fancied, and he had forwarded them on to others without her consent.

She was in art class when her phone started buzzing with messages from older boys.

"Nice pictures," read one. "I didn't think you were that type of girl," came another.

"It turns out my images had been Bluetoothed around the whole sixth form centre, which quickly got shared around my school, then around my hometown and eventually ended up on the phones of the men's football team in the town," said Jess.

Warning: Contains sexually explicit language and themes

"It's a small town so people knew who I was and knew I was underage and yet still flashed my images around to people that were in their 20s or 30s," Jess said.

Eventually news of the images reached her grandmother who told her parents.

This was to be the first of several incidents Jess experienced in her teens and 20s that would later inform her women's rights campaigning.

Her 2022 BBC documentary Deepfake Porn: Could You Be Next? was used to lobby the UK government to criminalise sexually explicit deepfakes in the Online Safety Act.

Now she has written a book, No One Wants To See Your D*ck: A Handbook for Survival in the Digital World, for which she has had to explore everything from sexual harassment to cyber-flashing and catfishing, and tells of men on well-known, easy-to-access forums requesting explicit deepfakes of their mothers and teachers.

Others are ing explicit photos of women they know and asking other men to write rape fantasies about them, Jess said.

"These aren't some weirdos in their mum's basement who are chronically online, never leave their homes and don't have a social life, no, these are people's friends and people's husbands," said Jess, who lives in Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan.

"There's a generation that's growing up online and it's a generation who don't see women as whole humans who have rights.

"It's a pandemic of misogyny that is unfolding online and isn't being taken seriously."

Jess, who grew up in the seaside town Aberystwyth in Ceredigion, said she had dealt with unwanted male attention since she was a child.

"I developed my body when I was really young and started wearing a bra when I was in year four so by the time I was in year six I would get comments from grown adult men about me being jailbait," she said.

"It's never really spoken about how girls who develop early are just treated so differently, all of a sudden it's like you're seen as 'you're mature now'."

When her photos were leaked at 15 her parents were ive but Jess said she got her first taste of victim-blaming from others around her.

"So much shame is put on the victim. It's like, 'why did you take that? Why did you share that":[]}