When someone finds out that a sexually explicit photo or video of themselves has been posted online without their consent, the instinct is immediate and instinctive: take it down. They go to the platform and they report. We tend to stop the story there, as if the report is the button that ends the damage. This is not so.
A new study by Qiwei and colleagues (2025)based on depth, injury– informed interviews with 13 US adult survivors of Intimate Imagery (NCII), also known as image-based sex abuse, reveals what many survivors already know in their own bodies: reporting NCII is its own harm that is superimposed on the original violation. Researchers use online platforms as one crime NCII’s stage, judge and jury: host abuse, control access to evidence, and decide what content is available and when. Drawing on the theory of institutional betrayal (Smith and Freud, 2014), they argue that platforms, such as schools and churches, can fail to traumatize the people who depend on them.
4 Reasons to report NCII is secondary damage
1. The clock is always moving. On the Internet, sexual content is most likely to be involved in the first hours and days online, which is exactly the window that survivors desperately want closed. This inconsistency creates a state of immediate hypervigilance: refreshing pages, searching for your name, looking for reverse photos, and monitoring social platforms for reloads. Clinicians who work with survivors of online sexual violence have specifically identified this pattern of “heightened awareness in online contexts” as a distinctive feature of digital sexual violence that is not usually seen in contact. sexual violence (Knipschild et al., 2025).
2. NCII migrates. Unlike physical assault, which occurs at the same time and place, NCII is endlessly repetitive. Self-awareness that the offending material is “out there” and can resurface is associated with higher PTSD intensity relative to abuse that is not digitally documented (Schmidt et al., 2023). A participant in Qiwei et al. (2025) study, performed the same removal four to six times in a single trial and sometimes saw that the photo went down for 24 hours before it reappeared. The work is never fully done, making “recovery” feel impossible.
3. Browsing your own content exposes you to abuse by others. To find their images, survivors often have to go through other victims’ NCII pages on host sites. They are forced to witness graphic, often indirect content that portrays and experiences strangers sadness for other survivors. Recent work on secondary institutional betrayal suggests that even witnessing institutional mistreatment by other survivors can trigger trauma symptoms in observers (PettyJohn et al., 2023).
4. After the report, you wait… Survivors described sitting in front of a screen refreshing the page, unable to feel any relief until the content was actually gone. This can take hours, days, weeks, or never. Platforms usually make reported content visible during the review period, which one participant makes clear: if a post is reported as objectionable, it should be taken down immediately when the reviewers intend to, not to distribute it.
What Research Finds: Institutional Betrayal Goes Online
The most important contribution of Qiwei et al. (2025) learning can be conceptual. Institutional betrayal, A framework developed by Jennifer Freud and colleagues describes how the institutions we rely on can harm survivors through dismissal, delay, to refuseand punishment after damage. A growing body of research has linked institutional betrayal to PTSD symptoms. depressionand barriers to help-seeking among survivors of sexual assault (Krystle et al., 2024).
Qiwei et al. (2025) is the first paper to systematically apply this framework to online platforms, and the findings are alarming. Survivors described platforms where abuse occurred, punishing them for reporting (one participant was banned by Discord when the perpetrator was not), responding with emails or silence, and creating environments where abuse is “common, normal, and likely to happen again.” Many have finally left the platforms they’ve relied on for years for community, livelihood or creative expression.
This naming is important. When victims feel invisible when reporting, they usually blame themselves: Why am I so devastated by a few clicks on a website? When we call harm institutional betrayal, the answer becomes clear: because a powerful institution to which you depend fails and you nervous system knows
Essential Readings on Sexual Abuse
4 Action steps
1. Recognize that there is value in searching and reporting. Constant searching can feel like control, but it often reinforces a sense of constant security. Sometimes the most protective thing you can do for yourself is not looking for a long time.
2. If you can, delegate the search and reporting to someone you trust. This one change can significantly reduce a survivor’s exposure to abuse of themselves and others. The labor of typing your name into a reverse photo search engine, browsing through a porn tagging the site or filling out the same DMCA form for the seventh can be done by a friend, family member, lawyer, or attorney. It should not be done by the person in the picture.
3. Use hash tools, but know their limits. Tools like StopNCII.org allow adults to create a digital “fingerprint” of an intimate image so that participating platforms can detect and block re-uploads. They are imperfect because they don’t cover most websites and may not capture edits on images, but they can still significantly reduce the manual work of monitoring. If the installation process itself is difficult, ask someone you trust to go through it with you.
4. Separate “recovery” from “recovery”. You don’t have to download every single copy before it lets you relax, be sad, see friends, and get back to it. therapyor experience pleasure again. Depending on the recovery to complete eradication, which may never come, the survivors may suffer an indefinite suspension. Healing can begin while the content is still there.
Conclusion
Image-based sexual violence is often seen as a problem of perpetrators and politics, but it is also a problem of platforms. Institutions have extraordinary power over survivors’ paths to safety, and they often use that power in ways that cause more harm. Until reporting systems are redesigned with survivors at the center, the work of capturing images will continue to fall on those least equipped to preserve it. Meanwhile, recognizing and treating the reporting process as secondary harm is itself a form of care.
