Revenge porn cases hit a record high in 2023, according to a report by the National Police Agency released on April 8.
The agency said that it received 1,812 consultations from people during the 2023 about nude images leaked by a partner or ex-partner.
It’s up 4.9% from 2022 and marks the seventh year in a row in which cases have risen.
It is a worrying trend but, with the complete proliferation of phones and online culture, likely only to get worse. In part, the increase is also due to greater recognition of revenge porn as a phenomenon and a legal category, and criminalization of it that has enabled more people to contact police with their cases.
Another reason may be that people increasingly meet partners through dating apps. If you hook up and then get ghosted, there may seem to be less repercussions if you leak images in revenge because you don’t have shared acquaintances or a joint social circle like you would if you met, say, at work or college.
The predominant consultation with 769 cases involved perpetrators possessing or filming sexually explicit videos. This was followed by 676 cases where the victim was threatened with having the images released to the public. Another 374 cases involved the victim having these compromising images publicized, while 253 cases reported the perpetrator sending these images to the victim. The remaining 72 consultations concerned perpetrators hinting they were “possibly in possession” of sexually explicit images.
Unsurprisingly, most police consultations took place in large cities and urban areas with younger populations, with Kyoto just ahead of Tokyo and Osaka.
Almost half of alleged perpetrators were current or former romantic partners, though the second largest number were “people who had met their victims online.” The distinction may seem strange because surely these could also have been partners, but we presume it means people who the victims met through an app or other online means, and hooked up, but didn’t have dating-style relationship.
Needless to say, the majority of victims in these cases are surely women, though it’s not mentioned in the Japan Today article and we could not find it in other Japanese-language media reports either.
