Former model and presenter Jess Davies wants to see the governments in England and Wales make image-based sexual abuse illegal. In her new BBC Three documentary, Deepfake Porn: Could You Be Next?, Jess investigates how technology is being used to create hardcore porn of women without their consent. Deepfakes are synthetic media in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced with someone else's likeness.
Over the course of the hour-long film, which also repeats on BBC One Wales on Monday, October 24, Jess sees first-hand the devastating effect that the exploitation of deepfake technology has on its victims. In England and Wales, there is currently no single offence that applies to non-consensual intimate images and the 29-year-old from Aberystwyth wants to see that changed.
Discussing her new film with WalesOnline, Jess said: “To know that the governments in England and Wales aren’t prioritising this is just crazy. You’d hope by the end of the documentary that there would be a bit of an uplift but unfortunately, there isn’t because there isn’t anything we can do about it at the moment. We hope that raising some awareness of these issues will put a bit of pressure on the government to make these acts illegal.”
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Jess began her career as a model and in recent years, has turned her hand to presenting and regularly works with the BBC and S4C. She pitched her new film to BBC Three following the success of her first documentary, When Nudes Are Stolen, which aired last year. “From the research in that documentary, I had been trying to track down where some of my images were being leaked. From being on forums where they had, I noticed threads popping up about deep fake porn.
“It just made me think. This is something that I didn’t really know about and I don’t think a lot of people really know about, so that led me to do a bit of research and approach the BBC with the idea.”
After her first documentary was released, Jess said that a lot of women came forward and sought her advice. She is hopeful that people will do the same when her new film releases. Jess explained: “A lot of women don’t know where to turn to and unfortunately, a lot of it isn’t illegal in England and Wales,” before commenting on how it “takes control away from the women involved".
“For me, the scale of this issue was shocking. Most deepfake porn is non consensual. Accompanying a lot of these requests and videos were really graphic sexual texts.” The presenter added that she found a lot of said texts had undermined women and she was surprised to learn that one of the most popular deep fake porn websites gets over 13 million hits a month.
Opening up about filming the documentary, Jess said that she found it “really heavy” meeting the contributors of her new film. “Obviously I haven’t been deepfaked and I haven’t been a victim so I didn’t think it would hit me as much as it did but sitting in front of these women and seeing how much it has affected them, was really heavy.”
Despite her desire to see some action taken from the government, Jess is understanding of the fact that the law cannot keep up with technology. She concludes: “I think it’s quite lazy as a society to say, ‘Just make it illegal and everything will go away’, because the fact that millions of people are treating women like this online and thinking that it’s okay, I think that is more of a societal issue that we need to tackle.”
Deepfake Porn: Could You Be Next? Airs on BBC Three on Friday, October 21 at 9pm. It is also available to watch on BBC One Wales on Monday, October 24 at 11.10pm.
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