The very worst of tabloid celebrity culture was on show yesterday at Chelmsford Crown Court when Stephen Bear faced his judgement.
This is a guy famous for winning Celebrity Big Brother a few years ago.
He became a celebrity for being on the reality TV show Shipwrecked before that.
These facts, combined with the fact that he turned up to court in a huge faux black fur coat, sunglasses and decorative walking stick, tells you this is a guy who doesn’t just like publicity, he seeks it.
I didn’t have a clue who he was until yesterday when a court found him guilty of being a sex offender.
Charged and convicted of voyeurism and sharing private sexual photographs, he’s now a criminal.
And that’s what he’ll be remembered for now.
What infamy.
Revenge porn part of a bigger set of problems
What Stephen Bear did was film himself having sex with his ex-girlfriend without her consent, before uploading it to a website from which he profited to the tune of £40,000.
It was disgusting, craven and thankfully now criminal behaviour.
But it wasn’t always so.
This type of activity only became an offence in 2015 in England and 2016 in Scotland.
It joined a long list of actions which the justice system has had to take in order to deal with the darker side of the internet.
While Bear’s must be one of the most egregious examples of “revenge porn”, it’s by far a unique case.
Revenge porn is a sexed up term for image-based abuse and it’s a prolific problem, particularly for women.
Men like Stephen Bear give us baddie we can all hone our hate on for one day.
But he’s just a symbol of a much deeper problem.
Harassment of women takes many forms beside revenge porn
The Channel 4 programme Dispatches has been at the forefront of investigative journalism for decades.
Its latest episode focuses on what can happen to women on a night out, such is the severity of the harassment women in Britain face today.
The journalist Ellie Flynn took a secret camera crew out with her into the streets and pretended to be a little drunk.
WARNING: Distressing content
"Why have you followed me into my hotel room?"
Journalist @ellieflynn exposes the harsh reality of sexual harassment for women in the UK by pretending to be drunk and alone in a busy nightlife area. What happens next is shocking.#C4SexualHarassment pic.twitter.com/XUna0tjvmV
— Channel 4 Dispatches (@C4Dispatches) December 11, 2022
She sat on a bench outside a pub pretending to contact her friends and was approached within seconds by a man offering to take her home.
Pestering her, offering a hotel room, telling her how much he liked her.
She got up and made her way home, being followed by the guy every step of the way despite her protestations that she was fine and just wanted to be left alone.
He followed her all the way the way into her room, before she demanded he leave.
Even with all the comfort of a TV crew and security team, she was left shaken and upset.
That’s because she knew exactly what would have happened if she’d be on her own and also how many times on any given day, in any given week, that happens to women the length and breadth of the country.
When will conversation shift to men’s behaviour?
It’s not just the men who won’t take no for an answer or exploit a situation to this extreme.
It’s all of the micro-aggressions, lewd jokes and so-called banter that create the conditions for this sort of exploitation.
And it’s the feedback cycle that says it’s because she drunk too much. Or it’s because of what she was wearing. Or what did she expect if she sat on a bench with no pals?
She was asking for it.
It’s hardly ever a conversation about the actions of men, which is why it’s so thoroughly and deeply depressing.
