‘I receive explicit messages everyday,’ says Emily Atack.
Every day, TV star Emily Atack receives hundreds of explicit pictures and messages. She wonders what motivates these men and what can be done to stop them.
Emily wakes up every morning to a picture of a naked man she hasn’t asked to see.
The 33-year-old actress, presenter, and comedian is flashed at hundreds of times per day – not in public, but on the internet.
“It’s the ultimate disrespect,” she says. “It’s the ultimate thing of going, ‘I think you’re easy to access and you’re up for it.'”
Emily – who has made a BBC documentary on the issue – has received explicit messages on her social media accounts for years. But their quantity and tone intensified over lockdown when they became even more sexually aggressive.
“I felt like it was just slowly chipping away at me,” she says.
Emily was 17 when she was cast as Charlotte Hinchcliffe in the popular Channel 4 coming-of-age comedy, The Inbetweeners.
“She was the popular girl at school,” says Emily. “The issue is, that yes, it’s a fictional character, but obviously people associate you with the characters that you play.”
From a very young age, Emily says she began receiving unwanted attention from some men. To try to protect her, she says her loved ones would suggest altering her behavior, like not wearing make-up or a skirt to school.
“It’s so out of control, the only way that those that love you can control it is to change you,” she says. “That all goes in somewhere, so I started looking inward. My whole life I just blamed myself because of that.”
Emily carried this sense of blame into her adult life.
“I’m nervous about going public about all this because I put bikini photos up on Instagram, I talk about sex in my shows and I’m very cheeky and flirty,” she says. “There will be people saying, ‘But you asked for this negative attention, what do you expect?’
“You do sit there and go, ‘Is this my fault? Is this something I’m putting out there?'”
Emily has always used humor as a defense mechanism to make light of the messages, but she says it’s not funny anymore.
“If we actually look at the severity of it, young girls are on Instagram getting messages like this,” she says. “What would happen if this was your daughter, your niece? It’s a more serious discussion to be had once the laughing stops.”
Research from 2020 found 76% of girls aged 12-18 had been sent unsolicited nude images of boys or men, commonly known as “dick pics”. When Emily spoke to some secondary school girls, she was shocked that all of them said they had received sexually explicit messages online.
“What shocked me the most was that I thought the girls were going to say it was the boys at school that were a bit out of control and on their phones, but it’s older men online that are approaching these girls,” she says.
Explain yourselves:
Emily put a post on her social media asking the men who send her explicit messages to explain why they do it.
“I checked my emails – zero, received nothing back,” she says. “These men spend their lives bombarding me with abuse and saying the most horrific things and then the second I respond and say, ‘Well I want to hear from you, let’s talk’ – nothing.
“What I did have was loads of women reaching out saying what they’d had to deal with.”
Emily claims she had never discussed the online abuse with her parents, and when she is shown a sample, her mother, comedian Kate Robbins, becomes very upset. She is concerned about her daughter’s psychological impact as well as her physical safety.
Although the messages are from a variety of men, Emily’s father, Keith, notices that they almost appear to be from the same person.
To learn more about these people’s characteristics, Emily messaged two men who regularly sent her explicit content and asked them why. One blocked Emily immediately after reading Emily’s message, while the other replied blaming her – saying he was trying to get her attention and his messages were due to her “reputation”.
Emily spoke to Jamie Klingler, co-founder of Reclaim These Streets, to try to understand the mindset of these men. Jamie first began receiving explicit images, rape, and death threats online after she organized a vigil following the murder of Sarah Everard.
“It’s not about what we wear, it’s not about what we do,” she says. “It’s about them wanting to silence and control you and them wanting to have the power to make you feel like they’ve got a piece of you.”
Prof Jane Monckton-Smith’s research focuses on the prevention of homicide – acts that lead to the death of another person. She says patterns of violence against women escalate from something seemingly small to serious sexual assault. Because of this, she recommends always reporting online abuse to the police so the individual’s name is put on record.
“Rape is not an entry-level offense, homicide’s not an entry-level offense,” Prof Monckton-Smith tells Emily. “There will be signs and behaviors and patterns before they get there, but most of those signs and patterns and red flags will be defended and excused and justified and there will be some blame put on the victim.”
