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Nellie was 14 and in a relationship when she was asked to send nude images over Snapchat.
She did it, in part, because it was “so normalised” among her friends to send nudes that she didn’t think too much about it.
She also knew that if the images were saved or screenshotted on Snapchat, she’d get an alert. Except she didn’t.
The person she’d sent them to used an external app to download the pictures, so she didn’t get any notification.
Six months later, they’d broken up, and she’d moved to a different part of the country. That’s when the messages started.
“I was waiting to go to school in the morning and I got a message from someone that I used to go to school with saying, ‘I just thought you should know this is what’s being sent around’, and sent me an image of myself.”
Within a week, she was getting messages from people every day saying intimate images of her were being shared around the school.
“I was so embarrassed and ashamed and really insecure that all these people would see me in such a vulnerable way,” Nellie, now 24, told Sky News.
Soon, it escalated – she was contacted by a stranger who threatened to blackmail her if she didn’t send more images.
“It was really, really scary because I didn’t know who they were, I didn’t know how they’d got the photos. I didn’t know how genuine they were in their threat and if they were going to share them further.”
Nellie realised the situation had spiralled out of control and called Childline, the NSPCC’s helpline for young people.
She felt she had no one else to speak to, not wanting to tell her parents or school that she’d sent the pictures in the first place.
Childline advised her to contact CEOP, the police agency that works to stop online child exploitation. The agency was so concerned she would become a target for paedophiles and blackmailers, they contacted Nellie’s…
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