What Happens Next

The quiet unravelling after deepfake abuse and what we can do better.

Today I was sent an article from the ABC that you can read here. The story doesn’t end with police involvement. It doesn’t end with headlines.

It barely even begins there.

What happens next off-camera, off-record, and often off-script is what should worry us most.There is a stark asymmetry in the aftermath of digital sexual harm. If the perpetrator is over the age of 18yrs they will face serious charges. If the perpetrators are young it is often framed as “just experimenting” or “didn’t realise the consequences.”  Sometimes they’re suspended, often they’re shielded because they are a young offender. “They’re just kids” is the line that gets repeated by administrators, lawyers, even parents. The legal system bends over backward to avoid marking them for life.

But what of the victims?

For them, the punishment is ambient and indefinite. It lives in every sideways glance in the hallway. In the eyes of teachers who suddenly don’t know how to look at them. In the silence of adults who treat what happened as somehow less serious because it was “online.” As if their reputations weren’t mutilated. As if the violation wasn’t complete simply because no one touched them.

There is no undoing the fact that their bodies were made visible without their consent. That their faces were dragged through digital filth and shared like contraband. It is no less real because it happened online. In fact, it’s more insidious for that very reason because it cannot be contained. Because the violation can be replicated endlessly with a click and yet, trauma born from digital violence is still treated as optional.

In the physical world, we know what to do. If a young person is sexually assaulted physically, police are called. Counsellors step in. Trauma-informed care is rolled out. Statements are taken. There is depth to the seriousness. But when the same assault occurs digitally, the system stutters. There is no trauma protocol, no language and often no plan.

The result is a vast and dangerous gap in safeguarding. One where the victim is left to carry the shame of a crime the law barely knows how to name when it is involving minors assaulting minors online. One where the response is fragmented at best and negligent at worst.

Deepfake laws may look strong on paper. Three years’ jail time for creating AI-generated explicit images without consent. But in practice, especially within school systems, these laws are often unenforced. They depend on the capacity of police, the discretion of principals, and the cultural willingness to call a digital sex crime what it is. I recently had a NSW Police Officer tell a school that I work with that it was not a crime because it was fake and online. Completely incorrect. Thankfully the school contacted me to double check.

The perpetrators are often too young to prosecute, and too protected to meaningfully discipline. Restorative justice is rarely considered, not because it isn’t possible, but because there is no system to deliver it.

Let's not forget the human-ness atthe centre. There’s a parent somewhere who will never forget the look on their daughter’s face when she saw that image for the first time. Not because it was real, but because it was real enough. And that’s all it takes for the damage to take hold.

There’s a girl who will drop out or refuse to attend school again, citing stress.  

There’s another who will delete all her social media accounts, disappear from group chats, stop participating in class. Their stories won’t make news again. Because what happens next is almost never reported.

But we know. And now that you know, there’s no excuse not to respond because Digital trauma is trauma. Deepfake abuse is abuse. The body doesn’t distinguish between physical violation and psychological invasion it flinches just the same.

We owe these girls more than vague sympathy and a PR statement. We owe them systems that respond with the full seriousness of what they’ve endured. Not because it looks bad. But because it is bad.

It will keep happening until the response stops being optional. Until we stop waiting for a scandal and start building a system to get ahead of this. Until the next image never gets made.

Not because it’s illegal. But because every student knows, finally, that online harm matters.

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To help we have created a world first Digital Ethics and Accountability Pathway for Schools. Written by Kirra Pendergast, Dr Brad Marshall, and Maggie Dent.

You can read all about it here

For more information contact us at hello@ctrlshft.global