What Is Sexual Abuse?

Find a therapist to heal from sexual abuse

For victim-survivors of NCII, reporting abusive content is a source of trauma, not just a path to relief.

New research applies institutional betrayal theory to online platforms for the first time.

Survivors, loved ones, and clinicians can take steps to reduce reporting harm.

When someone discovers that a sexually explicit photo or video of themselves has been posted online without their consent, the instinct is immediate and intuitive: get it down. They go to the platform, and they file a report. We tend to stop the story there, as if the report is a button that ends the harm. It doesn't.

A new study by Qiwei and colleagues (2025), based on in-depth, trauma-informed interviews with 13 U.S. adult survivors of non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII), also known as image-based sexual abuse, shows something many survivors already know in their bodies: reporting NCII is its own harm, layered on top of the original violation. The researchers describe online platforms as functioning simultaneously as the crime scene, judge, and jury of NCII: hosting the abuse, controlling access to evidence, and deciding whether and when content comes down. Drawing on institutional betrayal theory (Smith & Freyd, 2014), they argue that platforms, like schools and churches, can compound trauma when they fail the people who depend on them.

4 Reasons Reporting NCII Is a Second Harm

1. The clock is always ticking. On the internet, sexual content gets the most engagement in its first hours and days online, which is exactly the window survivors most desperately want to close. That mismatch produces a state of urgent hypervigilance: refreshing pages, searching one's own name, reverse-image searching, and monitoring social platforms for re-uploads. Clinicians working with online sexual abuse survivors have specifically identified this pattern of "heightened hypervigilance in online contexts" as a distinguishing feature of digital sexual abuse not typically seen in contact sexual violence (Knipschild et al., 2025).

2. NCII migrates. Unlike a physical assault that occurs at a single time and place, NCII is endlessly duplicable. The very awareness that abusive material is "out there" and may resurface has been linked to higher PTSD severity than abuse that was not documented digitally (Schmidt et al., 2023). One participant in the Qiwei et al. (2025) study, completed the same removal from four to six times in a single ordeal, sometimes seeing a photo come down for 24 hours before it reappeared. The work is never quite done, which makes "recovery" feel impossible.

3. Searching for your own content exposes you to other people's abuse. To find their own images, survivors often have to sift through pages of other victims' NCII on hosting sites. They are forced to witness graphic, often nonconsensual, content depicting strangers, and to feel empathy and grief for those other survivors. Recent work on secondary institutional betrayal shows that even witnessing the institutional mistreatment of other survivors can produce trauma symptoms in observers (PettyJohn et al., 2023).

4. After the report, you wait... Survivors described sitting in front of the screen, refreshing the page, unable to feel any relief until the content was actually gone. That can take hours, days, weeks, or never. Platforms commonly leave reported content visible during the review period, which one participant put in plain terms: if a post is reported as non-consensual, it should be taken down immediately while reviewers deliberate, not left up to circulate.

What the Research Found: Institutional Betrayal Goes Online

The most important contribution of the Qiwei et al. (2025) study may be conceptual. Institutional betrayal, a framework developed by Jennifer Freyd and colleagues, describes how the institutions we rely on can re-traumatize victim-survivors through dismissal, delay, denial, and punishment after harm. A growing body of research links institutional betrayal to PTSD symptoms, depression, and barriers to help-seeking among sexual assault survivors (Christl et al., 2024).

What Is Sexual Abuse?

Find a therapist to heal from sexual abuse

The Qiwei et al. (2025) paper is the first to systematically apply this framework to online platforms, and the findings are damning. Survivors described platforms denying that violations occurred, punishing them for reporting (one participant was banned by Discord while the perpetrator was not), responding with form letters or silence, and creating environments where abuse felt "common, normal, and likely to occur again." Many ultimately left platforms they had relied on for years for community, livelihood, or creative expression.

This naming matters. When the harm survivors feel during reporting is invisible, they tend to blame themselves: Why am I so devastated by a few clicks on a website? When we name the harm as institutional betrayal, the answer becomes clear: because a powerful institution you depend on is failing you, and your nervous system knows it.

1. Recognize that searching and reporting have a cost. Constant searching can feel like control, but it often reinforces the sense of constant unsafety. Sometimes the most protective thing you can do for yourself is not look for a stretch of time.

2. If you can, delegate the searching and reporting to someone you trust. This single change can dramatically reduce a survivor's exposure to their own and others' abuse. The labor of typing one's name into a reverse-image search engine, scrolling through a porn site's tags, or filling out the same DMCA form for the seventh time can be done by a friend, family member, advocate, or attorney. It does not have to be done by the person in the image.

3. Use hash-based tools, but know their limits. Tools like StopNCII.org allow adults to create a digital "fingerprint" of an intimate image so participating platforms can detect and block re-uploads. They are imperfect because they don't cover most websites, and may not catch edits to images, but they can still dramatically reduce the manual labor of monitoring. If the setup process itself feels overwhelming, ask someone you trust to walk through it with you.

4. Separate "removal" from "recovery". You do not need to have every copy taken down before you are allowed to rest, grieve, see friends, return to therapy, or feel pleasure again. Tying recovery to a complete erasure that may never come can trap survivors in indefinite suspension. Healing can begin while content is still out there.

Image-based sexual abuse is often discussed as a problem of perpetrators and policy, but it is also a problem of platforms. Institutions hold extraordinary power over a survivor's path to safety, and they too often use that power in ways that compound harm. Until reporting systems are redesigned with survivors at the center, the work of getting images down will continue to fall on the people least equipped to bear it. In the meantime, recognizing and addressing the reporting process as a second harm is itself a form of care.

Adams-Clark, A. A., Barnes, M. L., Lind, M. N., Smidt, A., & Freyd, J. J. (2026). Institutional courage attenuates the association between institutional betrayal and trauma symptoms among campus sexual assault survivors. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 18(3), 681–690. https://doi.org/10.1037/tra0001812

Christl, M.-E., Pham, K.-C. T., Rosenthal, A., & DePrince, A. P. (2024). When institutions harm those who depend on them: A scoping review of institutional betrayal. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 25(4), 2797–2813. https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380241226627

Freyd, J. J. (1996). Betrayal trauma: The logic of forgetting childhood abuse. Harvard University Press.

Knipschild, R., Covers, M., & Bicanic, I. A. E. (2025). From digital harm to recovery: A multidisciplinary framework for First Aid after Online Sexual Abuse. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 16(1), 2465083. https://doi.org/10.1080/20008066.2025.2465083

PettyJohn, M. E., Kynn, J., Anderson, G. K., & McCauley, H. L. (2023). Secondary institutional betrayal: Implications for observing mistreatment of sexual assault survivors secondhand. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 38(17–18), 10127–10149. https://doi.org/10.1177/08862605231171414

Qiwei, L., Kennon, K., Bedera, N., Eaton, A. A., Gilbert, E., & Schoenebeck, S. (2025). Platforms as crime scene, judge, and jury: How victim-survivors of non-consensual intimate imagery report abuse online. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3772318.3791115

Schmidt, F., Varese, F., & Bucci, S. (2023). Understanding the prolonged impact of online sexual abuse occurring in childhood. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1281996. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1281996

Smith, C. P., & Freyd, J. J. (2014). Institutional betrayal. American Psychologist, 69(6), 575–587. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037564

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