Data from 39 police forces in England and Wales shows that charges were lodged against perpetrators in an average of just 4.5% of cases. Photograph: Microgen Images//Getty Images/Science Photo Library View image in fullscreen Data from 39 police forces in England and Wales shows that charges were lodged against perpetrators in an average of just 4.5% of cases. Photograph: Microgen Images//Getty Images/Science Photo Library Online abuse Police routinely failing to investigate ‘revenge porn’, research reveals Lawyers launch super-complaint over finding that officers in England and Wales frequently dismiss image-based abuse
Prefer the Guardian on Google Police forces are routinely failing to investigate complaints about the circulation of image-based abuse, previously known as “revenge pornography”, according to research that has triggered a super-complaint over the way such crimes are handled.
Lawyers have gathered evidence from 100 people who reported intimate images being shared online without their consent. Their research suggests that image-based abuse is still frequently dismissed or not recognised as criminal offending, despite being described by the former prime minister Keir Starmer as a national emergency.
Read more Referrals to the Revenge Porn helpline, the charity that helps victims get non-consensual images removed from the internet, increased by more than 4,000% between 2015 and 2025, but data from 39 police forces in England and Wales shows that charges were lodged against perpetrators in an average of just 4.5% of cases last year. In some forces the figure was lower than 1%.
Some police officers responded inappropriately when women tried to register complaints, researchers found. One reported that the officer “almost giggled on the phone to me”, while another said the officer responded: “Boys will be boys.” Another said: “I bet you’ve learned your lesson.”
Image-based abuse overwhelmingly affects women and girls, who make up 98.9% of reported images.
Lawyers from Leigh Day and the charity the Centre for Women’s Justice are working with the charity #NotYourPorn to highlight systemic police failings in responding to image-based abuse, defined as “the taking, sharing or creating of intimate content without the survivor’s consent, or threatening to do so”.
They note that rapid innovations in AI are helping abusers find new ways to create and disseminate synthetic explicit material, sometimes known as deepfake content.
Their research classifies the policing response as “fragmented, inconsistent and incapable of meeting the scale of the threat posed by image-based abuse”. “Despite the increased public awareness, and the creation of new criminal offences designed to address this conduct, there has been no corresponding increase in charging rates, prosecutions or convictions,” the complaint says.
“The unavoidable conclusion is that the overwhelming majority of this offending goes unaddressed.”
Read more Home Office data shows that there were only 569 charges issued for image-based abuse in 2025/2026. The Revenge Porn Helpline received almost 25,000 reports in 2025.
Researchers found that the vast majority of survivors of image-based abuse did not report it to the police, noting that “embarrassment, shame and fear” contributed to their reluctance. Police outsourced the evidence-gathering process to survivors in many cases, the report notes, leaving them to work out how to collate proof that the images were being dissemin…