Apparently, you can manufacture sexually explicit images of a young woman, distribute them online without her consent, and still avoid spending a single night in prison.
What a fucking message to send.
William Hamish Yeates received a sentence of two years and three months but was released on a three-year recognisance order. He will serve no prison time. Not one day. Not an hour. Surely, they could have had him in there for a night or two; just find out about unwanted sexual advances!
Because calling something a “deepfake” can make it sound like a clever technical trick. A bit of computer fiddling. Some pixels rearranged by rearranged by a young bloke who got carried away.
There is a real person attached to that face.
A person who never agreed to become pornography. Who now has to wonder who saw it, who saved it, and whether it will turn up again.
According to the court reporting, his victim first saw her Year 12 graduation photograph on a pornography website. She continues to fear the material resurfacing and requires psychological support. A milestone she should have been able to celebrate became entangled with someone else’s abuse.
Sit with that for a moment.
You finish school. You should be looking at your graduation photos with your family. Instead, someone has taken your face and turned it into material for strangers to consume.
And somehow, you’re the one left carrying the humiliation.
The judge considered Yeates’s youth, diagnoses, guilty plea, remorse, treatment and prospects of rehabilitation. Those are relevant considerations. I can acknowledge them and still believe the outcome was inadequate.
I want him rehabilitated. I also want a consequence that reflects the gravity of what he did; let him know he fucked up... Big time.
And I am thoroughly sick of online communities where degrading women becomes a way for men to impress one another. What a pathetic little achievement: earning approval from strangers by violating someone who never consented to any of it.
The technology may be sophisticated. The entitlement is prehistoric.
Women should be able to post a photograph, graduate from school and exist in public without some fuckwit deciding their face is his raw material.
In my view, this offending warranted actual prison time.
Because the images were fabricated.
The harm wasn’t.
It's moment like these that I'm glad I'm old and missed all this shit!
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Thanks. Better check it out but it should be up today!