There’s a cyberflashing epidemic in the UK. 48% of women, 24% of men aged 18–24 and 76% of girls under 18 yrs have been cyberflashed with the issue “disproportionately affecting women and girls” (UN Women UK) and it’s on the rise.

In 2019, incidences of cyberflashing on London trains increased by 94% (British Transport Police). While it’s easily brushed off as distasteful, but harmless, it is incredibly damaging.

‘It can be intimidating, threatening and humiliating. It impacts adversely on women’s everyday lives’ – Professor Clare McGlynn.

But calls for it to be criminalised fell on apathetic ears because ‘cybercrime’ wasn’t seen as ‘real’ crime.

“When thinking about cybercrime, the public are likely to feel it is ‘victimless’ (UK Government) unlike ‘traditional crime’, putting it at risk of becoming another violation of consent that women had to endure.

Our brief was simple. Make cyberflashing illegal in Britain.

The breakthrough for breaking through apathy came when we spoke to victims.

“If they’d done that to me on the street, they would’ve been arrested”- female, 20s.

The damage from cyberflashing wasn’t diminished just because it was on people’s phones. It was just as violating as being flashed in real life (IRL) because it happens on your most personal device.

But while ‘flashing’ someone your private parts IRL was illegal, cyberflashing wasn’t.

So we reframed the issue and took the ‘cyber’ out of cyberflashing. Through highly stylised illustrations of ‘d**k pic’ poses all over London, ‘Never sent without consent’ was designed to force people to make the connection that if it’s illegal to ‘flash’ someone IRL, then it should be illegal online as well.

And we made it unmissable to lawmakers with QR codes strategically placed over intimate areas that would tweet local Members of Parliament (MPs).

Our media was designed to show that cyberflashing was a ‘real’ crime and that meant taking what was on people’s phones and onto the streets.

We made the deliberate choice to use mass and traditional OOH posters, not just social and not just digital, because we didn’t want to further cement it as just a ‘cyber’ problem and therefore easily dismissed.

The irony was, if we could, we would’ve taken what women were receiving regularly on their phones and put them on posters but that would’ve been illegal.

To make the campaign legal, we used illustrations with QR codes covering intimate areas.

Where we did use social was to connect the analogue channels to digital. 90.7% of UK Members of Parliament (MPs) had active Twitter accounts so when a passer-by took out their camera phones to snap the poster, it led them to a petition to tweet their local MP.

Despite no paid media, we negotiated key OOH poster locations across London to have maximum influence on lawmakers and launched the campaign during Sexual Health week in September 2021.

When we caught the attention of Fay Jones MP and she announced that she was going to take the debate to parliament and champion its inclusion in the Online Safety Bill, we supported her with a roving ad van parked on the Parliament Green so the it was unmissable to the other MPs coming and going.

All our assets featured the hashtag #stopcyberflashing to centralise the public outrage and encourage sharing with bespoke social content pushed out through Brook’s owned social channels that featured hardhitting statistics and messages that provided more fuel to the fire.

We saw a 299% increase in social mentions of cyberflashing and its variations between Sept-21 to Mar-22 compared to the same time in the previous year.

Brook became a leading voice in conversation with everyone from student unions to sex toy companies retweeting our content and spreading the word.

We knew the campaign had taken a life of its own when MPs were recreating and remixing our social posts, showing that we were getting the right kind of attention.

Of course, at the end of the day, the most important thing was the law.

2 weeks after Fay Jones MP led the debate in parliament, the government bowed to the public pressure and cyberflashing would be made illegal and perpetrators given a maximum sentence of 2 years imprisonment.