Ohio teenager Marina Lonina was indicted for child pornography and sexual assault charges after reportedly live-streaming her underage friend’s rape on Periscope.
On February 27, Lonina, 18, and her 17-year-old friend were hanging out at a house in Columbus, with an acquaintance, Raymond Boyd Gates, 29. At some point during their socializing, Gates allegedly forced intercourse with the victim, which Lonina then reportedly live-broadcasted via Periscope. Lonina also took nude photos of the victim the night before, according to a news release from Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien.
One of Lonina’s friends called authorities after watching the assault from another state. A grand jury indicted Lonina and Gates for kidnapping, rape, sexual battery, and facilitating child pornography. If convicted on all charges, the defendants could spend 40 years in prison.
The case is part of an unsettling trend of people sharing the commission of sex crimes on social media. In 2014, the rape of a 16-year-old Texas teen at a party went viral after her high school classmates posted photos of her unconscious body on Twitter under the joke hashtag #JadaPose.
Jada, who wanted to be identified by her first name in media reports, fought back by publicly telling her story and starting an anti-cyberbullying campaign, #IamJada. Photos of the victim in the Steubenville, Ohio rape case, in which two high school football players were charged, spread online in 2013. That same year, rape victims Rehtaeh Parsons and Audrie Pott committed suicide after classmates passed around images taken after their assaults. Charges were dropped in Parsons’ case but Pott’s accused rapists admitted to several counts of possessing and controlling sexual images of minors.
Like revenge porn, these cases often involve images or video that are leaked online but differ in that bystanders, rather than the perpetrator or a former lover, are the ones filming and disseminating the information. Bystanders typically don’t intervene or try to help people who are in trouble. When it comes to rape, however, many bystanders don’t recognize it as a crime as it’s happening in front of them.
To help combat that, anti-rape advocacy organizations have been working with college campuses to institute bystander intervention programs, which help teach students to recognize illegal and harmful sexual behavior. That includes understanding consent and training them to report or otherwise intervene when they witness incidents that don’t feel right.
Periscope streams are automatically made public, but the Twitter-owned platform prohibits graphic content. Twitter has declined to comment but the company’s live-broadcasting app has already given rise to several incidents of people filming crimes including physical altercations, drunken driving, and robbery. Such events will likely become more common as more social networks embrace live video streaming. Last year, Facebook began testing a new platform for live video to compete with Periscope.