The first thing Eliza Cowley opened on Christmas morning last year was not a present but a disturbing video message.
It arrived in her Instagram inbox from an unknown sender and left the 34-year-old woman feeling “violated” in the privacy of her Melbourne bedroom.
She had just been “cyberflashed” — which has been a crime in the UK since 2004 and in Singapore since 2019 but is not a specifically criminalised in Australia.
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Cowley came to discover this while reporting the explicit content, both to Meta and Victoria Police.
She soon realised just how normalised the issue is in Australia and how deeply embedded the barriers to support are.
“It’s the same as if someone just came up to you on the street and started flashing you,” Cowley told 7NEWS.com.au.
“It felt like a digital assault. I reported a man for sending me explicit content and I’m the one who lost everything.”
It was Cowley’s accounts which ended up being shut down.
Cowley said it was not the first time she had been contacted by the unknown man who cyberflashed her.
He had followed Cowley on Instagram several days earlier and, when she didn’t recognise his profile — which suggested he had a wife, children, and a Western Australia upbringing — she asked whether they knew each other.
His response was ominous: “Not yet.”
It was enough for Cowley to unfollow the man immediately.
“I just got a weird feeling from it so, I just removed him as a follower and I unfollowed him,” she said.
But not long after she received an uncensored, unsolicited video of the man “playing with himself”.
Cowley responded to the message, giving the sender a chance to offer some sort of an explanation.
“I honestly thought I would get a message from him saying, ‘Oh, I’m really sorry I was drunk’. Or, like, ‘I didn’t mean to send it’,” she told 7NEWS.com.au.
She was making salads for Christmas lunch when she received his response: “Christmas present chill.”
“I just felt so violated and angry and shocked and just in absolute disbelief,” Cowley said.
“I was speechless. I was in such a state of shock.”
‘We’ve disabled your account’ Cowley’s shock only continued when she reported the incident to Meta.
“Straight away, in front of me on my screen, I started getting logged out of all my accounts,” she said.
All four of her Instagram accounts were disabled, including accounts she had been using to establish her work in photography and body image coaching, and personal accounts she used as a digital diary and to stay in touch with friends and acquaintances.
The email she received from Instagram said: “We’ve reviewed your account and found that it still doesn’t follow our Community Standards. As a result your account has been permanently disabled.”
Despite her Christmas plans, Cowley spent the next four days trying to get in touch with someone from Meta to appeal the breach, knowing she would not have the time to dispute the matter when her holidays ended and she needed to access the accounts.
She managed to access a Meta support chat but said this avenue was only available to her because she had a business account.
“Each day I spoke to someone different and, essentially, it was just like, yeah, we can’t escalate this any further,” Cowley said.
Meta staff acknowledged the incident was unfair for Cowley but said the options were limited. Credit: Supplied One Meta support member told Cowley they knew the matter was “not fair”.
“I wanted to let you know that I did everything but the system is not allowing (me) to do my best action,” they said.
An email from another Meta support member told Cowley when accounts are disabled under the category that Cowley’s were, the internal teams at Meta are prevented “from submitting any internal appeals or escalations on our side”.
Cowley was told the lack of visible options to appeal the breach on her interface was “not a visibility issue” but the reality of a system that “does not allow for any manual override or priority escalation for this specific type of enforcement,” the email said.
Aussie cops call it crimeless Cowley next went to Victoria Police in hopes of holding the man accountable for his actions but they told her “there’s nothing we can do”.
Victoria Police confirmed to 7NEWS.com.au that Cowley reported the “lewd act” via Report Cyber, and that police referred her back to Meta and to the eSafety Commissioner.
“The video was investigated and it has been determined no criminal offence has occurred,” Victoria Police said.
To be considered a crime, Cowley would need to be 16 years younger — under cyberbullying laws, sending explicit content to underage people is a crime, but not when the recipient is older than 18.
Alternatively, she would have to have received multiple videos, rather than just one, so local police could see a “pattern” constituting cyber “harassment”.
Deakin University psychologist Dr Dominika Howard is a researcher and co-author of a 2024 study on technology-mediated sexual behaviours, including cyberflashing and help-seeking behaviours.
She told 7NEWS.com.au these responses from Meta and Victoria Police “don’t incentivise reporting at all”.
“That came up in our study. People said, what’s the point of me reporting? Nothing is going to be done about it,” she said.
Victoria Police told Cowley there was nothing they could do. Credit: Supplied From her interviews with victims about cyberflashing and barriers to support, Howard found “cyberflashing happens so often that people basically accepted it as part of their daily life experience”.
“They said that it’s so normalised, there’s no point in pursuing it further,” she said.
But this systemic normalisation appears to say more about Australia’s cultural attitude to the issue than it does about the issue itself.
In the UK, cyberflashing is considered as a “priority offence”, with the legislation part of a historic government strategy to halve violence against women and girls within a decade.
Those laws require tech firms to spot and censor the explicit content before it reaches potential victims, or be penalised 10 per cent of their qualifying worldwide revenue, or have their services blocked in the UK.
Bumble was the first dating app in the UK to explicitly moderate cyberflashing, and its vice president of trust and safety Elymae Cedeno said: “Receiving unsolicited sexual images is a daily violation that disproportionately impacts women and undermines their sense of safety online.”
‘Responsibility is put on the victim’ Cowley was cut off from her social media accounts for almost two months.
Shortly after 7NEWS.com.au contacted Meta about the incident, all four “permanently disabled” accounts were restored.
At the time, Meta did not respond to 7NEWS.com.au’s request for confirmation of how Cowley breached community guidelines, and whether AI moderation system errors were to blame.
In an age of addictive algorithms and a cultural reliance on near-constant connection, forced social media disconnection can have a range of negative impacts.
“People have businesses these days that are run entirely via Instagram or other platforms,” Howard said.
“If Meta shuts down an account like this, it doesn’t have only repercussions on the mental health of that person and the way that this person will feel invalidated but it’s going to also ruin the source of their financial income.”
While tech companies are held responsible for moderating unsolicited cyberflashing on their platforms in the UK, Howard said: “Here, the responsibility is put on the victim.”
The impacts of this attitude were seen throughout Howard’s study which found 62 per cent of survey respondents had received at least one unsolicited explicit photo or video, but only 3 per cent of that cohort ever reported it.
“We know from our research that exposure to those unsolicited images and videos can cause depression, anxiety, stress, and it affects both men and women,” Howard said.
While Howard’s report showed women are more likely to receive unsolicited sexts, she said men can experience more distress when receiving them, and that lower male reporting figures could also reflect help-seeking barriers.
She also noted the “similarities between online and offline sexual offending”.
“The victim constantly has to justify themselves … it’s always the victim’s responsibility to advocate for themselves and to seek justice and the perpetrator. What do we know has happened to the perpetrator? We don’t know anything, right?
“We need to put the onus of responsibility on the perpetrator.”
She said her study “illustrates that community attitudes and the legal framework in Australia towards unsolicited sexting need to change to recognise this sexting variant as harmful and illegal”.
If you or someone you know is impacted by sexual assault, domestic or family violence, call 1800 737 732 or visit 1800RESPECT.org.au . In an emergency, call triple-0.