Justice has been served and Stephen Bear is back in a cell… but no woman must come to harm from him again

TODAY justice was done. Again. What that man did has ­followed me and the people I love for years. Brave Georgia Harrison has campaigned to change the law on image-based abuse Credit: Olivia West Shameless Stephen Bear at court Credit: Andrew Styczynski It has sat at family dinners. It has pressed on even the ­happiest days, quietly. There are photographs from those years where I’m smiling, and only I know what was ­underneath the smile. Sign up for the Showbiz newsletter Thank you! That’s what intimate image abuse does. It doesn’t hurt you once. It stays. Even a prison sentence didn’t end it. He came out and carried on compounding the abuse. So I won’t call tonight an ending. I’ve learned not to. Read more on Stephen Bear But no woman must ever come to harm from him again. We have to support one another. No one should be left alone or abandoned due to that man’s actions. At least after today, for a while, there’s peace. I wasn’t in the courtroom to see it. I’ve been through all this before. The cameras, the performance, the circus. It doesn’t get us much ­further. I’m more interested in what comes next and in what this ­country needs to face together. Most read in Showbiz Nobody is born like this. Somewhere, there’s a school photo of an ordinary little boy. He loved his mum. He wanted people to like him. That’s not a monster. That’s every child in every playground in the country. Someone once said there’s treasure, if you can only find it, in the heart of every man. I’ve had to sit with the hard part of that ­sentence. It means every man. Something found that treasure before anyone good did. And it’s not a mystery. It’s a ­business model. The latest police shot of Bear Credit: PA Bear and pregnant wife Miami arrive at court Credit: Andrew Styczynski Pictures Take a child’s need to be noticed, attach money to the cruellest version of it, and keep ­paying. What happened to me was the product. Not every man who does this is chasing an audience. Many aren’t. But the contempt is the same. And for the first time, there’s an industry teaching it to boys at scale and profiting from every lesson. My case just happened to show the whole machine in one story: The abuse, the platform, the payment. I’m not asking anyone to feel sorry for him. He made his choices as a grown man, and twice now the law has answered them. But justice for one woman is not the same as safety for the next one. And I know I’m not rare. The Revenge Porn Helpline has just had its busiest year on record. Nearly 25,000 reports — up more than 11 per cent in a single year. That’s around 70 women a day. Three every hour. By the time you finish reading this, somewhere in Britain another woman will have picked up the phone to say it’s happened to her. And those are only the ones who go on to report it. For every woman who calls, there are others sitting in silence, checking their phones, hoping it hasn’t spread, telling no one. I know. I was one of them. Every one of those numbers is a woman feeling what I felt. The dread of who’s seen it. The shame that was never hers to carry. The exhaustion of telling her story again and again to get anyone to act. Some of the rise is women finally feeling able to come forward, and the helpline deserves enormous credit for that. But no one seriously believes this is getting better. We have the strongest laws we’ve ever had against image-based abuse. I helped fight for them. But the numbers are still going the wrong way. And this is just one corner of it. Police photo of Bear after his original offences Credit: ITV Campaigner Georgia has now started the ­Georgia Harrison Foundation Credit: Olivia West Violence against women and girls is an epidemic in this country. What happened to me is one front in it. You can’t sentence your way out of a culture. I know that better than anyone. I’ve watched one man be sentenced twice. That’s why I’m starting the ­Georgia Harrison Foundation. Not to punish this after it happens. The courts do that, and today they did. It exists to change the culture that keeps producing it. To reach boys before the algorithms do, in schools and at kitchen tables. To hold the platforms and payment systems that profit from cruelty to account. And to make sure no woman has to fight this alone, the way I did. Here is the first thing I’m asking for. Politely, but permanently. When a woman reports these images to a platform today, she is almost always talking to a machine. A form. An automated reply. A case number. If your card is cloned, your bank puts a human on the phone within minutes. If your parcel goes missing, someone writes back by lunchtime. When the worst images of your life are spreading across the internet, you get very little at all. So I want every major platform to commit to staffing a proper team of case workers dedicated to image-based abuse. People with the power to take things down, and the time to be kind and talk to victims at pace directly. I’ve met people at these companies. Most of them are decent, and plenty of them are parents. I’m not asking them to solve the internet. I’m ­asking them to answer the phone. I won’t spend tonight thinking about a man in a cell. Every hour, three more women are finding out what I found out. I’ll be thinking about them, and about boys who are seven years old right now and what reaches them before we do. That’s the fight that’s left. And it’s one we need to win.