"Everyone has had that nightmare.

You know, the one where you’re at work and all of a sudden you’re naked in front of all your work colleagues. 

You feel exposed, vulnerable, and like your entire world is crashing down around you. (Say goodbye to your career as a politician!)

Then you wake up and thankfully it was only a dream. 

Well, for the victims of image-based abuse, commonly referred to as 'revenge porn', this is a terrifying and ongoing reality."

WEL member and founder of feminist group, "fight for your right to book club", Emma McKenzie, has recently written on behalf of WEL to discuss the very pressing issue of 'revenge porn', which is legally referred to as image-based abuse. 

With much of our lives, conversations and communications now online, the digital world is becoming the new battle ground for violence against women and girls.

Many of us have heard about image-based abuse of high school students, on Tinder, and even within the Kardashian family, however did you know that non-consensual sharing of intimate images is also a common form of domestic and family violence - a tactic often used as a threat or to control?

What we are coming to realise is that Australian Federal and State laws are simply not adequate enough to prosecute image-based abuse perpetrators, or adequately deal with this growing problem, despite 1 in 5 Australians having been victims of image-based abuse.

So far, the states of Victoria and Adelaide have both criminalised the sharing of intimate photos without consent, and some steps are also being taken to criminalise image-based abuse on a Federal level.

However, the reality is that platforms like Facebook have been widely used for over a decade and yet we still lack laws which tackle online abuse. Legislative action must be delivered quickly - we simply cannot afford to stagnate on this issue when it is putting so many women and girls at risk of abuse.

To get the ball rolling and and put pressure on our lawmakers to criminalise image-based abuse across Australia, we want to know your opinion.

Will you take our survey?