The sexual abuse campaigner and former reality star Georgia Harrison has told the BBC she is “honoured” to be receiving an MBE.
Harrison, 30, will be awarded for her efforts to tackle violence against women and girls, which includes working with the government on the Online Safety Act in 2023.
She says she feels “a responsibility to help” the many women who are victims of crimes such as intimate image abuse and deepfaking.
Her ex-partner Stephen Bear was jailed for 21 months in 2023 after uploading sexual footage of himself and Harrison to OnlyFans filmed without her consent.
Harrison, who is being awarded her MBE as part of the King’s Birthday Honours, said she had to re-read the letter she received from King Charles “three times” as she “just couldn’t believe it”.
“It’s definitely not something I anticipated and it feels nice to have my work recognised because with campaigning sometimes you feel like a lot goes unnoticed,” she told the BBC.
The former reality star appeared on ITV shows such as The Only Way is Essex in 2017 and Love Island in 2018, where she entered the villa as a bombshell and gained nationwide fame.
It was during 2019 that she entered MTV’s The Challenge, where she met fellow reality star Bear.
The pair dated on and off for a few months, with Harrison discovering in December 2020 that the now 35-year-old Bear had uploaded intimate CCTV footage of them to streaming service OnlyFans without her consent.
She subsequently reported the crime and Bear was sentenced after being found guilty of voyeurism and discussing private, sexual photographs and films.
Harrison was then awarded compensation in a damages claim and said she would donate some of the £207,900 to charity.
She says she often feels a “responsibility to help” as she worries about the increase of social media influencers fuelling misogyny and sexism.
Harrison, who is currently expecting her first child, said: “I’d be scared to have a teenager right now, being completely honest, I really would be terrified”.
“We’ve seen with the rise of Andrew Tate and some men thinking the thing to do with women is to mistreat them and think they can do what they want with them,” she said.
She added she feels the need to let women know, “they deserve to be treated fairly, they deserve consent and the right to their own bodies”.
A recent poll of teachers in the UK found three in five believe social media use has had a negative effect on behaviour in schools – with Tate being named as a reason by a number of teachers in the poll.
Harrison says she has been into some schools recently to watch consent workshops with primary school age children, describing them as “brilliant”.
She hopes that these type of lessons will have an impact for the next generation.
“I’d like to think by the time my child gets to the age where consent becomes an issue, things are going to be a lot better, because we are doing something to educate around consent and that’s something that’s never really been done before in this generation,” she added.
Harrison says “on a positive note” women have told her case and “the strength you found” has encouraged them to take their perpetrators to court for causes of rape, domestic abuse and intimate image abuse.
Since Bear’s conviction in 2022, she has campaigned to increase the support for women and girls who have faced similar crimes to her by working on the Online Safety Act and as part of the Women and Equalities Committee.
She says she has been working with the committee on improving timescales for women who want to report crimes against them – as currently they only have six months after a crime has taken place to tell the police about it.
“It took me about four months to even realise a crime had been committed to me when it happened so its scary to think, had I been notified a few months later, I may not have had the right to justice.
“It should be a lot easier for women out there,” she added.
Harrison says she has also been receiving more and more messages from victims of deepfakes, which are videos, pictures or audio clips made with AI to look or sound real.
There have been recent concerns about schoolchildren using apps to distribute AI-generated deepfake content, despite the practice being illegal.
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) – a UK-based charity partly funded by tech firms – said in February there had been 245 reports of AI-generated child sexual abuse in 2024 compared with 51 in 2023, a 380% increase.
“I think [deepfake] technology is getting a lot more impressive and easier to access,” Harrison said.
Earlier this year, the government announced laws to tackle the threat of child sexual abuse images being generated by AI, which include making it illegal to possess, create, or distribute AI tools designed to create such material.
