Georgia Harrison has been awarded an MBE for her efforts to tackle violence against women and girls. Harrison, 30, will be awarded for her work, 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”.
The former reality star appeared on ITV shows such as The Only Way is Essex in 2017 and Love Island in 2018. 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 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 two counts of disclosing a private sexual film. Harrison was then awarded compensation in a damages claim and said she would donate some of the £207,900 to charity.
Harrison says she often feels a “responsibility to help” as she worries about the increase of social media influencers fuelling misogyny and sexism. She 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.
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) 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.
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