Each week, Prospect asks a range of experts, as well as our readers, to come up with answers to the questions defining the political agenda.

On Sunday, a user on the popular anonymous messageboard 4Chan claimed to have obtained photos depicting a number of young female celebrities naked. The resultant furore served to highlight the despicable attitudes of many people towards women's bodies, and their rights over them, as people shared and viewed the stolen images in droves. But this is just one high-profile example of a much wider trend; stolen pornography is commonplace. These women were hacked, others have intimate images or videos leaked by lovers (so-called “revenge porn”). A major study into the issue in 2012 found that 88 per cent of homemade pornographic material ends up on the internet. Stolen porn, and how to stop it, is a crucially important issue.

Criminalise revenge porn

These high profile women, victims of hacking, are not alone. Thanks to the problem of revenge porn, there are women from all backgrounds and of all ages who have found images plastered over the internet or shared around their workplace. I have also heard far too many stories of teenage girls whose images have been distributed through gangs and social media. One thing unites all these cases: the use of intimate images as a weapon with which to embarrass, humiliate and degrade. This is not an issue of free speech. It is a crime and it is time we recognised that in law. Labour will be supporting amendments, currently in the Lords, to include this in the Sex Offences Act. Yvette Cooper, Shadow Home Secretary and Labour MP

Recognise human flaws

This is not to blame anyone except those that are stealing it, but If we really want to stop the trade in stolen pornography then we've got to stop making it and uploading it to the internet. The moment that you share something online, it becomes vulnerable. Some hackers are very gifted, and we don't yet know with certainty the methods used to hack these celebrities specifically, but it's estimated that around 80 per cent of hacks more generally come from human error. That might be reusing passwords, or it might be giving your password away to someone claiming to be an IT technician (hackers call this "social engineering"). Technology won't ever change the fact that people just mess up sometimes. Jamie Bartlett, Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos

Leave women's bodies alone

For most kinds of things, our default assumption is that we need to ask permission from their owners if we want to take them home, or share them with our friends, even touch them—Just imagine if I reached for your wallet without asking.  Women’s bodies are not like this.  For women’s bodies, the default is quite different; unless a woman goes out of her way to indicate that her body is not to be touched or shared or taken home, she will be told “she asked for it.”  If she didn’t want to be groped, she shouldn’t have worn such a tight skirt.  If she didn’t want the whole world to see those naked photos, she shouldn’t have taken them. Compare this with the statement “If you didn't want me to take your wallet, you shouldn't have carried it with you.”  This is appalling.  What needs to change is simple: we need to realise that women's bodies are their own, and to start recognizing their right to determine what happens to their bodies. Professor Jennifer Saul, Head of the Philosophy Department at the University of Sheffield

Boost security

The only thing that might help significantly is stopping this material from being stolen in the first place—that means better prioritisation all round. When it comes to technology and security, trying to keep everything completely secure is impossible and counter-productive. What you need to do is identify those things that deserve maximum security, and set them aside from the casual way you treat everything else. You should protect them by making sure people need several bits of information to access them (multiple-factor authentications), setting unpredictable answers to security questions, using unique and frequently updated logins, and monitoring their status frequently. Best of all, you could store them on an encrypted disk that only you own. Tom Chatfield, Technology Commentator

Stir up society

There needs to be a societal reaction which says "this is simply not alright." Society has taken a very strong line on child abuse images: as well as them being criminal, we don't think they are tolerable. Although clearly not directly comparable, we should also be firm with intrusions into people's private lives and these intimate images. For hackers to steal these images is already illegal, so the police need to take this very seriously, and we've certainly seen with the issue of revenge porn, for example, that they haven't taken it as seriously as they ought to. There are training requirements for the police, therefore, but we also need as a society to be firmer that this is something which shouldn't be tolerated. Dr Julian Huppert, Liberal Democrat MP for Cambridge

This week's Big Question is edited by Josh Lowe and Jeremy Gordon