Get help for workplace discrimination, family law, violence or sexual assault, healthcare, and more. One in ten women under the age of 30 have experienced either threats to share or the actual sharing of intimate personal photos without their consent. Nonconsensual image sharing, also known as revenge porn, is one place where the digital age and misogyny meet.
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This refers to an implicit or explicit threat to have your intimate or sexually explicit material shared without your consent. The type of advice below is for situations where the perpetrator is a known person, for example, an ex-partner or family member, and they are making the threats to cause distress. Is it against the law? Threats to share intimate images with the intent to cause distress is now an offence in UK law. This is included within the Domestic Abuse bill which can be found here. This was enacted into UK law on 29th June , is the threat happened before this date, it may not be included. How is this different from 'sextortion'? Sextortion, or webcam blackmail, are scams usually committed by criminal gangs operating overseas. They will have different motives and intentions of threatening to share the intimate images for purposes of financial gain rather than causing the victim distress although this happens anyway.
How to get unwanted pictures of yourself removed
While new laws criminalising this practice represent a positive step forwards, the legislative response has been piecemeal and typically focuses only on the practices of vengeful ex-partners. Further, we argue that image-based sexual abuse is on a continuum with other forms of sexual violence. We suggest that this twin approach may enable a more comprehensive legislative and policy response that, in turn, will better reflect the harms to victim-survivors and lead to more appropriate and effective educative and preventative strategies. It is a pernicious and gendered form of sexual abuse, the prevalence of which has increased exponentially with the ubiquity of the smart phone. While new laws criminalising this practice represent a positive step forward, the legislative response has been largely ad hoc. Footnote 2 To develop this argument, in the first part of the article we analyse various forms of image-based sexual abuse, examining the variety and similarities of these practices. We then consider the extent to which this conceptualisation reflects the reality of sexual offending and the experiences of victim-survivors, including the varied nature of the harms suffered by differently situated victim-survivors which are more than the physical harms commonly associated with the criminal law: we argue that image-based sexual abuse forms part of the continuum of sexual violence. In essence, therefore, we are making two arguments: first, that there is a continuum of practices which together form our concept of image-based sexual abuse; and, secondly, that image-based sexual abuse is on a continuum with other forms of sexual violence.
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