Beyond ‘Revenge Porn’: The Continuum of Image-Based Sexual Abuse

Abstract

In the last few years, many countries have introduced laws combating the phenomenon colloquially known as 'revenge porn'. 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. Drawing on Liz Kelly's (Surviving sexual violence. Polity Press, Cambridge, 1988) pioneering work, we suggest that 'revenge porn' should be understood as just one form of a range of gendered, sexualised forms of abuse which have common characteristics, forming what we are conceptualising as the 'continuum of imagebased sexual abuse'. 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.Keywords Revenge porn Á Image-based sexual abuse Á Continuum of sexual violence Á Non-consensual pornography Á Online abuse

Defying shame

“…Th ese images are referred to here as consensually produced sexual images. Th is covers not only the common example of revenge porn (McGlynn et al, 2017) but also cases in which pictures are stolen (Holten, 2014) or the distributor is simply unknown. Th is is the case in Mathilde's story.…”

“…Th e third category consists of non-sexual images. Th ese involve cases in which images were not sexual in their original context, but are sexualised through reproduction and distribution (McGlynn et al, 2017). One commonly discussed example of these images is deep fake or Photoshop porn (Sørensen, Frederiksen, & Kirk, 2017), in which an image of the victim's face is edited onto a pornographic body or into a sexualised situation.…”

“…Unlike broader defi nitions of image-based sexual abuse (e.g. McGlynn, Rackley, & Houghton, 2017;Powell, Henry, Flynn, & Scott, 2019), our defi nition includes identifi ability and harassment. Th ese elements were central to the participants and, while the defi nition certainly excludes other cases of DSA, it gives an accurate understanding of the basis of this study.…”

Wench Tactics? Openings in Conditions of Closure

“…In picking up Kelly's concept of the continuum of sexual violence and giving it new life, McGlynn et al (2017) show how continuum-based analysis is a kind of technique of feminist opening and closing, even though they do not put it that way themselves. For Kelly, the concept of 'continuum' enabled a way of seeing connections between different practices of violence and addressing their interactive and cumulative effect (1988).…”

“…The gold standard, 'Open Choice', 20 makes the full research publication directly available to the reader on a journal webpage, which is usually identifiable by a DoI number and a link, or can be searched out through research indexes and internet search engines. Examples of gold open access publications in this issue are: McGlynn et al (2017) and Welsh (2017). The author retains copyright 21 in the publication, rather than transferring it to Springer as in the traditional subscription model, and can post and share that publication as she likes.…”