Posting intimate images of people online without consent is a type of sexual violence for which nobody has found an effective answer. Most people know this as ‘revenge porn’. We prefer to call it intimate image abuse, as sex workers are harmed when pornography and sexual violence are conflated.
Intimate image abuse transcends all boundaries, targeting individuals across diverse communities and leaving behind a trail of trauma and injustice. Existing frameworks for dealing with it are wholly inadequate. They fail to prevent, they fail to remove images from the web, and they fail to provide victims with compensation and support. They even fail to capture the full scope of harm experienced by victims.
Few people know this better than sex workers, who often send images of themselves to prospective clients as part of their work. These frequently get passed on and posted elsewhere, causing the original senders to lose control of where their images end up. This is a violation. Just as consensual sex becomes rape when the perpetrator goes beyond what was consented to, consensual image exchange becomes abuse when the receiver decides those images are now theirs to do with as they will.
