In a welcome step forward for ending violence against women, our laws have been changed to make it easier to prosecute those guilty of intimate image-based abuse – otherwise known as 'revenge porn'.
As part of amendments to an Online Safety Bill this week, sharing deepfake images or videos – sexual images or other media that have been digitally manipulated to replace a person's likeness with that of another – will also be criminalised for the first time.
‘Intimate image abuse destroys lives and, as a result of these changes to the Online Safety Bill, will become a sex crime which recognises the real damage done to victims,’ Maria Miller MP has said, after a decade-long campaign against the issue.
‘Posting intimate images online without consent is a gross demonstration of control and subjugation, a tool of abusers to strip their victims of any remaining sense of autonomy, and a violation of trust.’
Sharing deepfake media will be punishable by up to six months in prison, as will sharing ‘revenge porn’ images, which experts have asked that we now call ‘intimate image abuse’ or ‘image-based sexual abuse’ instead.
This shift in the way we define sexual abuse is necessary, not just because the term ‘revenge porn’ is completely outdated. It perpetuates the very toxic normalisation of victim blaming that exists within our culture when it comes to sexual abuse and a range of other crimes. Also, the use of the world ‘porn’ is problematic when describing this crime, as pornography should be consistent with acts between two consenting adults. Image-based sexual abuse, meanwhile, is absolutely not consensual.
It’s important that we reflect on the words we use to describe these types of abuse because, as Andrea Simon, director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition says, it shapes how these crimes are dealt with and how they are perceived in society.
‘The language we use matters because it shapes our collective attitudes and behaviours,’ she explains. ‘Survivors and their advocates have long called for image-based sexual abuse to be called by its proper name.
‘When the media wrongly names sexual abuse as "porn", it minimises the harm done, retraumatises survivors and reinforces the myth that abuse of women is a normal part of sexual relationships.’
So while the changes to the Online Safety Bill are indeed an excellent move towards effectively prosecuting such awful crimes, we can also do our part everyday to affect change by being mindful about the words we use to discuss them.