Virtual Violence and Harms Beyond the Screen: Gender-Based Cybercrimes, Escalating Offline Violence, and Institutional Neglect

Abstract

Gender-based cybercrimes have influenced and encouraged the continuum of sexual violence against women in both the virtual and the real world. Image-Based Sexual Abuse (IBSA) is most commonly known as ‘revenge porn’, which acts as an umbrella term for the multitude of digital harms. However, most people understand ‘revenge porn’ to mean the act of non-consensually sharing intimate images that were either taken without the victim’s consent, or the victim was unaware that they were being filmed at the time. Recently, IBSA has evolved exponentially with the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create deepfake images, in which individuals have not consented or unknowingly had their faces digitally manipulated onto another’s body within an intimate image or video. Although the term ‘revenge porn’ is more commonly used, this paper adopts the term Non-Consensual Image Sharing (NCIS) instead. This is because the phrase ‘revenge porn’ implies that the victim has done something to incite revenge and thus is a term that is ostensibly victim-blaming. Not only have digital harms increased in different forms of image production and sharing, but some victims have unfortunately faced physical attacks offline by their online perpetrator. Additionally, heightened vulnerability of digital sexual violence is seen primarily within groups of young women and girls, showcasing intersectionality between age and gender. All of this has been allowed to accelerate due to hopeless legal reform and ignorance by legislators to implement mechanisms that effectively combat evolving tools by perpetrators to inflict such harms. Such tools, including mass distribution on public platforms and AI, produce an accessible opportunity to commit such crimes, especially the availability to do so without substantial surveillance and proportionate legal punishments.