Legal Discourse On Right To Bodily Autonomy: Lessons And Best Practices
- IJLLR Journal
- Nov 20
- 2 min read
Dr. Mononita Kundu Das, St. Xavier's University Kolkata
Introduction:
Feminist concerns have found a place in law, increasingly over the past years. The ‘digitalisation of intimacy’ during the Covid-19 pandemic has caused an increase in overall sexual behaviour online, including an increase in sexual deviance online. Such digital sexual deviance includes online stalking, online sexual harassment, revenge pornography, online dating scams, etc. The typical victim of revenge pornography may very well be a man, or a transgender person. However, since the issue revolves around sexual autonomy and since the phenomenon has left most harrowing impacts on the lives of women, it cannot be studied without a feminist perspective.
Historical evidences:
The term ‘revenge pornography’ traces its origin back to the sensational case of American citizen, Hunter Moore, who hosted a blog on the internet and collected such intimate images from various sources and then disseminated it on his website without the consent of the people depicted in those images. He earned revenue through advertisements and merchandising. At the time, there were no specific crime titled ‘revenge pornography’. Hunter Moore was convicted and ultimately sentenced for the offence of identity theft. However, the term ‘revenge pornography’ was used in this case for the first time. The phenomenon of nonconsensual dissemination of ‘private sexual images’ (PSI hereinafter) also became a part of the public discourse. Garcia and Aitchison, have argued that online public shaming (abbreviated by the authors as OPS) has been used as tool of moral policing, where the victim is shamed online with the purpose of ‘disqualifying her/him from normal discourse’. They deem the act of online shaming and abuse to be a ‘reputational punishment’.
Typologies of the Offence:
The phenomenon of ‘revenge pornography’ has been described by many authors in many different names. It has been called ‘revenge pornography’ ‘non-consensual pornography’, and ‘non-consensual sharing of intimate images’. The parameters of revenge pornography have not been well defined. Among the various prevalent term, Indian judiciary has only ever used term ‘sextortion’ to refer to image-based sexual abuse.
