Criminalizing Intimate Image Abuse: A Comparative Perspective

Intimate image abuse is a recent, endemic phenomenon which raises multiple legal issues and presents a significant challenge for the traditional institutions of law and justice. The nature of this phenomenon not only involves the legal complexities of regulating privacy, sexual offences, and cybercrime, but also requires an understanding of the social and cultural issues of what may be considered 'intimate', 'private' or, indeed, 'sexual'.

Since the harm experienced by victims of intimate image violence is particularly serious and involves disparate legal interests, criminal law has been invoked as one of the solutions, but it is unclear what its role and limits should be. The law's approach aims to avoid any moralistic attitude, trying to achieve a balance between sexual autonomy and the protection of sexual privacy. At the same time, the needs of criminalization must be balanced with the traditional principles of criminal law.

Criminalizing Intimate Image Abuse strives primarily to generate new conceptual and theoretical frameworks to address the legal responses to this phenomenon, by bringing together a number of scholars involved in the study of image abuse over recent years. This book compares and contrasts the various solutions developed in different legal systems. The comparative perspective is mainly focused between the Anglo-American criminalization model and that of continental Europe, but there are also overviews of the state of criminalization in Asian and Latin American countries.

Once the criminalization of intimate image abuse, and its theoretical and practical limits, has been established, the analysis of the book focuses on possible new legal strategies, complementary or alternative to traditional criminal justice, to create an effective safeguard for victims. The role of internet service providers and bystanders in working to prevent abuse or possible forms of restorative justice is also considered.