Promises and pitfalls of legal responses to image-based sexual abuse: ritical insights from the Italian case

Pavan, Elena and Lavorgna, Anita (2022) Promises and pitfalls of legal responses to image-based sexual abuse: ritical insights from the Italian case. In, Powell, Anastasia, Flynn, Asher and Sugiura, Lisa (eds.) The Palgrave Handbook of Gendered Violence and Technology. Springer, pp. 545-564. (doi:10.1007/978-3-030-83734-1_27).

Abstract

Over the last decade, online image-based sex abuse (IBSA)-the digital non-consensual diffusion of intimate and/or sexual images, commonly referred to as "revenge porn"-has been increasingly targeted by national governments. This is indeed the case in Italy, which indexed IBSA among other legally punishable forms of domestic and gender-based violence within its 2019 "Red Code law". In this chapter, we propose to assess levels of responsiveness of this provision starting from a conceptualisation of online IBSA as a form of violence perpetrated in and through human-nonhuman assemblages, and characterised by relational connections, unique affective forces, and agentic capacities. Read through the lens of assemblages, the "Red Code" law is labelled a provision ineffective by design affected by three main limitations: first, the peripheral and instrumental role assigned to digital media; second, the disregard of the more-than-human nature of online IBSA, which confines its legal response within a strict model of deterrence; third, the lack of recognition of the collective and distributed nature of online IBSA.

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Contributors

Author: Anita Lavorgna

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