Revenge Porn: A Deep Dive into Nonconsensual Pornography

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Norma fell victim to what is known as revenge porn, which is a subset of nonconsensual pornography, or the “nonconsensual distribution of sexually explicit photograph or videos online”, frequently accompanied by identifying information. In many cases ex-partners are the perpetrators, but other instances of nonconsensual pornography include hacking or material recorded without the victims knowledge . Nonconsensual pornography can cause terrible damage to the victim’s personal reputation, career, and well being. Victims have reported that in addition to online harassment, they have experienced offline forms of harassment, including “threatening phone calls, house call, mail, [and] stalking.” Entire websites, such as myex.com, are dedicated …show more content…

Indeed, the most that can be said is that there is “consensus among privacy scholars about the fact that privacy is important and that privacy is vague, fuzzy, and hard to explicate or pin down”. This “fuzziness” contributes to the difficulty lawmakers have in addressing issues such as nonconsensual pornography, where issues of privacy are clearly implicated but potential remedies come into conflict with other values, such as free speech. However, Hoven writes of two ethical frameworks for that shed light on how nonconsensual pornography represents a violation of privacy. The first is that of “information-based harm”, which occurs when personal information is used to bring about “a broad range of harms to an individual” including “reputational harm”. Nonconsensual pornography’s documented impacts, from harassment to job loss, make it a clear case of information-based harm. Nonconsensual pornography represents a violation of privacy under the “moral autonomy” framework as well, which stipulates that the individual has the right “to shape our moral biographies, to present ourselves as we think fit […] without the critical gaze and interference of others.” This framework argues that a privacy violation causes one to unduly feel pressure to change your behavior because “what others know about you can radically affect your view of yourself” , therefore justifying laws that protect one against “the fixation of one’s moral identity by others” Nonconsensual pornography, which aims to shame and harass its victims, is violation of privacy that exposes victims to the unduly to the judgment of the public and therefore violates their moral autonomy. Under both the

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