When New York joined 45 other states this week with a law banning revenge porn, its statute — with civil and criminal provisions — was like many others in that it was watered down thanks to Internet industry lobbying that denies most victims legal recourse, Slate reports. New York’s law treats sharing explicit images of a person without their consent as harassment, meaning it applies to people who publish nonconsensual sexual images of someone “with intent to cause harm to the emotional, financial or physical welfare of another person.” Proving intent, say victim advocates, is not only difficult, but in most cases irrelevant.
Most cases of nonconsensual sharing of sexual images wouldn’t necessarily fall into the category of harassment, nor does the individual distributing the photos always want to cause some kind of distress to the person depicted. According to a 2017 study conducted by the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit that works on policy and helps victims of nonconsensual pornography, 80 percent of people who share private and sexual images of someone without consent aren’t trying to harm anyone. Violations of sexual privacy, whatever the intent of the perpetrator, can permanently damage a person’s reputation and home life, and cause severe emotional trauma. A handful of other states, like Illinois, have laws that aren’t couched in language about intent to harm victim. They focus instead on whether an image was shared without consent. Yet the Illinois law is currently being challenged.