Criminalising 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 criminal justice. The nature of this phenomenon requires considering the traditional complexities of regulating privacy, sexual offences, and cybercrimes, alongside the social and cultural issue of what may be considered ’intimate’, ’private’, or indeed ’sexual’.

Since the harm experienced by victims of intimate image abuse 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 should 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 intimate image abuse over recent years. This volume compares the solutions developed in different legal systems. The perspective is mainly focused on the comparison between the Anglo-American criminalization model and that of continental Europe, but there are also overviews of the criminalization trends in Asian and Latin American countries.

Once the criminalization of intimate image abuse, as well as its theoretical and practical limits, have been established, the analysis focuses on possible new legal strategies, complementary or alternative to traditional criminal justice, such as restorative justice. Finally, in order to achieve an effective safeguard for victim-survivors, the book deals with the role of Internet Service Providers and bystanders in preventing intimate image abuse.

Gian Marco Caletti, Kolis Summerer

Gian Marco Caletti obtained his PhD in criminal law at the University of Bologna. From 2019 to 2022 he was a research fellow at the Free University of Bolzano, working on the interdisciplinary research project ＂CREEP - Criminalizing Revenge Porn?＂. He has been visiting scholar at the Universities of Cambridge and New York (NYU). Among the first Italian scholars to deal with image-based sexual abuse, he has repeatedly advised national institutions. His research has focused on criminal law, particularly on criminal negligence and recklessness, and more recently on sexual crimes. He also wrote a recent book on the shift from violence to absence of consent in Italian rape law.

Kolis Summerer is Associate Professor of Criminal Law at the Free University of Bolzano (Italy). She received her law degree (1999) and her Ph.D. in Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure (2004) at the University of Bologna. She was awarded, among others, research grants from the Max Planck Society. She is specialized in comparative legal research and her research has focused on substantive criminal law (particularly on causation and mens rea) as well as on key topics (such as gender violence and restorative justice). She has written a monograph on causation and evitability (2013) and authored many articles published in national and international journals and books.