Feminist Organizing: Research on Image-Based Violence

‍The Reclaim Coalition to End Online Image-based Sexual Violence

Language matters. That’s why we need to define different forms of female subjugation with accurate terms and aim to unlearn male supremacist terms. Image-based sexual violence is when someone takes, shares, or threatens to share sexually explicit images or videos of a person without their knowledge or consent, and with the aim of causing them distress or harm.

Male supremacy obscures these facts through the creation and proliferation of the term “revenge porn.” By calling image-based sexual violence “revenge porn” and other euphemisms, men aim to conflate their violence with legalized commercial sexual exploitation. This in turn minimizes the violation of these crimes in the eyes of the law and society. These men capitalize on the societal belief that female bodies are to be bought and sold through force, fraud, and coercion.

The term pornography has a similar history as language created by men to obscure violence against women and girls. For centuries male supremacy has worked to equate female with commercial object. It’s not enough for these men to have access to women currently being exploited by the sex trade, they also need to commodify the women they know in their personal lives to feed their socialization for violent power and control. Image-based sexual violence becomes the ‘regular man’s’ way to participate in commercial sexual exploitation. In a world that created and glorified the term “pimp” it is no surprise that men have increased the digitization of exploitation. Image-based sexual violence becomes a currency for these men and boys to share and trade for desperately sought-after male approval.

📚 Resources to Explore:

• “I Didn’t Consent: A Global Landscape Report on Image-Based Sexual Abuse”

• ‍The Reclaim Coalition to End Online Image-based Sexual Violence

  
  

✍️ Journal Reflection Prompt:

• What inaccurate and obscuring terms do you find yourself using because they are normalized under male supremacy? Sit with any shame that comes up and remember we are all socialized toward disassociated complicity in violence.