Maria Miller MP has tabled amendments to the Online Safety Bill to be debated today to tackle the severe harms that come from intimate image abuse.
Maria said, ‘Sending intimate images of someone without their consent can do huge psychological harm to victims, who are overwhelmingly women, as well as being used as a tool for control by perpetrators of domestic abuse. It is vital that we do everything we can to protect victims of this cruel act by putting appropriate offences into law.’
In light of Maria’s eight-year campaign on this issue, the Government agreed to change the law in this area. This represents a huge victory for victims, many of whom have suffered in silence for too long.
Maria's amendments regarding intimate image abuse reflect the Law Commission’s recommendations following a 3 year inquiry.
Incidences of intimate image abuse, also termed ‘revenge porn’, are increasing greatly. The Revenge Porn Helpline found that cases increased by over 40% between 2020 and 2021, rising from 3,146 cases to 4,406, and female victims, not only representing 75% of cases, suffer on average 60 times more content of them released than do male victims.
The pandemic had a severe impact on the amount of abuse, with reports to the Revenge Porn Helpline increasing by 87% between 2019 and 2020. Reports continue to rise, and the impact on victims is devastating.
Maria has tabled seven amendments to the Online Safety Bill – six to tackle intimate image abuse, and one to ensure fines levied by Ofcom are funnelled back into victim support organisations.
The structure of Maria’s intimate image abuse amendments is six clauses, creating a base offence plus three more serious offences that reflect a greater culpability on the part of a defendant. Two further clauses provide for special measures and anonymity for victims.
The amendments do the following:
- Base Offence: creates the offence of sharing an intimate image without consent, providing the necessary exclusions such as for children’s medical care or images taken in public places, and establishing the penalty as triable by magistrates only with maximum imprisonment of 6 months.
- Sharing with Intent to Cause Alarm, Distress or Humiliation: creates a more serious offence where there is the intent to cause alarm etc. by sharing an image, with the appropriately more serious penalty of 12 months through a magistrates’ court or up to three years in a Crown Court.
- Sharing for Sexual Gratification: creates another more serious offence of sharing an image for the sexual gratification of the sender or receiver. Again, this is punishable by 12 months through a magistrates’ court or up to three years in a Crown Court.
- Threat to Share: creates another more serious offence of threatening to share an intimate image, regardless of whether such an image actually exists, and where the sender intends to cause fear, or is reckless to whether they would cause fear. Again, this is punishable by 12 months through a magistrates’ court or up to three years in a Crown Court.
- Special Measures: this amendment inserts intimate image abuse into legislation that qualifies victims for special measures when testifying in court (such as partitions to hide them from view, video testifying etc.) which is already prescribed by law.
- Anonymity: similar to special measures, this amendment allows victims of intimate image abuse the same availability for anonymity as other sexual offences to protect their identities and give them the confidence to testify against their abuser without fear of repercussions.
Crucially, the amendments cover so-called ‘deepfakes’ – generated images that look real, but are in fact faked. This will help to tackle ‘nudification’, which is making nude images of a person by manipulating real images of them. A website that strips photos of women of their clothes received 38 million hits in just seven months.
The Online Safety Bill is hugely important for making the UK the safest place to be online, but it is vital that intimate image abuse is fully included, as the Law Commission have recommended.