Abusive partners frequently use digital technologies to control, intimidate, degrade, and harass their partners. Sending intimate photos or videos of yourself to a partner has its risks, but nowadays with advances of artificial intelligence (AI) one doesn’t even have to send intimate content for an abusive partner to use technology to sexually abuse them. Ai generated explicit materials, known as deepfakes, is when a video is altered digitally using artificial intelligence to appear one is doing something or taking a photo they never even took or did typically out of malicious intent. Image-based sexual abuse (IBSA) is a broad term that involves the weaponization of sexually explicit images or videos. A current or previous partner may create or share explicit content as a form of “revenge” or threaten to distribute them as a form of blackmail. Recent lawsuits and legislations increasingly acknowledge the ways that abusive partners create, distribute, or threaten to distribute intimate images without the consent or knowledge of their partner often as a form of revenge, yet little research has been explored concerning image-based sexual abuse within contexts of intimate partners.
REVENGE PORN
Revenge pornography refers to the act of sexual assault and domestic violence/abuse where an intimate partner reveals or distributes (posts, uploads, etc.) sexually explicit images or videos of a person without their consent and in order to cause them distress or embarrassment. Victim-support advocates and domestic violence sector workers have increasingly acknowledged the role that image-based sexual abuse plays in the perpetration of intimate partner abuse (Douglas et al., 2019; Henry & Powell, 2015; Woodlock, 2017). In the event of an intimate relationship, image-based sexual abuse can include any of the following actions: taking, creating (with Deepfake AI technology), or sharing nude or sexual images without consent of their partner; threatening to share intimate images to coerce or force a partner into sharing more intimate images or engage them in an unwanted act and then recording (distributing sexual assault imagery).
Image based sexual abuse is a criminal offense and new law are being passed to protect citizens against this new threat against privacy. It is one’s right to bodily autonomy to decide what happens to one’s body even if it isn’t “real life“, the damage to one’s image can be devastating. Our bodies are still our bodies online and everyone should have the right to protect their online image.
DIDDY AND CASSIE
Infamous music producer Sean “Diddy” Combs has been arrested and convicted of various counts of sexual assault and repeated physical abuse of partner Cassie Ventura and various other individuals. Earlier this year in May 2024, Combs publicly apologized for physically assaulting his girlfriend Cassie Ventura when caught on a hotel surveillance camera. This was after denying Cassie’s accusations of assault and sexual abuse claiming she and the many other women who came forward, as a victim, wanted a pay day. The video shows Combs chasing, kicking, dragging and hurling a glass vase at Cassie. Attorneys for Combs even suggested they would seek to have the tapes excluded from his upcoming trial. The allegations contained in lawsuits against Combs date as far back as the 1990s, when he founded his own record label, Bad Boy Records in the early 1990s.
Unfortunately physical abuse was not the only form of abuse Cassie and many others would experience from Diddy Combs. Sex trafficking involves the use of force, fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act from someone.
In the filed lawsuit in Federal District Court in Manhattan Cassie claimed that not long after she met Combs in 2005 he began a pattern of control and abuse that included plying her with drugs, beating her and forcing her to have sex with male prostitutes while he filmed the encounters. According to the suit, Combs called these encounters “freak offs,” which involved costumes, like masquerade masks and lingerie. They continued for years, taking place at high-end hotels across the United States and in Combs’s homes. The suit says that he instructed Cassie Ventura to search the websites of escort services to obtain male sex workers. Drugs were supplied at these events, which Ventura’s suit says she took it because they “allowed her to disassociate during these horrific encounters.” Cassie Ventura would attempt to delete videos from these incidents that had been shot on her phone, but Combs told her he still had access to the videos, and on a flight once made her watch a video she believed she had deleted. As a result of these incidents in multiple states across the country Cassie Ventura was a victim of sex trafficking, digital trafficking, and image-based sexual abuse.
To conclude abusive partners use image based sexual abuse like deepfakes, recordings of sexual assault, or hidden cameras to humiliate and control their partners often as a form of revenge (as known as revenge porn). The effects victims experience are devastating including suicide, mental and physical health issues, loss of work, money, opportunities, relationships, family and the ability to live a normal healthy life which gives abusers the leverage to continue abuse. How could someone leave a partner who is threatening to make such materials public if you leave them? This is the reality victims of revenge porn and other forms of image based sexual abuse face often alone and with little compassion and understanding from society. It is time as a whole we stand together for stronger legislation for victims of these crimes, to protect them from further exploitation by criminalizing those who willingly distribute image based sexual abuse online, in adult websites, and other platforms. Join us in this fight to create a safer online space for everyone, including yourself, your loved ones and the future generations.
THE PROTECT ACT needs your help and support for the House of Representatives to push it through.
