Specifically, voyeurism laws tackle a very particular form of conduct, namely spying on ‘private’ acts (conventionally understood) for the purposes of sexual gratification. In recounting their experiences of harassment and abuse following ‘revenge porn’, victim-survivors have described the harms suffered as a form of sexual assault. The idea of the continuum based around a ‘basic common character’ enables connections to be revealed between different forms of abuse with important discursive, policy and legal implications. WIGGAN, J (2012) 'Telling Stories of 21st century worklessness: the UK Coalition government and the neo-liberal discourses of worklessness and dependency' Critical Social Policy Vol 32 (3) p.383-405. SLATER, T (2012) 'The Myth of 'Broken Britain': welfare reform and the production of ignorance' Antipode, doi: 10.1111/anti12002. STABILE, C and MAROOKA, J (2010) 'Between Two Evils I Refuse to Choose the Lesser' Cultural Studies Vol 17 (3) p.326-348. As Kelly herself has commented, the continuum concept is open to development, recognising the necessity of intersectional analysis (Kelly 2012). This understanding has been clearly articulated by Fiona Vera-Gray who comments that ‘although all women and girls are in some way subject to gender discrimination, all women and girls are not discriminated against in the same way. We can see here abusive practices ‘shading’ into one another (Kelly 1988). In terms of legal categories in English law, however, the non-consensual creation and distribution of the photoshopped image is not criminalised.Footnote 21 Indeed, in responding to a request by one of us to extend the law to cover such manipulated images, a Government minister claimed that manipulated images, while ‘still distressing’, do ‘not have the potential to cause the same degree of harm as the disclosure of images that record real private, sexual events’ (Ministry of Justice 2016). The experiences of victim-survivors suggest otherwise.



Her predominant concern was to provide the conceptual tools by which women’s experiences of men’s violence could be better understood as they were (and still are) not reflected in the ‘legal codes or analytic categories’ of existing research (Kelly 1988, 74). The concept also enables women to make sense of their own experiences ‘by showing how "typical" and "aberrant" male behaviour shade into one another’ (Kelly 1988, 75). In Kelly’s work, a continuum is understood in two main ways. You can still enjoy our high quality free Xxx sex Video free xxx sex video pics and movies in HD on your desktop, but in keeping up with the times all of our hardcore pics and porn videos are also available on mobile devices. This typically involves an ex-partner (usually a man) posting consensually created private sexual pictures or videos of their former partners (usually a woman) online and without consent, and in order to exact ‘revenge’ following the break-up of their relationship. There are many ways in which private sexual images are created without consent, some of which are covered by current criminal laws, an example being voyeurism.



Furthermore, shoe-horning practices into conventional privacy-related offences risks obscuring the nature of the abuse and reducing any potential expressive effect of the criminal law. In terms of legal redress, in many jurisdictions there are a range of existing criminal offences which cover some aspects of ‘sexual extortion’, such as blackmail or causing another to engage in sexual activity. The legal response in some jurisdictions to the filming and recording of sexual assault and rape shows that the divide between the real world and the virtual world is no longer tenable; both the physical assault and the film causes harm. As the organisation Australian Women Against Violence Alliance (2016, 6) note: ‘the fact that an image has been altered, or is even composed of images taken of different women, does not diminish the potential harm resulting from its dissemination’. Footnote 23 Where the victim-survivors are adults, ‘women are the primary targets’, leading researchers to conclude that ‘adult sextortion therefore appears to be a species of violence against women’ (Wittes et al. Often victim-survivors are threatened with the exposure of the free xxx sex video should they report the assault to the police.



Victim-survivors will not know there are other offences that might encompass their experiences, and many police, prosecutors and perpetrators are likely to be similarly unaware. He or she might not be the person you thought of at all! This situation might change with the attainment of a critical mass of users (some say, 2 million per non-Anglophone country). Put differently, its breadth and flexibility creates a framework in which new experiences can be located and accurately understood as abusive-something which is especially important in this area where modes of perpetration rapidly change due to advances in technology. The commonplace label and reference to ‘peeping’ also serves to minimise the impact and significance of the conduct, as with so many other labels in this area. Not surprisingly in this light, the evidence on prevalence suggests high levels of abuse and a gendered impact. While accurately describing the practices involved, it minimises the nature and impact of the abuse.