Revenge porn is the unauthorized and malicious dissemination of intimate images or videos on the internet. The victim is usually naked or engaging in a sexual act. In most cases, the material will originally have been taken with the subject's consent, often by a partner on a camera phone.
Indeed, the images may have been taken by the victim themselves and sent as a private message, but sometime later, perhaps after a relationship has ended, the images are published without the victim's consent.
The publisher is commonly motivated by a desire to punish, threaten or control the subject and the consequences can be catastrophic. Revenge porn, and revenge porn websites, first came to prominence in the U.
The situation in Europe, however, is a little different, and laws banning revenge pornography have been slow to emerge.
This week, Tiziana Cantone, a year-old from Naples in Italy, committed suicide after footage showing her engaging in a sexual act was posted online. Italian publication Blitz Quotidiano reported that Cantone made the video herself to send to an ex-boyfriend and that the video was swiftly circulated all over the internet. According to The Independent , she had the video wiped from search engines last year but it can still be found online, and the video prompted a lot of people to harass her on social media.
