Until September time last year I wasn’t overly familiar with the term “Revenge Porn”, I had occasionally seen those words on the odd newspaper article but wasn’t fully aware of it!
Then I was chosen to be one of the criminal law reform leaders for Big Voice London’s Model Law Commission Project and the area they were going to be reforming (with some supervision/guidance) was Revenge Porn.
(For more info check out their website here – http://bigvoicelondon.com).
I did a lot of research on this and as a group the sixth form and college students (who pretty much all want legal careers) were amazing at understanding the current position and debating ways to improve it.
So ever since then I have been following the story and seeing the various proposals and debates that have gone along with it.
One of the major points the group found was that the name really ought to be changed.. “revenge porn” wasn’t the right name for the crime, and it took them a fair while and a number of debates to come up with something that they all agreed with. The name had to be short, but they also provided a longer definition to elaborate on it. If you are interested in reading this report by the Model Law Commission please check it out here: http://bigvoicelondon.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Report-Amended.pdf
But it seems that the newly named offence, which forms s33 of the Criminal Justice And Courts Act 2015 went for something a little less short in terms of a name “disclosing private sexual photographs and films with intent to cause distress”.
This pretty much does sum up what it is, but what the group found when discussing Revenge Porn was that there are lots of variables and different scenarios and situations and the Law needed to reflect this but also enable scope to develop as technology advanced as well as catch those that fell outside certain scenarios.
Over the coming weeks I am going to be uploading more information on this topic and the new law.
Let me know what you think.
Rebecca x