Civil remedies could be an important complement, and in some cases an alternative, to criminal prosecutions of digital sex crimes. Experts raised concern that the law does not criminalize audio recordings made without consent (including of sex), or impersonation of another person. “As long as policies and legislation see harm to victims in relation to porn and degrees of porn, policies will never address the harm… We need to shift to a women’s rights perspective as a starting point,” she said. She argues for separating digital sex crimes from the issue of obscenity and regulating them through laws that focus on preventing invasion of privacy.
This problem could be partially avoided with better public information and advice to people experiencing digital sex crimes, and a more proactive approach by police to gathering evidence including from platforms. Others sought to have images removed by internet platforms and succeeded Barclays Slots only to be later told by police that they had destroyed the evidence necessary to support criminal charges. She said this is a reason officers sometimes refuse to take a case unless “it’s already solved.” When Lim Ye-ji reported a digital sex crime, she said one of the officers read out an abusive message suggesting that she was selling sex five times, loudly, in front of a room full of his all-male colleagues. Women are 30 percent of judges, but that number shrinks among senior judges to 20 percent in the lower courts and 4 percent in the high courts.
She could ask the court to order a perpetrator to take personal and financial responsibility for seeking removal of images from the internet, including by paying a company to provide this service. Survivors of digital sex crimes often face financial harms resulting from lost employment, being forced to move, or having to pay for services to seek removal of images or detect spycams. They could also deter digital sex crimes by, for example, imposing financial consequences on perpetrators. In cases reviewed by Human Rights Watch, perpetrators sometimes seemed to carefully take advantage of the limits of the law, using innuendo to skirt defamation laws, and posting images that resembled their victims but were not actually them. Many survivors of digital sex crimes interviewed for this report described considering suicide. This stigma can harm women and girls’ access to education and employment, as well as their personal relationships.
