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Media attention on nonconsensual intimate image dissemination has led to the relatively recent proliferation of academic research on the topic. This literature has focused on many areas including victimization and perpetration prevalence rates, coerced sexting, legal and/or criminal contexts, sexual violence in digital spaces, gendered constructions of blame and risk, and legal analysis of high-profile cases and legislation. Despite this research, several gaps exist, including a lack of empirical research with service providers. Informed by in-depth interviews with 10 sexual violence frontline professionals in Southern Ontario (Canada), this chapter focuses on their perspectives of the additive role of technology. With respect to nonconsensual intimate image dissemination, technology acts as a digital “layer” that operates in addition to the commission of physical acts of sexual violence, and compounds the harms experienced by the victim by adding a virtual – and indelible – “permanent remembering” of the violence. Nuancing the contours of consent in a digital age, this chapter concludes by considering what consent means in a technological context.

The nonconsensual taking or sharing of nude or sexual images, also known as “image-based sexual abuse,” is a major social and legal problem in the digital age. In this chapter, we examine the problem of image-based sexual abuse in the context of digital platform governance. Specifically, we focus on two key governance issues: first, the governance of platforms, including the regulatory frameworks that apply to technology companies; and second, the governance by platforms, focusing on their policies, tools, and practices for responding to image-based sexual abuse. After analyzing the policies and practices of a range of digital platforms, we identify four overarching shortcomings: (1) inconsistent, reductionist, and ambiguous language; (2) a stark gap between the policy and practice of content regulation, including transparency deficits; (3) imperfect technology for detecting abuse; and (4) the responsibilization of users to report and prevent abuse. Drawing on a model of corporate social responsibility (CSR), we argue that until platforms better address these problems, they risk failing victim-survivors of image-based sexual abuse and are implicated in the perpetration of such abuse. We conclude by calling for reasonable and proportionate state-based regulation that can help to better align governance by platforms with CSR-initiatives.

This paper aims to examine how exposure to sexual images activates the urge to yield to temptation in a subsequent unrelated context.

In Study 1, this paper uses empirical data based on an automobile expo to examine the correlational relationship between sexual imagery and indulgence. In Studies 2 and 3, this study examines the moderating effects of self-construal and gender differences on indulgent consumption, with different dependent measures. Study 4 distinguishes the sexual images into gratuitous sex and romantic love and tests the mediating role of sensation seeking.

For men, an independent self-construal increases indulgent consumption. In contrast, an interdependent self-construal facilitates women’s indulgent consumption. Having an interdependent self-construal has the opposite impact on indulgent consumption for the two genders: sexual images of romantic love attenuate the effect on men but boost the effect on women. Perceived sensation-seeking serves as the underlying mechanism.

This paper contributes to the literature on sex, reward-processing, context effects in marketing and indulgent consumption.

Advertisers, retailers, food courts and restaurants may use sexual imagery to promote more indulgent consumption with gender and self-construal as segmentation variables. Public policymakers and other concerned parties should also raise consumers’ awareness of the priming effect found in this research.

This research advances the literature on sex by demonstrating the priming effects of sexual imagery and further considers the simultaneous impacts of gender and self-construal on consumers’ subsequent indulgent consumption.

This review aims to focus on men who access, download, and circulate child abuse images across the internet as the most frequently occurring type of internet sex offender.

Some of the misconceptions associated with this behaviour are outlined and the extent to which internet offenders display some of the criminogenic factors thought to be associated with the multi‐factorial theories of sexual offending are reviewed.

One conclusion from this is paper is the general impression that internet offenders show many of the characteristics of paedophiles. Their theoretical importance is that they appear to be “desisters” from acting out their sexual interest in children by hands‐on offending.

It is argued that there is a need for more research to stimulate our understanding of this type of offender. Furthermore, what of those who both download material and offend directly against children? They present a dilemma for the literature as some research would suggest that they are not entirely like the internet or the contact sexual offenders in their psychological make‐up; they are the group most in need of reappraisal.

Canada criminalized the nonconsensual distribution of intimate images in 2014. Lawmakers and commentators noted that this new offense would fill a legislative gap in relation to “revenge pornography,” which entails individuals (typically men) sharing intimate images of their ex-partners (typically women) online in an attempt to seek revenge or cause them harm. Feminist writers and activists categorize revenge pornography as a symptom and consequence of “rape culture,” in which sexual violence is routinely trivialized and viewed as acceptable or entertaining, and women are blamed for their sexual victimization. In this chapter, I analyze Canada's burgeoning revenge pornography case law and find that these cases support an understanding of revenge pornography as a serious form of communal, gendered, intimate partner violence, which is extremely effective at harming victims because of broader rape culture. While Canadian judges are taking revenge pornography seriously, there is some indication from the case law that they are at risk of relying on gendered reasoning and assumptions previously observed by feminists in sexual assault jurisprudence, which may have the result of bolstering rape culture, rather than contesting it.

Rape culture, described as when “violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent” (Buchwald, Fletcher, & Roth, 1993, p. vii), exists online and offline (Henry & Powell, 2014). Much of the research on rape culture focuses on the experiences of heterosexual women, and few studies have explored rape culture in the context of dating apps. This chapter explores how men who have sex with men (MSM) understand and experience rape culture through their use of Grindr and similar dating apps. A thematic analysis of interviews with 25 MSM dating app users revealed problematic user behavior as well as unwanted sexual messages and images as common manifestations of rape culture on dating apps. Participants explained that rape culture extends beyond in-app interactions to in-person encounters, as evident by incidents of sexual violence that several participants had experienced and one participant had committed. Participants were unsure about the extent to which MSM dating apps facilitate rape culture but asserted that some apps enable rape culture more than others. This chapter demonstrates the importance of investigating sexual violence against people of diverse gender and sexual identities to ensure their experiences are not minimized, ignored, or rendered invisible.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the narratives that construct the practice and regulation of ‘sexting’, the sending of sexualised images via text message, when engaged in by young people. The aim of this discussion is to better understand the extent to which those narratives recognise young people’s agency in relation to their sexuality and the role that new media plays in enabling youth to explore their sexual identity.

The methodology employed is that of discourse analysis. This approach is used to deconstruct the dominant narrative of sexting contained in the literature, a narrative that constructs it as a problem to be contained and controlled, either through the application of the criminal law or through education and guidance approaches. This paper then investigates an emerging counter narrative that gives greater emphasis to the autonomy rights of youth. A case study involving a Parliamentary Inquiry in one Australian State into sexting is also employed to further this analysis.

This paper concludes that the dominant narrative remains the strongest influence in the shaping of law and the practice of sexting, but that young people may be better served by the counter narrative that recognises their agency in ways that may empower and grant them more control over their bodies.

The paper thus provides an alternative approach to developing new law and policy with respect to the regulation of sexting by youth that should be of value to lawmakers and child and youth advocates.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of sexual appeal in print media on consumers’ brand recall. More specifically, the differences between the fixation time on the “image” and “logo” elements in advertisements, with and without sexual appeal, were verified.

The correct research is experimental in nature, and divided into three stages: choosing the print advertisements to be viewed by the participants with eye tracking, capturing participants’ eye movements using a special eye tracking equipment and completing the questionnaire for calculating the number of brands recalled by the participants.

The authors have identified that there are no statistically relevant differences between the number of brands recalled, whether the advertisement does or does not have any sexual appeal.

The use of sexual appeal in advertisements on print media must be made with caution, and several implications for the textile and apparel industry are expressed in the conclusions.

The study’s relevance is threefold: the authors present more recent results about the relationship between sexual appeal and brand recall, as the most recent research study of a similar type was published in the late 1990s; they adopt key concepts from the neuromarketing field in an attempt to connect memory with the capacity of different components of the advertisements, to attract the visual attention of consumers; and they present results for three different product categories (alcohol, apparel and perfume).

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect on brand name recall in advertisements with varying levels of female sexual objectification content among young millennials and the effect of distraction on this recall effort. The question arises whether this group evokes those brands that appear in advertisements using different levels of objectification content.

The study uses a correlational design that includes two studies with different groups of subjects: an assessment of perceived female sexual objectification levels in a set of ads and a quasi-experimental study that used the assessed perceived levels of female objectification and brand name short-term recall scores of those ads, with and without the intervention of an attention distractor.

Results suggest that female sexual objectification content exerts a limited influence on brand name recall between participants. In addition, it is not men who remember brand names from ads using sexual objectified images, but young women.

The study had an exploratory scope and used a small non-probabilistic sample. Subjects belong to a cultural context of Western world developing economy, and thus perceived female objectification may vary between different cultural settings. Results refer to graphic advertisements, though this cohort is exposed to other audiovisual content platforms.

Several studies have addressed female objectification in advertising and media, but few focused on young Latin American audiences and its impact on the recollection of advertised brands. Brand name retention and awareness is still a relevant variable that the advertising industry takes in account as one of several predictors toward buying decisions. Even less research has been made on Latin American social and cultural contexts.

Technology-facilitated violence and abuse including image-based sexual abuse (IBSA) is a phenomenon affecting women and girls around the world. Abusers misuse technology to attack victims and threaten their safety, privacy, and dignity. This abuse is gendered and a form of domestic and sexual violence. In this article, the authors compare criminal law approaches to tackling IBSA in Scotland and Malawi. We critically analyze the legislative landscape in both countries, with a view to assessing the potential for victims to seek and obtain redress for IBSA. We assess the role criminal law has to play in each jurisdiction while acknowledging the limits of criminal law alone in terms of providing redress.