Reporting Non-consensual Intimate Image Distribution: Girls’ Legal Consciousness and Hesitancy to Invoke Criminal Law
摘要
This chapter draws on data collected with youth between 13 and 18 years in Nova Scotia, Canada to examine the legal regulation of teenage intimate image sharing. I explore how girls experience the gendered sexual shaming around the practice, and how this influences the ways that girls understand the role, usefulness, and limitations of criminal law in responding to Non-Consensual Distribution of Intimate Images (NCDII). Bringing together legal consciousness and youth sexual citizenship scholarship, I argue that while participants in my study understand that law is there to be mobilized, they do not see themselves as agents of legal mobilization. I argue that this is related to their incomplete sexual citizenship. This chapter reveals that while they believed a criminal justice response was necessary in cases involving digital evidence of sexual assault and sometimes in cases of NCDII, teenage girls said that they would not turn to law as a first resort.