Young people's experiences of image-based sexual harassment and abuse in England and Canada: Toward a feminist framing of technologically facilitated sexual violence

This article reports on a qualitative research study Sharing Networked Image Practices (SNIP) among young people. We explore our findings from 37 focus groups with 206 young people aged (11–19) in London and South East England and Toronto, Canada conducted in 2019 and 2020. Drawing on feminist legal and criminological scholarship (Powell & Henry, 2017; McGlynn et al., 2017; McGlynn and Johnson, 2020) we develop a framework to clearly identify how and when image sharing should be constituted as forms of: (1) Image-Based Sexual Harassment (IBSH) (i.e. unsolicited penis images (‘dick pics’) and unwanted solicitation for nudes), and (2) Image-Based Sexual Abuse (IBSA) (i.e. non-consensual image creation/sharing). We argue that categorizing non-consensual image sharing, showing and distributing as image-based sexual harassment and abuse rather than ‘sexting’ is an important conceptual shift to enable young people, schools, parents and all relevant stakeholders to recognize and address new forms of technology-facilitated sexual violence.