Page 2764 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 16 August 2017
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Where victims are identifiable, they report significant abuse online and offline, the loss of professional and educational opportunities and exposure to stalking. This can cause a crisis of identity for victims as they lose the ability to control how they are presented in the world. Tragically, there have been cases reported in the United States and Canada where young women have committed suicide when their images were disseminated without their consent.
The non-consensual sharing of intimate images often occurs in the context of domestic and family violence where the offender is known to the victim. Women are most often its targets and frequently face this kind of abuse at the hands of former partners. Intimate image abuse can be used as a weapon to humiliate and demean, including as revenge, following relationship breakdowns. Threats to distribute images can be used to coerce and control, in keeping with the broader pattern of coercion and control that characterises domestic and family violence.
These changes are a great step in addressing different ways of perpetuating abuse and demonstrate the whole-of-government, whole-of-community commitment to address all forms of abuse. The fact that the three parties are working together to achieve the best outcomes for the community is something that we should not overlook here today.
On many occasions I have said that we all need to be asking everybody to have a place in this—across government, throughout the community—to be an advocate, a facilitator, a change-maker in order to eliminate domestic and family violence once and for all. This bill sends a strong message that domestic and family violence, including interpersonal violence, is not acceptable in any form in the ACT.
MS LAWDER (Brindabella) (11.34): I rise today to commend Mr Hanson for bringing this bill forward and to thank the government and the Greens for their useful amendments and support of Mr Hanson’s bill. I do not think there is any doubt that these days information technology is very much a part of our lives. It is no longer true that it is a virtual world, not the real world. For most people born today and who are teenagers today, the digital world is part of their everyday life. There are billions of users of social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter and many others as well.
Whilst the information age has opened up so many new opportunities for us, it has also opened up the dark side of how it can be abused and used to the detriment of some people. Back in the day you used to take photos on a camera and send them off to your local Foxy’s photo place. Then you would have to go and pick them up two weeks later. It made it a little more challenging to distribute personal images in that way because you knew that someone else was going to be looking at those developed photos. That is not to say that it did not happen, but nowadays with technology it can happen instantly and to such a wide audience. That is where the harm can come from for people.
More recently we have had the advent of people taking and sending photos electronically, including intimate images, what is known as the practice of sexting. Explicit photos of themselves or their peers are sent to other people via texts, often
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