Revenge porn

Revenge porn involves the distribution of sexually explicit images or videos of individuals without their consent, driven by a punitive intent to create public humiliation or character assassination as an act of revenge. The material may have been originally created with the subject’s knowledge and consent during an intimate relationship, or it may have been recorded without their awareness. In some cases, the subject experienced sexual violence during the recording, sometimes facilitated by psychoactive substances that reduce pain and involvement, cause dissociative effects, and induce amnesia. Perpetrators often use possession of the material to blackmail victims into performing further sexual acts, coerce them into continuing or ending a relationship, silence them, damage their reputation, or seek financial gain. The practice is recognized as a form of psychological abuse, domestic violence, and sexual abuse.

While the term commonly refers to uploading explicit content online to humiliate someone who ended a relationship, it is also broadly applied to non-revenge scenarios, such as nonconsensual pornography distributed by hackers or individuals seeking profit or notoriety. Images are typically accompanied by identifying information—names, locations, social media links, home addresses, and workplaces—in a process known as doxing. Victims may face workplace discrimination, cyberstalking, or physical attack; some lose their jobs and become effectively unhirable due to companies searching for potential bad publicity. Some academics argue the term should be replaced with “image-based sexual abuse.”

Historically, in the 1980s, *Hustler* magazine’s “Beaver Hunt” featured reader-submitted nude images often accompanied by personal details, leading to lawsuits from women whose images were published without permission. In the 2000s, Italian researcher Sergio Messina identified “realcore pornography” involving ex-girlfriends’ images distributed via Usenet. By 2008, XTube received complaints about nonconsensual content. The issue gained international attention in 2010 when Hunter Moore launched IsAnyoneUp, a site that included identifying information. Activist Charlotte Laws, the first to publicly support victims, faced backlash and death threats, later meeting with legislators to push for laws. In 2015, Reddit and Twitter updated their policies to ban nonconsensual