Promises and Pitfalls of Legal Responses to Image-Based Sexual Abuse: Critical Insights from the Italian Case

Over the last decade, online image-based sex abuse (IBSA)—the digital non-consensual diffusion of intimate and/or sexual images, commonly referred to as “revenge porn”—has been increasingly targeted by national governments. This is indeed the case in Italy, which indexed IBSA among other legally punishable forms of domestic and gender-based violence within its 2019 “Red Code law”. In this chapter, we propose to assess levels of responsiveness of this provision starting from a conceptualization of online IBSA as a form of violence perpetrated in and through human-nonhuman assemblages, and characterized by relational connections, unique affective forces, and agentic capacities. Read through the lens of assemblages, the “Red Code” law is labelled a provision ineffective by design affected by three main limitations: first, the peripheral and instrumental role assigned to digital media; second, the disregard of the more-than-human nature of online IBSA, which confines its legal response within a strict model of deterrence; third, the lack of recognition of the collective and distributed nature of online IBSA.