To write this editorial on digital gender violence, I am forced to include those questions that we are asked when we carry out actions to disseminate the Belén Law and Olympia Law projects that we are presenting. The first question to address is why are specific laws necessary to eradicate digital gender violence? At this time, in our country, digital violence is not legislated: its multiple forms, for the most part, are not considered crimes and there are no strict forms of approach. Any woman who is going to report that someone spread her intimate material without consent, or the illegitimate obtaining of that material, or another form of violence in which the mistreatment was carried out through the use of information and communication technologies, like cyber bullying, may not get a state response. It will be at the mercy of the good will of the court that receives the case, the granting of some measure of protection.
If the victim is lucky enough to live in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, where some of these forms of digital violence are contraventions, a criminal and contraventional prosecutor will intervene. But our country is vast and access to justice for those who suffer gender violence cannot be a lottery, since it is a right. Those people who cannot access legal sponsorship due to lack of economic resources will be left even more helpless.
The Olympia Law and Belén Law projects constitute a request for urgent intervention from the State, to regulate and intervene in this form of violence that circulates freely, using the image of women’s bodies for enjoyment and exchange. There are currently approximately 2,500 groups of exchange and sale of images of people, who sometimes are unaware of their passive participation in that space. On the other hand, they represent a reparation strategy with the victims, who must be assisted with absolute respect and with the necessary gender perspective in order to minimize re-victimization.
From the work with victims of digital gender violence, it is evident that the psychological damage and the symptomatology are compatible with that of the victims of other forms of violence, since it is even such a massive form of aggression, it is that the entire life of the person is harmed. Their economic, labor, social, relationship, relationship, educational capacity will be damaged, with no way of escape, since the viralization of their image will immediately escalate an unimaginable space.
Gender violence is present in all areas of life, but some of these spaces are not yet regulated by law, these projects seek to regulate this new form of violence, since, given the impossibility of physically attacking directly to the victim, controls and invades her so much, that it achieves the exclusion of all areas of her daily reality, to the point of motivating the desire to disappear.
We invite you to eradicate the term “revenge porn” from our vocabulary since it is revictimizing and assumes the victim as responsible for the damage to which she was subjected. We also demand that Internet users and networks not participate in the viralization network, being responsible for the use they give to ICTs without being promoters of violence.
