Condivisione non consensuale di materiali intimi: le ripercussioni sulla salute mentale delle vittime

The right to be forgotten is usually granted to ex-criminals who served their sentences. However, people who committed crimes are not the only ones who are able to demand it. Victims of non-consensual diffusion of intimate images (a crime also known as “revenge porn”), for example, have their whole reputation ruined by the – now acknowledged as a crime in many countries included Italy – act of sending sexually explicit images or videos of themselves without their consent on the Internet by people whom they shared it with. The purpose of this article is to analyze the felony of non-consensual diffusion of intimate images as well as the psychological damages that it causes to the victims, whose private images are viewed by many users online. Because most victims are females, non-consensual diffusion of intimate images is also considered part of the gender violence category. Our patriarchal matrix-based culture built on biases and gender stereotypes keeps fueling and trivializing those threatening behaviors and violence by blaming the victims of those and with improper portraits of the facts. Those actions are all part of the rape culture, which keeps dismissing the cultural problem we are still facing.