It was in 2014 when I first became familiar with the term ‘revenge pornography’ after being invited to a workshop on the topic organized by Nikky Godden-Rasul in Newcastle Law School. This book is the result of my research on this topic, which was supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship on the subject (RF-2016-358\8, ‘Privacy law, gender justice and end-users’ liability: “revenge porn” and beyond’). My point of entry to the debates surrounding what I will term non-consensual intimate images (NCII, more on the terminology to be discussed later) is multifold. First, I have a longstanding interest in defending and developing the role of equality and distributive justice in private law and tort law in particular (Keren-Paz, 2007a). My initial work on these issues focused, in its doctrinal translation, on the tort of negligence. So this project, at a high level of abstraction, is an attempt to develop the argument into the area of privacy law. Second, I have a lingering interest in law, gender and sexuality, and more specifically, in private law responses to gendered harms, often those thought of as an issue of criminal law, rather than of private (mainly tort) law. So having by then just completed the monograph Sex Trafficking: A Private Law Response (Keren-Paz, 2013), the time was ripe to move to examining this other pressing, topical and rapidly evolving site of gender-based harm.

Third – and this possibly was the single most important driver of this project – as part of understanding the demand for sexual services as an instance of a mass sexual tort problem, I have developed a theory of liability for the creation of demand for commercial sexual services, which led to some victims of trafficking having been recruited and exploited to satisfy this demand. This – admittedly radical – theory found some support in the USSC decision of US v Paroline, which dealt with apportionment of liability of those who viewed images of child pornography to the injury that victim’s knowledge about the viewing produced.