Watching Women: Past and Present Legal Responses to the Unauthorised Circulation of Personal Images

The unauthorised circulation of personal images is one of the most pressing issues concerning the surveillance and privacy of women. Women’s bodies are being filmed and watched, without their consent, at an ever increasing pace. However, while this problem has intensified in recent years due to technological developments, particularly the ubiquity of smart phones and social media, it is also as old as photography itself. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, legal cases and commentary about the circulation of images of private persons without consent led to the establishment of a right to privacy in the United States (the first in the common law world). Women brought these cases to resist having their images exploited, possessed and objectified by men. This article will examine the rising trend of ‘revenge porn’ and associated image-based harms within the context of their gendered legal history and analyses the current and proposed legal mechanisms for addressing it in Australia.