Police Officer Perceptions of Non-consensual Dissemination of Intimate Images

Liza Zvi · Mally Shechory Bitton

30 citations0/0 files storedFrontiers in Psychology

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Sexual Assault and Victimization Studies Policing Practices and Perceptions Stalking, Cyberstalking, and Harassment

Abstract

Non-consensual dissemination of intimate images (NCII) is a major concern in many countries. The increase in the number of NCII cases and awareness of its adverse effects on victims has raised public awareness, with many states enacting legal and non-legal measures to combat this new type of violence. Yet, despite recent legislation, there is a reason to suspect that the majority of NCII cases remain unreported. Thus, research is needed on law enforcement perceptions of victims and identification of victim-blaming attitudes and factors that might affect legal decision-making. The present study addressed this issue by focusing on Israeli police officer perceptions of NCII victims and offenders: 145 police officers and 160 students, who served as a control group, were presented with a scenario depicting an NCII offense in which the stolen intimate material was either self-generated by the victim (selfies) or stealth-taken by the victim's ex-boyfriend. In both cases, the stolen images were disseminated by the ex-boyfriend without the victim's permission. The findings indicated victim-blaming attitudes toward NCII victims within law enforcement as well as an effect of the source of stolen images. Although officers perceived NCII as criminal and the offender as highly culpable and punishable, they engaged in victim-blaming. This was especially the case for the self-taken scenario, which elicited negative feelings and less empathy toward the victim. The relevance of emotions in legal contexts is emphasized in light of their contribution to the participants' punitive judgments. Victim-blaming in NCII offenses and its implications are discussed, and suggestions are made for how to reduce negative and victim-blaming attitudes among law enforcement.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 30 citations exist upstream.

References

2007G*Power 3: A flexible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences 1993Beyond simple pessimism: Effects of sadness and anger on social perception.2016Technology-Facilitated Sexual Violence: A Literature Review of Empirical Research 2012Attribution of blame in rape cases: A review of the impact of rape myth acceptance, gender role conformity and substance use on victim blaming 2017Beyond ‘Revenge Porn’: The Continuum of Image-Based Sexual Abuse 2016Revenge Porn and Mental Health 2016Image-Based Sexual Abuse 2016Sexual Violence in the Digital Age

Cited by

2021Police Perceptions of Sex-worker Rape Victims and Their Offenders: A Vignette Study 2021Gender differences in videoed accounts of victim blaming for revenge porn for self-taken and stealth-taken sexually explicit images and videos

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.