Alastair Grant/AP 'Hunger Games' actress Jennifer Lawrence and dozens of other female celebrities were the targeted by hackers who published stolen photos.
The recent large-scale hack of female celebrities’ private nude photos has been greeted by patronizing statements about how victims should “know better” than to have pictures like this, often topped off by a sanctimonious and unoriginal admonition along the lines of “it’s a shame that bad people exist, but they do, so lock your doors if you don’t want to get robbed!”
The “lock your doors” analogy and its many variations – lock your car, hide your wallet, chain your bicycle, etc. – are familiar to anyone who has ever had a discussion about the sexual violation of women. This analogy is inappropriate on nearly every possible level.
First, people who use the analogy imply that victims who fail to take certain precautions are not really victims of a crime at all. But that is patently false. An unlocked door doesn’t transform a burglary into a sleepover. Theft is (thankfully) not defined as “removal of property with the intent to permanently deprive the owner of this property … except when the owner does not take every precaution to secure that property.”
The second reason the analogy is inappropriate is that locking a house is a simple, generally applicable, non-burdensome precaution. Locking a door takes mere seconds of a person’s life, and communicates essentially nothing about any particular person. But not all precautions are created equal, because not all crimes are created equal.
To see the significance of this, let us consider a different kind of precaution. After learning of a recent anti-Semitic attack in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the principal of an Orthodox day school in that neighborhood considered whether he should advise male students to wear baseball caps over their yarmulkes in an effort to protect them from similar attacks.
Reflecting further on the matter, he decided against it: “We have to stand up here in New York and say we are who we are, and this kind of behavior by people who try to terrorize others should never be allowed.”
The precaution of hiding one’s Jewish identity is not generally applicable or non-burdensome. Advocating this precaution would mean restricting the liberty of those who have already been unfairly singled out by bigotry. It would surrender to that bigotry.
While taking nude photos is not exactly the same as wearing religious headgear, there are instructive similarities. To tell a woman not to take nude photos lest she become the target of sexist bigotry is to tell her she is not allowed to do what she wants with her own body, in the privacy of her own bedroom, in a way that harms no one.
There is hardly a more fundamental interference with basic liberty than that. This precaution sends the self-defeating and incoherent message that the problem of sexist bigotry and entitlement should be addressed by restricting women’s freedom.
Some crimes involve harm far more serious than deprivations of property. Some crimes attempt to deprive victims of dignity and equality. Those crimes cannot and should not be answered by selective, humiliating precautions that further burden the victims.
These types of crimes need to be recognized and punished by law. Right now, this is largely not the case for invasions of sexual privacy.
While federal and state law prohibit hacking, only 14 states have criminalized the disclosure of intimate images without consent. Many of these states have made the mistake of including “intent to cause emotional distress” requirements.
As this massive hacking event makes clear, perpetrators may not even know their victims. Whether they disclose the private images for revenge, harassment, profit, or notoriety should make no difference.
Legal reform must be accompanied by social reform. It is not society’s place to demand that victims restrict their rights to their own bodies if they want to avoid harm. It is society’s task to unequivocally reject the bigotry and sexual entitlement at work in these privacy invasions.
Franks is an associate professor of law at the University of Miami School of Law and Vice-President of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, which engages in advocacy work through the development of individual campaigns meant to target specific cyber harassment issues.
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