March 4, 2016 12:46 pm
Sextortion is a type of exploitation that involves coercion to extort sexual favours from the victim. It is also a type of blackmail in which sexual images or videos are used to force sexual favours from the victim. Since everyone can be a victim of sextortion, we have chosen it to be the IATE Term of the week.
Sextortion occurs when a person uses guilt, power, or knowledge of a certain secret to force another person into providing sexually explicit photos or performing sexual favours.
In our days, mostly on the Internet and social media, sextortionists pressure their victims to give them sexually explicit photos and/or favours in exchange for their secrecy about previously obtained private information or for a promise to hold off on future violent acts.
If the victim fails to comply with a sextortionist’ demands, perpetrators might threaten to post intimate images of their victims online, send those images to other people the victim knows, including family members, employers, and school officials, or hurt them physically in some way.
Read more about EU legislation on cyber-security here.
An example of sextortion as cited in IATE is “the phenomenon where child abusers gain access to inappropriate pictures of minors and use the images to coerce victims into further acts or the abuser will forward the images to family and friends of the victim.”
- ‘Sextortion’: One of the grimmest cybercrimes is growing. Available at: http://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2015/08/18/sextortion-one-of-the-grimmest-cybercrimes-is-growing/
- Sextortion on Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sextortion
- Federal Bureau Of Investigation article on sextortion. Available at: https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2015/july/sextortion
- The sextortion case on LinekedIn. Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sextortion-blackmail-internet-act-fast-shut-down-dan-sherlock
- European Commission press release on Cybercrime. Available at: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-14-129_en.htm
Written by Raluca Caranfil
Communication Trainee at TermCoord
Journalist & Student at the University of Luxembourg
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Categorised in: IATE Term of the Week