International Women’s Day is here, and this year, all of us at Glamour want to mark it by celebrating the campaigners making the world safer for women and girls.
Already this year, the government has made it illegal to create deepfaked, sexualised images without consent, introduced 48-hour takedown orders for sites hosting abusive images, and, most recently, announced plans to ban so-called ‘semen’ images and incest porn. At Glamour, we've long been pushing for such extraordinary change, and we're honoured to partner with the likes of Professor Clare McGlynn, Jodie Campaigns, the End Violence Against Women Coalition, Not Your Porn, and Baroness Charlotte Owen to help achieve it.
The campaign to address all forms of VAWG within the law, whether physical or digital, has a long history because progress takes time. Against such a beast, it can be hard not to lose hope and to remember to recognise the wins when they arise. Today – and every day – the women fighting for a safer future deserve their flowers.
Meet the women changing the law on image-based abuse
Since entering the House of Lords in 2024, Baroness Charlotte Owen has focused on tackling deepfake intimate image abuse. Working alongside the likes of the Revenge Porn Helpline, Not Your Porn, MyImageMyChoice, Jodie Campaigns, EVAW and Clare McGlynn, Owen was braced for a long fight, but the group has made significant progress in a few short years.
"I am so grateful to the survivors, campaigners and Glamour magazine who have fought alongside me for so long to achieve comprehensive protections in law around intimate image abuse,” says Owen. “I am so proud of the incredible group of women who stood up against this vile form of abuse and worked with me to change the law. Our work is not yet complete, but I know that together we will continue to fight."
Owen also reminded us that the battle for change isn’t over until we reckon with society’s judgment of people sharing intimate imagery. "We now live in a world where most adults under the age of thirty will have consensually exchanged intimate images,” Owen continued. “It is vital that we adapt to this new reality and have a law comprehensive enough to protect them. As a society, we must do better to remove the shame and stigma so unfairly and disproportionately placed on women when those images are taken out of context and shared without their consent."
For Rebecca, confronting VAWG means going right to the source to “prevent it from happening in the first place”, which “cannot be done through ad hoc amendments to criminal law”. She explains: “While these changes are hugely important and welcome, what is required is a whole society response which provides dedicated resources to challenging attitudes and behaviours rooted in gender inequality.”
"We have been campaigning for incest pornography to be banned for many years, given the well-established links between porn and sexual gratification and societal sexual norms,” Rebecca tells Glamour. “We will continue to push for an Image-Based Abuse Law that provides greater options for survivors to seek redress.”
“This means having somewhere they can report to in order to hold platforms accountable, with strong civil law systems to assist in immediate content take-downs and compensation from perpetrators,” she continues. “It also means funding for specialist support services that come directly from taxing and fining the platforms that profit from the abuse and degradation of women and girls, and a regulator that actually takes these harms seriously.”
“We are working out the broad top-level gaps with legislation, but in some ways the real work begins now,” says Michael. “For example, we still need a dedicated online harms commissioner, we need to still hold a range of tech companies accountable which teach people and give people the tools to perpetrate IBA, we need to focus on getting the details of enforcement right and plugging gaps in the system where there are overlaps with other types of violence against women and girls like coercive controlling behaviour.”
“These are welcome additions to the law. Survivors, campaigners and experts have fought hard for there to be a system of protections that covers the full spectrum of harms of image-based abuse,” co-founder of #NotYourPorn, Elena Michael, tells Glamour. "We must listen to survivor voices if we truly want to work towards preventing image-based abuse, and the government responding to the hard work of the movements over the last year or so, by announcing these amendments is a strong step in this direction.”
Jodie* tells Glamour, "For so many survivors, this campaign has been about trying to reclaim a sense of safety and control after something profoundly violating. Knowing that there will finally be stronger protections around the sharing of intimate images without consent is incredibly meaningful.
"For many survivor-campaigners, the work is deeply personal. The harm doesn’t neatly sit in the past – it can resurface in unexpected moments and shape how we move through the world. That reality can be painful, but it’s also what drives many of us to push for change so that fewer people have to go through the same experience.
“What sustains me most is the community around this work. There are so many brilliant people (mostly WOMEN!) – survivors, academics, campaigners, journalists and advocates – who have dedicated years to pushing for recognition and reform. Being part of that collective movement makes the work feel hopeful rather than isolating or traumatising.”
For Professor Clare McGlynn, who has been at the centre of this legislative fight since before we had terminology to explain things like deepfake pornography, she is hopeful that there will be many more wins in the future.
Next, she’d like to see a “civil regulatory regime where anyone could apply online to get orders to have material removed very straightforwardly” to empower all victims with tools to remove abusive material. McGlynn also anticipates that a “cultural reckoning” must follow, too, because “not all of it can be regulated by criminal law.”
However, perhaps the most important frontier on the horizon is holding onto the hope that powers all of our campaigning.
“Hope is so vital to our activism, in the sense that you have to cling to that hope so that you can make a difference,” explains McGlynn. “Even when it feels hopeless, I try to think, no, actually, we’ve got to continue to have hope.”
“There’s always going to be so much more to do — that is just a fact we have to get used to, but each win is progress,” she adds.
*Name has been changed.
