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New frontiers in violence against women: exploring the legal challenges of AI and deepfake sexual abuse

Deepfake sexual abuse is now an ever-present threat pervading the lives of women and girls. The threat is real, and the legal system is failing to prevent this abuse or provide effective redress. In this presentation, I examine the harms of deepfake sexual abuse and recommend the new terminology of sexual digital forgeries to better convey the nature and harms of this abuse. I set out the legal framework as advanced in the EU’s gender-based violence directive and identify some of its failings. Looking forward, I examine the new frontiers of abuse from emerging technology and the consequent challenges for legal responses.

Biography 

Clare McGlynn is a Professor of Law at Durham University in the UK. Her research pioneered the concept of image-based sexual abuse, and her advocacy has influenced law reforms across the world, including the recent UK campaign to criminalise creating and sharing sexually explicit deepfakes. She has authored leading works on the EU’s new directive on gender-based violence and is a member of the Council of Europe’s Expert Committee on Technology-Facilitated Violence Against Women. She has advised governments, human rights organisations and policy-makers, as well as working with the largest social media platforms to improve online safety. She is a co-author of Cyberflashing: recognising harms, reforming laws (2021), Image-Based Sexual Abuse: a study on the causes and consequences of nude and non-consensual imagery (2021); co-editor of Feminist Judgments: from theory to practice and Rethinking Rape Law: international and comparative perspectives; and author of Families and the European Union: law, politics and pluralism (2006) and The Woman Lawyer: making the difference (1998). 

Feminism, Violence Against Women, and Law Reform: Decolonial Lessons from Ecuador

Abstract: Challenging the consensus that penal expansion is mainly associated with the co-option of feminist campaigns to counteract violence against women in the context of neoliberal globalisation, this book shows that long-standing colonial narratives underlie many of today’s dominant legal discourses justifying criminalisation, even in countries whose governments have called themselves "leftist" and "post-neoliberal". Mapping the history of law reform on violence against women in Ecuador, the book reveals how the conciliation between feminist campaigns and criminalisation strategies takes place through liberal legality, the language of human rights, and the discourse of constitutional guarantees, across the political spectrum. Whilst human rights make violence against women intelligible in mainstream legal terms, the book shows that the emergence of a "rights-based penality" produces a benign, formally innocuous criminal law, which can be presented as progressive, but in practice reproduces colonial and postcolonial paradigms that limit and reshape feminist demands. The book raises new questions on the complex social and political factors that impact on feminist law reform projects, as it demonstrates how colonial assumptions about gender, race, class, and the family remain embedded in liberal criminal law.

Bio: Dr Silvana Tapia Tapia is  Associate Professor in Law at Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham, where she previously held a Leverhulme Early Career fellowship (2022-2024). Until 2022, Silvana was Lecturer in Law and Coordinator of legal research at the University of Azuay, Ecuador. Her book "Feminism, Violence against Women, and Law Reform: Decolonial Lessons from Ecuador" received the Hart-Socio-Legal Studies Association Book Prize in 2023. Her work has been published in world-leading journals such as Feminist Theory, Social and Legal Studies, Law and Critique, and Feminist Legal Studies.

Silvana’s research empirically examines the limitations of criminal legal system and mainstream human rights frameworks in addressing violence against women. Employing an anticolonial and abolitionist lens, Dr Tapia Tapia collaborates with anti-carceral grassroots organisations to understand the impact of penality on marginalised women’s lives and the role of criminal law and hegemonic human rights in the production of carceral violence.

 Revisiting Feminist Theory

In this seminar, I will reflect on my recent experience of teaching feminist legal theory to undergraduates for the first time in 20 years. What has changed in terms of students’ expectations and the resources available in the classroom? And how has feminist scholarship shaped legal studies in the past two decades?

Nicola Lacey is School Professor of Law, Gender and Social Policy at the London School of Economics. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, served as a member of the British Academy’s Policy Group on Prisons, which reported in 2014, and was from 2014-2019 the Academy’s nominee on the Board of the British Museum. In 2011 she was awarded the Hans Sigrist Prize by the University of Bern, for scholarship on the rule of law in modern societies; and in 2022 she won the Law and Society Association’s International Prize. Her publications include A Life of HLA Hart (OUP 2004); Women, Crime and Character: From Moll Flanders to Tess of the D’Urbervilles (2008); The Prisoners’ Dilemma (2008), and In Search of Criminal Responsibility (2016).

TWAIL Feminisms: Divergent Praxis, Contingent Subjects

This work explores the intersection of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) and critical feminist approaches through different configurations such as TWAIL and Feminisms, TWAIL-Feminisms and, TWAIL Feminisms. These configurations critically examine the structural inequalities embedded in international law, revealing how these systems perpetuate power imbalances favoring a few while marginalizing others in diverse ways. TWAIL Feminisms challenge the notion of universal legal principles and subjects by highlighting the different, complex and often conflicting experiences of those in the periphery, particularly in the Global South. The scope of this work is to foreground how TWAIL Feminisms are not merely gendered perspectives but are comprehensive critiques of international law’s hegemonic structures, including patriarchy, capitalism, and Eurocentrism which affect everyone, however differentially. By focusing on the crises of international law, dominant feminisms, and the production of legal subjectivities, TWAIL Feminisms offer new ways of understanding and transforming legal frameworks which are more inclusive and attentive to experiences and knowledge frameworks beyond the mainstream. In this work, I hope to illustrate TWAIL feminisms as heuristics and critique by emphasizing the politics of definitions and categories and by positioning TWAIL and feminisms as dynamic processes rather than static concepts. In these forms, TWAIL Feminisms intervene in international legal structures and processes with the aim of reimagining it through the experiences and alternate epistemologies of different marginalized subjects where marginality is also a location of empowered clarity from where the status quo may be challenged.

Short Bio:

Rohini Sen is an Associate Professor at the Jindal Global Law School and teaches as a Visiting Faculty in different institutions across India. Rohini thinks about, reads and writes on the various engagements between Law, Social 91̽��s and Humanities through ideas of - critical thinking, critical pedagogies, queer and feminist approaches and, different cosmologies of knowledge-making. 

Personal and professional?

Feminist legal theory and method in a wide sense have been crucial to my academic career, personally as well as professionally. In this presentation I give an example of this, without actually emphasizing feminism as such. I take point of departure in a concrete case of family reunification for young unaccompanied children. My aim is to expose how the traditional legal notion of the liberal subject fails to provide protection in the context of legal practice. Instead, I argue for using the vulnerable subject as a starting point, to make more visible the context in which law operates and ensure protection even for the youngest children. I also call for an awareness of the mobile commons– the informal support that exists among migrating people, NGOs, and activists – in relation to the realization of family reunification.

Bio

Ulrika Andersson is a professor of Criminal Law at the Faculty of Law, Lund University, Sweden. She focuses broadly on questions concerning law and power. Her research engages with issues of sexuality and gender, including sexual violence, the criminal legal process and human trafficking regulations. She has collaborated in many international and interdisciplinary settings. Together with Professor Titti Mattsson she has initiated and direct the interdisciplinary research group Law and Vulnerabilities at Lund University, in collaboration with among others Professor Martha Fineman at Emory Law School, Atlanta. They have published M Fineman, T Mattsson & U Andersson (eds.) Privatization, Vulnerability and Social Responsibility: A comparative perspective, Oxon, Routledge (2016). She is also collaborating with Tata Institute of Social 91̽��s (TISS) in Mumbai, India, where she stayed as a visiting researcher and teacher in the spring of 2016. She is coeditor of the book Rape narratives in motion, Palgrave Macmillan (2019).

Her latest projects concern societal and legal responses on #the Metoo Movement and sexual harassment in the academia, see eg. ,  & , 2024, I:  32, 2, s. 231-252; , , 2023 okt. 16, The Criminalization of Violence Against Women: Comparative Perspectives. Douglas, H., Fitz-Gibbon, K., Goodmark, L. & Walklate, S. (red.). Oxford: ; , , , , ,  & , 2022 dec., I:  22, 1, 2240.

No Coward Soul is Mine: #MeToo in Academia
Dr Usha Natarajan, Melbourne Law School

Abstract: The #MeToo movement exposed cultures of sexual harassment in many industries and academia merits sustained attention. Increasingly, people are speaking out about sexual harassment as well as other forms of gender-based violence that are equally pervasive in academia albeit garnering less attention. While individual circumstances and voices are unique, there are some unmistakable patterns with regard to the types of privilege perpetrators exercise, the ways in which society displaces shame and guilt onto survivors, institutional complicity and cover ups, as well as widespread enabling and normalizing of gender-based violence. Cultures of complicity and hypocrisy can be changed. As people all over the world and of different generations of academia find their voice and share their wisdom, we better understand patterns of abuse and collusion in academic life. We formulate effective strategies and mobilize together tactically for change. Crucially, by giving voice to diverse experiences, those suffering in similar situations know that they are not alone and can not only survive but thrive.

Bio: Dr Natarajan is an international law scholar whose interdisciplinary research utilizes postcolonial and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) to provide an interrelated understanding of development, environment, migration, conflict and gender. 

Title: The Nordic states’ contribution to the shaping of EU gender equality law and policy

Abstract

The Nordic countries are broadly seen as a role model for gender equality. The objective of this chapter is to illuminate the interplay of the Nordic and EU legal regimes on gender equality, with a specific focus on how the Nordic states have contributed to the shaping of EU law. The complex and dynamic interplay is formed in a broader context; institutional, practical, and, normative. What is so significant for the comprehensive Nordic gender equality model is that it is not based only on legislation, but perhaps even more on policies and general welfare measures. The chapter embraces both political and legal aspects of the Europeanisation and shows some examples of gender equality exports of significance in the interplay between the Nordic countries and EU, family work life balance, prohibition of purchase of sex and gender quotas in company boards.

To be published this year:

Svensson, Eva-Maria, Gender equality, in Nordic Cooperation and the European Union: 50 Years of Legal Integration, edited by Graham Butler & Helle Krunke, Modern Studies in European Law, Hart Publishing/Bloomsbury, Oxford, 2024.

Bio:

Eva-Maria Svensson, LLD and Professor at the Department of Law, at the School of Business, Economics and Law, University 91̽��. Her research focus on freedom of speech, feminist legal studies, legal theory and philosophy, gender equality, ageing and discrimination. She was the leader for the research project Market driven and democracy driven freedom of expression, funded by the Ragnar Söderberg Foundation 2013–2016, resulting in several publications together with Maria Edström and Andrew T. Kenyon. She has been the Director for Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Research 2012–2017. Together with Moa Bladini she was partner in a European project, Hate speech, gender, social networks and political parties (GENHA) in 2020-2022. She is one of the editors of several Nordic feminist legal studies collections published at Ashgate and as special issues published in Nordic Journal of Law and Society. Svensson is also the author, together with Åsa Gunnarsson, of the textbook ��ä�ٳٲ���Dz������پ���&�Բ�����;[Legal dogmatics] (2023), and together with Åsa Gunnarsson, Jannice Käll and Wanna Svedberg,&�Բ�����;�ұ�Գܲ���ä�ٳٲ�����ٱ�Բ��첹�� [Gendered legal studies] (2018). Her current research project A contextual feminist legal philosophy will be published in 2025 and is funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond for the Advancement of the Humanities and Social 91̽��s. 

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Title: Revaluing Care: Part Time for All and More Than Human Constitutionalism

Abstract: This talk will present my argument in Part Time for All: A Care Manifesto (co-authored with Tom Malleson, Oxford, 2023) along with some of its implications for my new project, “Constitutionalism through a More Than Human Lens.”  PTfA sets out a program for new norms: everyone contributes about 22 hours a week of unpaid care and no-one does paid work more than 30 hours a week. We argue that these norms are vital for overcoming the pressing problems of family stress, inequality for care-givers, policy makers ignorant of care (the care/policy divide), and chronic time scarcity. Everyone needs to care because everyone needs to learn what is learned from doing care. The net result will be a revaluing of care. This is essential not only to equality and human well-being, but the capacity of humans to care for the earth—and to understand that care as a mutual responsibility. My relational approach (Law’s Relations, 2011) finally includes “all our relations.”

Bio: Professor Jennifer Nedelsky is an internationally renowned and prominent scholar in law and political theory. Professor Nedelsky has an impressive list of publications, research initiatives and fields of expertise, spanning over many areas of law, such as criminal law, adjudication, labor law, constitutional law, human rights and the rights of indigenous people, equality and the environment, interpretation and application of law, liability and property rights, administrative law, law and liberalism, commodification theories, feminist theory and jurisprudence.

Jennifer Nedelsky received her Ph.D from the interdisciplinary Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in 1977. She held a Killam Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Faculty of Law, Dalhousie University (1977-79) She has an extensive experience as a guest researcher and other honorary positions from several universities, primarily in Canada, Australia and the US. She has been appointed Professor of Law and Politics at the University of Toronto and as Professorial Fellow at the Institute for Social Justice, in Sydney, Australia. She has also been appointed at the University of Chicago Law School and Princeton University.

Her first book was Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism, followed by Law’s Relations: A Relational Theory of Self, Autonomy, and Law (2011). Her latest book is jointly authored with Tom Malleson, Part Time for All: A Care Manifesto (Oxford University Press, 2023). She is now returning to her book manuscript, “Judgment in Law and Life,” building on the unfinished theory of judgment of Hannah Arendt, her dissertation supervisor. She is also returning to her work on property as part of a larger project on revisioning constitutionalism from a more than human perspective. She is married to Joe Carens and the mother of two sons, Michael (1987) and Daniel (1990); their care and relationship have shaped all her work. Her appointment at Osgoode will end December 2024 and she looks forward to exploring new opportunities.