Visual Terrorism: The weaponisation of photography, image-based violence and the online sex worker

The rise of the internet in the mid-1990s allowed online sex work to flourish as sex workers began to create self-representations such as photographic self-portraits and portraits to market and sell physical and digital sexual services (Hughes, 2004; Strangelove,1995; Sharpe and Earle, 2003; Sanders, 2005; Cunningham et al 2017: Cunningham et al 2018; Waring, 2020 ). Since then, for full-service women sex workers (women selling sexual acts for money), sex worker-authored portraits have become essential for the transaction of commercial sex. While the internet has allowed female sellers of sex to control, produce and manage the visual façade of sex work—a role facilitated by technology-led disruption that has changed the economics and geographies of sex work—sex buyers and other consumers of sex worker-authored imagery have been allowed to remain anonymous (Maginn, P.J. and Steinmetz, 2014; Sanders et al, 2017). This juxtaposition has fuelled the weaponisation of photography and image-based violence against women sex workers. As with victims of other forms of image-based abuse, this has serious social, professional and health ramifications