ARGENTINA

On November 1, the Senate Women’s Banking Committee approved a bill that incorporates digital or online violence into Law 26485 on integral protection to prevent, punish and eradicate violence against women. At the same time, it contemplates that the owners or administrators of virtual platforms must remove sexual content displayed without the consent of the affected women (whether real or apocryphal) in order to protect their integrity, dignity, intimacy and private life. In this way, the initiative is ready to be discussed in the Chamber.

Promoted by Senator Cristina del Carmen López Valverde (Frente de Todos – ruling party), the bill introduces digital violence as a modality of violence against women. According to its fundaments, it seeks to “capture violent conducts that attempt against the sexual intimacy of people through the non-consensual diffusion of real or apocryphal images or videos that reveal total or partial nudity, explicit sexual content or erotic situations that were not conceived to be public and that are transmitted through the use of information and communication technologies (ICT), intending their viral transmission”. 

The bill defines digital or online violence as violence that through the use of ICTs “obtains, distributes, disseminates, exhibits, reproduces, transmits, commercializes, offers, exchanges and/or shares images or videos, real or apocryphal, of intimate sexual content of one or several women without their consent, with the purpose of violating their integrity, dignity or intimacy and/or causing psychological, economic, sexual or moral harm both in the private and public sphere, to them and their families”. In addition, it orders the owners or administrators of virtual platforms to remove the images or videos of intimate sexual content exhibited without the consent of the affected women.