[attach id=305062 size="medium"]“The sharing of explicit material without a person’s consent is a clear breach of data protection,” says minister Helena Dali.[/attach]

The Social Dialogue Minister is considering amending the law to make it a crime to share explicit photos without the consent of the person depicted after several naked selfies of young women were circulated on the internet.

“The sharing of explicit material without a person’s consent is a clear breach of data protection,” a spokesman for Social Dialogue Minister Helena Dalli said in reaction to the furore sparked by the publication of the pictures.

“However, as the Data Protection Commissioner highlighted, he has no jurisdiction over websites based in the US. This ministry will, therefore, be looking into the problem with a view to amend the law.”

This step will mirror recent legislation introduced by the Israeli government, which, only last week, made it illegal to post sexually-explicit material online without the subject’s consent.

It is not known exactly how the photos began to circulate widely but the posts on a blog dedicated to Maltese girls led to fears of revenge porn where jilted lovers or hackers upload explicit pictures to the web without the subject’s consent.

The photos have since been removed from the Tumblr blog, which closed down shortly after it was reported in the mainstream media. However, the photos have been widely shared through social networks and mobile phone apps.

The police said investigations were ongoing. Distributing, circulating or publicly displaying pornographic material in Malta is illegal but lawyers said this was difficult to enforce online.

Commenting on the phenomenon, sociologist Albert Bell highlighted the need to protect vulnerable young people.

He described the incident as “a forfeiture of a sense of trust that is normally present in an intimate relationship” and stressed that the onus could not be placed on those who had been victimised, in this case the women whose photos were posted online.

Reacting to those who were quick to judge the victimised women, Dr Bell said this was dripping with “a sense of hypocrisy”. “People condemn but then everyone looks at them.”

We are living in a virtual bedroom so we have a fine line between what’s happening in the private space and in public

“Most kids do not understand that Facebook and other social websites are in the public domain. We are living in a virtual bedroom so we have a fine line between what’s happening in the private space and in public.”

Dr Bell also pointed out that the exploration of sexualisation was fundamental to young adulthood.

“It’s endemic. There are more opportunities for exhibitionism now. It’s difficult to measure whether young people are more exhibitionist now than they were in previous generations because, in previous generations, we did not have such opportunities for exhibitionism.”

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