UK Law Commission recommends new offences for intimate image abuse including digitally created material
Guardii Analysis
The Law Commission published recommendations on 20 August 2024 for a comprehensive reform of England and Wales criminal law on intimate image abuse, proposing new offences that explicitly cover digitally created and manipulated images including deepfakes. The proposed framework would criminalise the creation, sharing and threatening to share intimate images without consent, with aggravated penalties where the victim is a child, and would close gaps in existing legislation that prosecutors and victim advocates have identified as barriers to securing convictions in cases involving AI-generated sexual imagery of minors.
Legislative reform establishes liability after an image has been created or shared, but detection technology can intervene at the point of distribution or coercion. Tools that recognise the behavioural signature of sextortion—escalating demands, threats of exposure, requests for additional material—can flag a conversation in which AI-generated or manipulated imagery is being weaponised against a child before the harm compounds, and Guardii's sextortion and anti-CSAM modules are designed for exactly that moment, alerting a parent, school safeguarding lead or law enforcement agency to a child under duress in real time across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and other platforms where such abuse unfolds.