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I love @IChotiner’s work but this is very very wrong. The word #sextortion arose as a prosecutor/FBI slang for a specific and important reason: because investigators were seeing horrific sexual exploitation cases that had important features in common for which they had no word.
The word is not meant to be cute or witty. It is meant to describe something. The group of people who work on this issue never use it as anything other than candidly factual.
One of the serious problems those of us who have worked on this issue have is that there is no name for this crime. Literally tens of thousands of kids and adults are being forced into making porn. It’s a kind of slavery. And we have no vocabulary for it.
And not having words makes it hard to talk about. It makes it hard to criminalize appropriately (how do you pass laws banning conduct you can’t easily describe?). And it makes it hard, very hard, to get people to take seriously.
So no, @IChotiner, not going to apologize for the word #sextortion. It’s all we’ve got. It usefully describes what is happening out there. And it was not coined by someone one Twitter trying to be cute.
It was almost certainly coined by a grizzled FBI agent or a computer or sex crimes prosecutor reduced to anxious desperation on behalf of some kid or young woman—or maybe 100 of them.
The terms we use in this field are all placeholders. Folks like @ma_franks have usefully sought to replace the term #revengeporn with “nonconsensual pornography”—which is a useful umbrella term that can also cover #sextortion. But unless you’ve got a term to cover what we are...
trying to talk about, don’t take away the terms we’ve got. We need them. Really.
For those who want more information on #sextortion, here is some of the work we have done on the subject at Brookings and on Lawfare.
And just to be clear: @IChotiner didn’t do anything wrong here. A lot of people, on first hearing the word, think it’s a bad attempt at wit. It’s actually something way more interesting and complicated and upsetting than that.
That’s all I got.
