Ms Elizabeth Farries:

I thank the committee. We present these submissions in memory of Dara Quigley and in consultation with her mother, Aileen Malone, who is present in the Gallery.

Dara Quigley was an Irish activist and journalist. In 2017, members of An Garda Síochána forcibly detained Ms Quigley under Ireland's Mental Health Act for walking naked in a Dublin street. State CCTV cameras captured Ms Quigley's images. Media reports tell us that a garda was suspected of recording the images. The images were shared on a WhatsApp message group and, subsequently, posted on Facebook. The images were reported to have been shared 125,000 times before being taken down. Several days later, Dara Quigley committed suicide. Two and a half years later, no organisation or individual has been held responsible for their role in the abuse of Ms Quigley. Dara's mother has supported our discussing this case today to lend a personal perspective regarding, as she says, "how devastating online sexual harassment and public humiliation can be".

Today, the committee is considering responses to what it terms "revenge porn". ICCL objects to "revenge porn" as a term. It is not pornography; it is sexual abuse. Revenge is only one of myriad motivations that, principally, are to violate a person's dignity and his or her autonomy.

"Image-based sexual abuse" is a term coined by UK academics to better describe the non-consensual nature of this problem either by creating or distributing private sexual images. Image-based sexual abuse is a gendered problem with established harms. Our research shows that while anyone can be a victim, the majority are women and the majority of perpetrators are men. This is not to say that intersectional factors also influence the likelihood of experiencing online harassment. Generally, the LGBT+ community is at increased risk. One's race, religion, ethnicity, mental health and ability are all risk factors. The harms have been well described by others, numerous academics and in our submissions. I ask the members to please let me know if they want me to elaborate during questions.

The image-based sexual abuse of Ms Quigley illustrates weaknesses in the Irish regime for responding. We have proposed several solutions in our submissions and we will focus on three solutions here.

A first step for tackling this problem is updated and robust laws. This has been outlined well by the Law Reform Commission, LRC. ICCL specifically calls for the criminalisation of image-based sexual abuse. This is might be an amendment to the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act 1997 to outlaw the creation and-or sharing of private sexual images. ICCL also supports the creation of a civil wrong together with legal aid access to ensure restitution and compensation. However, as ICCL has previously stated in its submissions on harmful content moderation, and in our review of the recent Harmful Communications and Digital Safety Bill 2017, "harmful content" must be clearly defined. As has been said well here to the committee, a lack of specificity will not meet legality standards and could lead to infringement of other rights, including expression.

Second, strong laws also require strong enforcement practices and we cannot have enforcement without a cultural understanding of this problem at gardaí level. The committee has heard stories here of people not receiving adequate assistance from gardaí on online harassment issues. Dara's treatment was far more egregious. In our submissions we, therefore, present a number of suggestions for the Garda in line with our other ICCL publications to ground Garda practices in the principals of human rights. Specifically, the integration of training and assessment regarding the gendered and otherwise intersexual nature of online harassment, including image-based sexual abuse intersectional. It is enough to focus on cyberbullying, a terms that erases the context of power and marginalisation in which injustice against people such as Dara has occurred.

Third, the ICCL is opposed, in principal, to the Department Justice and Equality's community-based CCTV programme. We recommend that the State does not further contribute to online harassment by building up the web of tech surveillance to which we are all, increasingly, subject. Installing CCTV to maintain public safety is based on flawed logic. Blanket surveillance does not help us; it harms us, which Dara's experience has certainly demonstrated and it harms some of us more than others. There is significant research that suggests CCTV does not effectively deter crime to sufficiently mitigate the impact on our privacy. Policing tech can also be very discriminatory. In Dara Quigley's case, CCTV has become a mechanism for gendered online harassment and her experience of image-based sexual abuse. We need to rethink this wrong-headed approach to expanding surveillance simply because the technical means exist together with over-policing segments of the population in Ireland.

In conclusion, Dara Quigley's experience is an appalling one and it is ongoing for her family. We are conscious that investigations have been initiated into Dara's death and egregious treatment of her by, as yet not formally identified, perpetrators.

However, two and half years later, these investigations have not provided any justice to Dara or her family. The aim of our submission today is to highlight the tragic consequences of violations of rights in this area and solutions in order to prevent such cases occurring in future. At the same time, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties will continue to support Dara's family in the struggle for justice.