Pornography and Sexual Self-Determination

• Applicant: Dr. Anja Schmidt
• Subject Area: Criminal Law ; Principles of Law and Jurisprudence
• Term: from 2017 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 386171237

This research project is aimed at a basic critique of the criminal law relating to pornography. In the center of the argumentation stands the consequent guarantee of the right of sexual self-determination of adult and minor persons. The legal concept of pornography is vague, largely morally determined and does not consistently refer to a threat or violation of sexual self-determination. Sexually-oriented depictions are included even if they are not sexually explicit, because they are involved in criminal law related to pornography, in other norms of criminal law and in the legal-political debates. On the basis of the insights of this analysis, criteria for the punishability of sexually-oriented depictions and a systematic legal regulation of sexual depictions which consequently guarantees the right of sexual self-determination will be suggested.For the critique of the legal concept of pornography, the feminist positions against and for pornography and the field of porn studies (which have been developing since the 1990s) will be made productive because they have expounded the poles of the debate about pornography from a scientific foundation and include the dimension of gender. In addition, more recent phenomena of sexually-oriented depictions will be problematized which are conceptualized in the Anglophone debates as image-based sexual abuse such as sexually provocative representations of the genitals of minors, upskirting, revenge porn or dick pics. In German criminal law they are partly criminalized as pornography and partly in other ways, and, to a certain extent, they are merely socially problematized as a violation of the right to sexual self-determination. The concept of image-based sexual abuse will be taken up in the German debate. The analysis of the legal risk assessments on pornography and other sexually-oriented depictions rests on the research into the effects and use of pornography over the last 10 years, and on the empirical studies which form the basis of the concept of image-based sexual abuse. All of these empirical studies will be made accessible to the German criminal law debate.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants