In July 2015, Reasonable Doubt’s Carmen Hamilton wrote about cyber sexual assault, more commonly referred to as revenge porn. For those unfamiliar, revenge porn is when your disturbed ex (or anyone, really) posts intimate photos of you online without your consent.

Carmen reviewed the legal avenues to hold these perpetrators accountable; for the most part, a victim’s recourse was only to cobble together a case from existing laws about invasion of privacy and defamation or resort to criminal laws about cyberbullying.

I think it’s fair to say that most of us can appreciate that posting intimate photos of someone online without their consent is despicable conduct. Also most of us can imagine how horrifying it would be if it happened to us. But if there is no way to directly hold someone accountable for their actions, is it quietly acceptable?

I think there are a fair number of people that probably think, wrongly, that if you don’t want intimate photos posted online you shouldn’t be taking intimate photos of yourself, and that if it gets posted online, it serves you right. This is what we call victim-blaming, and it’s not cool.

Well, as of January 12, 2016, it is no longer even quietly acceptable to engage in revenge porn. In Ontario, a Justice of the Ontario Superior Court has called a spade a spade and ordered that a man pay his former girlfriend $100,000 for posting a photo of her online without her consent.

The initial posting of the photo occurred in 2011. The man posted the photo on a porn website and left it up for three weeks before taking it down. The woman hired a lawyer and sent him a demand letter. Perhaps because there has been no legal precedent to date, he indicated that he did not take the letter asking for compensation seriously because its claims had no merit.

Not only did he not take the demand letter seriously, he did not take the legal proceeding seriously. He did not even show up to court or file a statement of defence. To be fair, the defendant was only 18 in 2011 and is still, at 23, likely new to the world of accountability.

Despite case after tragic case of suicide due to cyber sexual assault, the law has been slow to catch up and acknowledge and remedy the harm that is wrought when intimate photos are posted online without consent. There was no way to directly bring a civil claim against someone for their misconduct, and the reality is that there are real financial and personal consequences to these images being posted online.

Manitoba is leading the way on this issue in Canada. It is the first province to have enacted legislation that creates the tort of “non-consensual distribution of intimate images”. For the nonlawyers out there, in Canada, if you are going to sue someone for doing something, the thing that they must have done has to fall into a “tort” category. There are only so many torts available, and it is not easy to create new ones.

Now that the common law in Ontario has caught up, it will be easier for people in provinces without Manitoba’s progressive legislation to make a case against their perpetrators of cyber sexual assault. Sure, as Carmen pointed out in her article, a legal case is not necessarily an option for most people who find themselves victims of this kind of conduct. Suing someone can take years and cost upward of $30,000.00.

But simply calling out the conduct, legally pronouncing it not acceptable and attaching a very high price tag, will deter many miscreants from posting. For others, it will serve as education.

It is not acceptable to post intimate photos without consent.

Laurel Dietz practices family law and criminal defence with Dogwood Law Corporation in Victoria, B.C. Reasonable Doubt appears on Straight.com on Fridays. She can be followed on Twitter at twitter.com/UnbundledLawyer. You can send your questions for the column to its writers at straight.reasonable.doubt@gmail.com.