The legal position has changed substantially over the past decade. Sharing intimate images without the subject's consent is now a specific criminal offence in a large number of jurisdictions, and in several the offence covers threatening to share as well as sharing.
The advice given in schools has changed considerably less. A great deal of it still concentrates on not producing images in the first place, which addresses the wrong party and is ineffective on its own terms.
Why the prevention framing fails
Three problems with it.
It does not describe the majority of cases. Images are frequently taken without knowledge, captured from video calls, obtained through account compromise, or now generated synthetically. Advice about not sending images does not address any of these.
It assigns responsibility to the person harmed. The act constituting the offence is the sharing, performed by someone else. Framing the harm as a consequence of the subject's decision reverses the moral structure and, in the research on disclosure, reduces reporting.
It does not work. Surveys of adolescent behaviour find that image sharing between partners is common regardless of educational messaging, which is what one would expect given that it is not primarily an information problem.
What the law generally provides
Provisions vary and anyone affected should get jurisdiction-specific advice, but several features are common across the jurisdictions that have legislated.
The offence typically concerns distribution without consent, regardless of how the image was obtained. Consent to the taking of an image is not consent to its distribution — this is the central legal point and it is widely misunderstood by both perpetrators and victims.
Threatening to share is a separate offence in a growing number of jurisdictions, which matters because threat is the more common experience.
Anonymity provisions for complainants exist in several jurisdictions, addressing a significant barrier to reporting.
Where the subject is a minor, entirely separate and more serious offences relating to child sexual abuse material apply, and these apply regardless of who created the image — including where the subject created it herself. This creates a genuinely difficult situation in which a young person may be both victim and, technically, offender, and prosecution policies in most jurisdictions have been adapted to address it.
Removal, in practice
The legal remedy and the practical remedy are different things, and the practical one usually matters more urgently.
Several dedicated services now exist to assist with removal of intimate images, including hash-matching schemes that allow an image to be fingerprinted and blocked across participating platforms without the image itself being transmitted to the service.
These schemes are the most effective available technical remedy and are not widely known. They work preventively as well as reactively — an image can be hashed before it has been shared, which addresses the threat case.
Platform reporting processes have improved but remain uneven, and response times vary enormously.
What to do, in order
Preserve evidence before anything else. Screenshots including usernames, URLs, timestamps and any messages. Deleting the material is the instinct and it destroys the evidence.
Report to the platform, using the specific intimate image reporting route rather than general reporting, which is usually faster.
Use a hash-matching service where available, which addresses redistribution more comprehensively than platform reporting.
Report to police where the jurisdiction criminalises it. This is a decision the affected person should make, and it is worth knowing that reporting does not commit her to prosecution.
Contact a specialist support service. General advice lines are less useful here than services specifically dealing with image-based abuse, which know the removal routes.
The school response problem
Where this occurs among school-age students, the institutional response frequently makes things worse.
Responses that involve disciplining the subject of the image, requiring her to explain herself repeatedly to multiple staff, or informing her family without her involvement are all reported in the research and all reduce future disclosure.
Better practice, as set out in most current guidance, treats the subject as a victim, concentrates action on distribution, involves specialist services, and limits the number of times she is required to recount events.
Whether guidance is followed varies enormously between institutions, and asking what a school's specific procedure is — before anything happens — is a reasonable question for a parent to put.
The sentence that matters most
Consent to an image being taken is not consent to it being shared. This is the legal position in most jurisdictions that have legislated, and it is the point that both the people who share images and the people whose images are shared most frequently do not know.
A young woman who sent an image to a partner and then had it distributed has not made a mistake that caused this. Someone else committed an offence. That distinction is not merely a comfort; in most jurisdictions it is now a statement about the law.