Moira Aikenhead

Moira Aikenhead is a Lecturer at the Allard School of Law. Her current research focuses on the adequacy of federal and provincial responses to technology-facilitated gender violence from a feminist perspective. At Allard, Professor Aikenhead teaches Torts and Legal Research and Writing. 

Professor Aikenhead’s recent work examines legal responses to technology-facilitated violence within the context of abusive intimate partnerships. This includes the first analysis of British Columbia’s novel framework for addressing the non-consensual distribution of intimate images, the Intimate Image Protection Act. This work builds on her dissertation research, which encompassed a comprehensive review and critique of the Canadian criminal justice system’s response to technology-facilitated intimate partner violence. Professor Aikenhead’s research highlights challenges that the legal system must face in addressing these evolving forms of violence, including the need to ensure evidentiary standards and legal conceptions of privacy and equality are not eroded in the context of digital violence.

Prior to joining the Allard School of Law, Professor Aikenhead taught Torts, Evidence, and Sentencing at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law. She is a founding member of the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) Technology-Facilitated Violence Advisory Committee and an Associate of the BC Access to Justice Centre for Excellence (ACE).

• Law 241 (Torts)
• Law 281 (Legal Research & Writing)

Moira Aikenhead. “Image-based abuse in intimate partnerships in Canada: Lessons from the criminal case law” in Summerer Kolis & Gian Marco Caletti, Criminalising Intimate Image Abuse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).

Suzie Dunn & Moira Aikenhead. “On the internet, nobody knows you are a dog: Contested authorship of digital evidence in cases of gender-based violence” (2022) 19 Canadian Journal of Law & Technology 396-407. 

Moira Aikenhead. “Revenge pornography and rape culture in Canada’s non-consensual distribution case law” in Jane Bailey, Nicola Henry & Asher Flynn, eds, The Emerald International Handbook of Technology-facilitated Violence and Abuse (Bingley, UK: Emerald Group, 2021) 533.

Moira Aikenhead. “A ‘reasonable’ expectation of sexual privacy in the digital age” (2018) 41:2 Dalhousie Law Journal 273-300.

Moira Aikenhead. “Non-consensual distribution of intimate images as a crime of gender-based violence” (2018) 30:1 Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 117.