According to the recent report presented by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), the data of NCW online crimes against women in India is increasing day by day. Multiplicity of crimes has brought in its wake by the advancement in computer technology and internet and delivered ever-increasing opportunities and prospects for the criminals to harass women in cyber space. Some of the top law colleges in Nashik have a dedicated Centre for Women’s Justice System to help combat digital and physical violence against women.
The total number of internet users in India is expected to surpass 900 million during 2025. As per the data available 47% of internet users in India are women, who are mostly using social media without any knowledge of safety and security rules and become easily prey on the hands of online criminals.
Increasing Online -crime against women is thus becoming a reality in India which is difficult to detect, not often reported and even challenging to prove in spite of several provisions in legislations, efforts of government and judiciary. Thus it is the urgent need of the century to find effective measures to cope up with this menace in the form of powerful and controlling cyber security. Technology is considered as a two-edged sword that can be working for either for good or evil purposes. Violence against women and girls, which is the part and parcel of their lives since time immemorial, is taking on fresh new forms with the constantly growing rates of easily accessible internet globally and the wider use of digital technologies.
Digital and Physical Violence Against Women
Physical, sexual, and psychological ferocity taking place offline, including on the street, at home or in the workplace, have boomed, improved, spread and deteriorated by new advanced information and communication technologies. Women in India are also becoming easy victims of advanced technology generated or facilitated crime. “Social media has become a good, attractive, and easily accessible ground for online criminals to harass women by personal data leakage, stalking, cyber impersonation. With the help of these technologies, criminals target vulnerable women easily and a new form of online interpersonal violence.
Cyber Offences -Affecting Women
One of the newly emerging crime techniques to manipulate innocent women by developing online trustful relationships with women known as online grooming.
Online Grooming
In the modus operandi of online grooming, criminals deliberately cultivate an emotional connection with a woman in order to get something in return. When a person uses social media, online grooming is a common technique used to manipulate women to obtain the trust of the target and finally utilise that trust and faith to use the victim. Online grooming is the opening door to a variety of other crimes against women such as morphing, cyber defamation, and blackmailing, forced porn and so on and named it all as technology generated crimes.
Cyber Pornography
This means the publishing, distributing or designing pornography by using cyberspace. Revenge porn that is when any person willingly with intention circulates, distributes, or prints any absence or sexually explicit material without the consent of the person.
Morphing
Crimes against women involving morphed photographs are repeatedly on the rise in India. Usually, celebrities are the main target of cyber criminals for morphed images, but nowadays, a simple ordinary woman is targeted by a criminal who may seek revenge on any woman for not accepting a proposal for an intimate connection, or to blackmail her to otherwise harass her.
Online Sexual Harassment
It includes online flashing or sending unsolicited sexual images and comments, sexualised defamation as slander, sendup for sexual purposes; Sexualised and gender-based trolling. Image-based sexual harassment such as creep shots, which include sexually suggestive or private pictures taken and share on online without consent of women.
Human Trafficking
This is not a new concept; trafficking of women is an ancient enterprise that dates back nearly back to the beginning of civilisations. Female slaves were often highly valued in the ancient nations for the use of prostitution, but today it has become an international industry. The problem of women trafficking is growing rapidly and has received serious dimensions in the recent context of globalisation.
Challenges Faced in the Detection and Elimination of Online Crime
The new development in technology in the cyber space has emerged a new form of online interpersonal violence. Filing of complaints is very difficult for victims of physical gender-based violence against women in general and it would be more problematic in cases of online and technology-facilitated violence against women, because of the technicality and evidential proves so most of the time women unable to file complaints, it can remain challenging in more remote areas.
The silence of women and not reporting of the crime to the government authorities is also one of the reasons why the perpetrators are roaming free. Criminals take the benefit of such pitiful condition of victim women and many times blackmail them, because of all these harassing situations women are under great mental pressure that affects their health. In some situations, they end their life as they are unable to handle the pressure.
No doubt Information technology act, 2000 has been passed by the Indian Parliament with the objective to facilitate the prevention of Cyber Crimes. But the reality is that it is not a separate code for electronic transactions. It has only a gap filling role and it does not provide a separate legal regime and does not cover up the issues that have cropped up by the use of the Internet especially cyber stalking, morphing and e-mail spoofing.
In a sense, this Act and its latest amendment of 2008 have the following drawbacks namely there exists no statutory definition explaining the term cyber-crime in any law in the respective countries. At the same time, the Act is silent about the precautionary measures and methods adopted for online security of the netizens.
Unawareness about the safety measures regarding cyber security is one of the vital causes behind growing online criminality. As every day online criminals have invented new technology of hacking and harassing and which is more advanced and riskier to human beings.
Key Takeaways and Recommendations
In view of the growing dimensions of online crimes, there is a need for adopting suitable supervisory legal measures and effective law enforcement mechanisms to tackle the problems. The user should also follow the Self-regulation rules at the time of using the internet. Users, especially women, must avoid providing personal details such as family background, pictures related to the people with whom you are socialising, your private moments etc. on social websites like, Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn as it can be easily misused.
There is a serious need for training of law to enforce agencies and IT professionals to curb the menace. While a lot can be said about the IT Act, 2000, there is room for some improvement. Maximum punishments under the Act are bailable thus there is a necessity to increase the punishment and make the serious online gender violence offences as non bailable offences. Some of the best law colleges in Maharashtra can set up Centres for Postgraduate Legal Research to help stem crime against women.
It is essential to have effective security measures for the users when they use different apps and sites, for that government should make drastic laws and permission should be granted only to the secure service provider, for that it is essential to take measures at the international level.
Online crime against women is form of gender violence and eradicating any gender violence from society only laws are not sufficient but it requires cooperation and positive support from society also for that society has to change its attitude towards women, so that they would able to raise their voice against online crime and also file the complaint against such crime fearlessly without any burden and social stigma. The most important is to create awareness regarding online crimes, especially amongst women and girls, so that more and more legal awareness camps, campaign in schools and colleges should be organised by the governments and NGO.
Conclusion
To fight with this new form of criminality there is need to take effective cooperative measures from all the corners of the society because it is a socio legal technical issue and to build cyber secure environment needs co-operation and dynamic support of people, organisations, legislature, enforcing agencies, Government, judiciary and the most important is the cyber security provider and cyber regulatory bodies for regulation of rules, rights and duties of netizens. It also needs the cooperation from international organisations for preventive cyber security measures.