Women victims in the cyber space are increasing in number. The
patterns which are mostly followed are creation of fake profiles either with
the picture of the victim that the
perpetrator already had with him, or with the picture and informations that the
perpetrator got accessed to through hacking in to the private emails / social
media profiles of the victim. In my paper presented in the Sweden criminology
symposium this year, I had shown ( excerpts of my presentation are available @ http://www.criminologysymposium.com/symposium/event-information/2012/archive/news/2012-10-05-risk-behaviours-increase-exposure-to-cyber-crime.html)
that such sorts of victimisations also
play big role in damaging the reputation of the victim in the marriage market
and can even break marriages. Fear of this often makes women victims withdrawn
from reporting the crimes and encourages them to take the other way round to
remove the offensive content many often by hacking (see excerpts from my
presentation in the above link). But it would be very wrong to say that women
are only the victims. There are couple
of examples to show that women are turning into perpetrators also. In my above
presentation I had shown how women are turning into “victim-turned offender”. Apart
from this, many women are also following the path of male cyber perpetrators by
creating fake avatars of other women in the social media. But how many women
victims really turn up to report?
The recent
case of singer Chinmayee’s online victimisation which included threats and obscene
contents against her, created ripple. Quite simultaneously, I got to see many
write ups which questioned the power of Tweets and the power of section 66A of
the Information Technology Act which very broadly prohibits offensive speech in
the cyber space. I also came across some write-ups which pointed out that even
the singer also had used her right to speech. This reminds me of the noted
writer Meena Kandasamy whom I am very fortunate to have in my own Facebook friend
list. Meena was also targeted for her bold feminist ideologies. But these two
women didn’t keep quite when they were targeted. Both of them reported the
incidences to the police. There are many
women cine actors and TV actors who
refuse to bow down to the people who play with their images in the cyber space.
But not to forget, these women refuse to recognise the after effects of
police-reporting and media trails of the case as ‘social stigma’. General women
victims are not courageous enough to take this path ( I had researched on this issue in my paper Halder D., & Jaishankar, K. (2011). Cyber Gender Harassment and Secondary Victimization: A Comparative Analysis of US, UK and India. Victims and Offenders, 6(4), 386-398). There are legal provisions through which women victims can obtain protection to their identity. But hardly any one is aware about it. At the same time, many women victims feel that such legal provisions are ultimately for a ‘namesake’ and they don't really keep their own promises. The recent press release
by the DGP Hyderabad (see http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-11-09/hyderabad/35015301_1_cyber-crime-acid-attacks-women-victims)
assuring the women victims of cyber crime about the protection of their
identity is a welcome move. It is a hard truth that we have patriarchal system
and women are judged by their morality not only in the marriage market, but many
women do believe that this would affect their credibility in the job market as
well. Like this officer, if other officers take steps to publicly announce that
victims of cyber crimes would be protected from identity leakage may be women
victims can get enough strength to seek proper help rather than improper help
which would finally push them to even more dangerous zone.
Wish you all a happy and prosperous
Deepavali
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please cite it as “Halder D. (2012), “Why do Indian
women feel reluctant to report cases of cyber
victimisation?”, 10th
November,2012, published in
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