CYBER CRIME AGAINST WOMEN BY DEBARATI HALDER
Last month I attended the National Commission for Women of
India’s consultation meet on cybercrime against women as an expert. I not only
got to meet other luminaries on law, cyber security and gender studies from all
over India, I took this golden opportunity to learn more about some practical
issues from the experts in the field. Almost all of us in the consultation meet
unanimously agreed that majority of online crimes against women go unnoticed
because women don’t report the crime. Why online crimes? There are thousands of
cases of offline gender harassment, wife abuse, elder abuse and child abuse are
going around in all of our neighbourhoods, but how many of us really know about
it? How many of the victims actually feel that the cases are worth reporting?
How many families encourage the victim to report the matter to the police? The
recently released NCRB report would tell the sorry state of affairs in this
regard. This is for the first time that the NCRB report has included statistics
about cyber crime targeting women in India. A glance to it would show that
neither the new laws (as has been brought by the Criminal law amendment Act,
2013) were used properly for booking the crimes, nor there were much numbers of
cases registered with the police. If one sees ongoing studies on gender
harassment, it may be noted that in many places in India the victims have
complained about non cooperation by the police when it comes to registering the
crime. I agree with some of such findings. In many cases of wife abuse, sexual
assault on women to even eve teasing in public places etc., may not receive
proper police attention for various reasons. There are instances where driven
by frustration, many women had either committed suicide, or had killed their
children along with them, or had turned into chronic psycho-patients. In the
cases of cyber crimes, my understanding says the reason for police apathy
largely stems out from the lack of knowledge about the nature of the crime. I
have discussed about this in many of my scholarly works. However, I can not but put the equal share of
blame on the victims as well. I have seen many young women victims of cyber
crime, who were eager to report the matter to the police. Nonetheless, there
are officers in the police department who are equally eager to help in such
cases. I personally know some of such officers who take special interest in
helping victims of cyber crime cases and who take special initiatives to
encourage people to report cases of victimisation. But they turn helpless when the victims
suddenly decide to turn back. It needs to be noted that now in every district
in all States in India, the police head quarters must compulsorily have cyber
crime cell. This means that even if the local police stations officers are
unequipped to register cases of cyber crime, a victim can directly go to the
district police headquarters for seeking help. True, due to absence of mutual
legal assistance treaties in cyber crime cases, some cases involving foreign jurisdictions
may not be solved by the police. But still then, a case must be registered.
Also, if the harasser is known to the victim, stays in the same locality and
takes up digital ways to harass the victim, the police may solve the cases
within record time only if the victim cooperates with the police. I have my
personal experience in such cases and I highly appreciate such police officers
who take personal interest in such kinds of cases even if the victim decides to
withdraw in the mid-way. But unfortunately in many cases no FIR may be lodged
due to the pressure from the victim’s own family. As one officer expressed his concern, if no
case is registered, yet the victim seeks help of the police, the police can
still work on the case on the mutual understanding between the complainant and
the officer, but to a certain limit. No procedural action can be taken to
safeguard the victim or even taking the harasser to the next levels of
investigation or even prosecution. This is because there are umpteen numbers of
cases where victims had turned hostile during the prosecution and the policing
of the case was questioned by the courts for no fault of the police personnel. Victims
and their families must understand that they play an equal role or even greater
role in executing the laws. Other wise, the laws would remain just ‘name sake
laws’. One of the greatest examples is probably S.354D of the Indian Penal Code
which addresses stalking as well as cyber stalking. While cases of offline
stalking are being booked under this provision, online stalking is still not ‘understood’
properly either by the police or by the general public due to almost nil number
of reported cases.
Women, please understand that unless we report the crimes,
no one would come over to help. The cycle of harassment would continue to
increase. Last but not the least; we will continue to have a police
organisation who will be unaware of the present trends of online crimes and how
to deal with such crimes since the victims would never make the police aware of
the new trends of crimes.
Please Note:
Do not violate copyright of this blog. If you would like to use informations
provided in this blog for your own assignment/writeup/project/blog/article,
please cite it as “Halder D. (2014), “When reporting
is not welcome”, 23rd August,2014, published in
http://debaraticyberspace.blogspot.com/
