CYBER CRIME AGAINST WOMEN BY DEBARATI HALDER
One of the trending news in Facebook and Twitter
now is that of Ray Rice. He punched his the- then girlfriend, made her
unconscious and dragged her from the elevator in inhuman ways; so what is the
big issue in it? As the media reports say, he is now married to his ‘victim’
Janay Palmer, even though there are records that he had had the most dangerous
‘punch’ delivered on her which many women consider a good ground to not to
continue any relationship, leave marriage. I was going through Professor Mary
Anne Franks’s Facebook posts regarding this. I, like many of her fans who
follow her scholarly write-ups, at first thought that this was an issue of
another celeb-scandal. But when I went through the media reports that Professor
Franks shared and her comments on that, I felt shocked. One of the ‘comments’
that I read in her posts stated that Rice was taught to blow punches to knock
down hardest man and also was taught to not to use these for anyone other than
his opponents in sports or for self defence. What drew attention of the world
was the cctv footage of the whole act and the actions that had been taken or
should be taken against him. What drew my attention was, pleading from the sensible
people including Dr.Franks to not to watch or share this video as this may add
more humiliation to the woman who has been victimised. I agree. In India after
the Badaun case, many started sharing the images; some for showing genuine
concern and some for using it as a warning message for women who dare to break
the obnoxious rules setup by some societies to restrict women’s rights to speech, to life and to choose a partner of
her own choice. I was one of the many who got requests from Facebook friends and
acquaintances to share the images. My answer was my blog @ http://debaraticyberspace.blogspot.in/2014/06/what-does-social-media-has-to-do-with.html
. I had this realisation especially after I did my research on online
victimisation of Andaman Jarawa women (the online version can be found @ http://bjc.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/05/05/bjc.azu026.abstract?keytype=ref&ijkey=3XNPIViieFGse4G
). Why only Badaun case? In the internet one can find thousands of footages
which show humiliation of women in various ways and I am not talking about
pornographic sites only. There are videos of kicking, hitting, verbally
abusing, dragging women or even unwanted and unwelcome touching. There are also
footages of kissing or love-making which may have been uploaded either as a
secret leak of cctv footage or as planned uploading of revenge porn materials.
The common behaviour
that can be expected from the people in such cases is, they glance those
audio-visual or still images to satisfy their own inquisitiveness and may also
share them to show concern (both in positive as well as negative meaning) and
may also add their own ‘comments’ to make the ‘items’ more enjoyable for the
trolls. In our latest article “Revenge porn by teens: a socio-legal analysis”(International Annals of Criminology, 51(1-2),85-111), we had shown how revenge
porn becomes an offensive material the same way. Many don’t understand that by
contributing more ‘hits’ to these clippings they are actually contributing more
towards the humiliation of the victim. I remember couple of years back there
was this YouTube clipping which was doing rounds in the internet : of an angry
young woman with a small child in her lap, hitting, punching and violently
pulling the hair of another woman and the husband, who were ‘caught red handed’
having a extra marital affair. The abuser was not alone; she was accompanied by
some of her women relatives who were also hurling abusive words to the ‘other
woman’ and the husband. Whether this was an amateur ‘YouTube short movie’ or a genuine
incidence recorded by an agitated relative of the wife whose husband was
denying her the love and care for another woman, is unknown to me. But this
video was instantly spread in the internet attracting hundreds of comments, for
as well as against the ‘wife’. If this was a genuine video, it needs to be
understood that this could have reduced the ‘wife’s’ chance to claim justice as
the ‘other woman’ could win over her due to the physical as well as online
humiliation she may have got. Due to the tremendous developments in the laws,
especially in evidence laws in India, influenced by availability and
genuineness of the digital records and also the human habits of
depending over the digital communication technology for positive as well as
negative gains, the perception of the society and the criminal justice
administration towards direct digital crimes and indirect (sometimes it may be
non-voluntary as well) crimes have also changed. On the positive side, let us
hope that soon the prosecution would also start including the liability of
those who add more insults to the victim by ‘enjoying’ the visual images of victimisation.
Unless people show concern by not seeing, commenting and spreading of such
humiliating images, victims would continue to be victimised.
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), “What should we learn from the case of Ray
Rice?13th September,2014, published in
http://debaraticyberspace.blogspot.com/
