What should we learn from the case of Ray Rice?

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?13^th September,2014, published in http://debaraticyberspace.blogspot.com/

When reporting is not welcome

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”, 23^rd August,2014, published in http://debaraticyberspace.blogspot.com/

What does social media has to do with Badaun Rape case?

CYBER CRIME AGAINST WOMEN BY DEBARATI HALDER

For past month or two a very disturbing image is flashing in the social media: two girls hanging from a large tree with an audience of some village folks. They were allegedly hanged after they were raped. Many of my Facebook and Twitter acquaintances shared the image in their respective profiles with their own opinions of the issue of rape culture in India. The image got widely circulated. Some shared to show genuine concern, some shared because they thought they should follow the trend of sharing ‘viral images’ to establish their presence in the social media. But I can’t really appreciate such circulation of images which may increase insult to the corpses of the poor girls. While I was writing my article titled “"Online Victimization of Andaman Jarawa Tribal Women: An Analysis of the ‘Human Safari’ YouTube Videos (2012) and Its Effects "  (the online version can be found @ http://bjc.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/05/05/bjc.azu026.abstract?keytype=ref&ijkey=3XNPIViieFGse4G), I noticed how dangerous it can be to circulate disturbing news  channel images of women who are victimised. As I understand “The peculiar legal understandings that allow floating of apparently offensive images in the cyberspace(McGuire 2007; Levmore and Nussbaum 2012) for the need of research, literature or general concern, have allowed the existence of the Human safari videos in the social media, and they continue to attract researchers’ as well as general individuals’ interest from various perspectives including that of sexual fantasy and racial trolling(Jewkes 2011).(see pgs 684-685 in Debarati Halder & K.Jaishankar, Online Victimization of Andaman Jarawa Tribal Women: An Analysis of the ‘Human Safari’ YouTube Videos (2012) and Its Effects, British Journal of Criminology, 2014 (54) 673-688, doi:10.1093/bjc/azu026). While this had been the major reason that the Jarawa women may continue to be victimised for some more years in the internet, this understanding may nonetheless be applied to the case of Badaun rape victims as well.

  In this case of raped and murdered girls, as far as my understanding goes, the images were released in the news channels and the civil society members started sharing the same. We all know how easy it is to spread the flame in the social media by sharing images. However, such public or even private  sharing may not always be good.  I do not disagree with the view that the more such incidences are shared, the more civil society members can be involved for a mass revolution against violence against women. The Delhi Rape case in December 2012 and the consequences which resulted in creation of new set of laws for women in India can be best example. But it also needs to be understood that our Criminal Procedure Code and the Indian Penal Code strictly prohibits distributing images of victims, especially women and child victims. This not only may jeopardise the prosecution, but also may add more insult to the dead. I agree that some images show blurred faces; but the original image(which had been circulated by many in the social media) with clear picture is not only visually disturbing, it actually gives an implied message as how women are still subdued by large scale discrimination. One never knows what sorts of sadistic trolls may enlarge the scope of victimisation of the dead in this case. Those who are still sharing these images may note that  the parents of the victim girls can approach the court to stop such post death humiliation of their daughters in the  digital media.  

Please consider: to stop violence against women first stop sharing disturbing images of the victims  which may have made them (the victims) feel ashamed of their womanhood. Use social media  to build up a strong resistance against rape culture by sharing your views and making people aware of the issue.............. but not by disgracing the victim or by overriding the law.

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 does social media has to do with Badaun Rape case?

”, 29^th June,2014, published in http://debaraticyberspace.blogspot.com/