Cyber-crimes against women in India-

Cyber-crimes against women in India-

Every minute, one woman in India gets tricked to be a victim of cybercrimes and the social media platform is now the brand new platform wherein a female’s dignity, privacy and security is increasingly being challenged every minute.

Trolling, abusing, threatening, stalking, voyeurism, body-shaming, defaming, surveillance, revenge porn and other sorts of indecent representation of women are rampant within the cyber space. In cybercrimes which are against women, are affected more mentally than physically even as the point of interest of the legal guidelines making sure women’s security are more focused on physical harm than the mental harm.
In the age of new and advanced technology where internet is the common term for everyone, where everyone uses internet for connecting with the world through various social networking sites (Facebook, WhatsApp etc.). These technologies are used by criminals as the resource for committing crime that targets to defame women by sending obscene WhatsApp messages, e-mail, and stalking women by using chat rooms, websites, and worst of all by developing pornographic videos, mostly created without their consent, spoofing e-mails, morphing of images for pornographic content by using various softwares available online.

In India mostly women who are facing such crimes or are the victims of various cyber crimes are not able to report cybercrimes immediately as they are not really aware as to where to report such crimes or are not serious about reporting the same due to social embarrassment they don’t want to face. Women needs to be aware of their rights and such laws where they can take actions against such crimes instead of tolerating such wrongful doing of these predators, their mind-sets needs to be broaden in such a way that instead of tolerating such crimes or thinking about the social embarrassment they will face they must go ahead and lodge an immediate compliant against such predators. Most of the problems can be solved if women report the crime immediately and warn the abuser about taking strong legal action.

Cybercrimes are mostly done through fake ID’s which are created by criminal with intention of committing crimes on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms causing grave harm to women, as through these platforms, major blackmailing, threatening, bullying, or cheating via messenger messages and email are done by the criminals. Criminals commits such cybercrimes with malicious intensions such as illegal gain, revenge, insult to the modesty of a woman, extortion, blackmailing, sexual exploitation, defamation, incite hate against the community, prank satisfaction of gaining control and to steal information.
These cybercrimes have left dangerous and severe effect on womens and have put thousands of women into various health issues such as depression, hypertension and women suffer from anxiety, heart disease, diabetic and thyroid ailments due to e-harassment.

Major Cybercrimes against womens are-

Cyberstalking:
Cyberstalking is on the rise and women are the most likely targets. Cyberstalking is a way to use the Internet to stalk someone for online harassment and online abuse. A cyberstalker does not engage in direct physical threat to a victim but follows the victim’s online activity to gather information, make threats in different forms of verbal intimidation. The anonymity of online interaction reduces the chance of identification and makes cyberstalking more common than physical stalking.

Defamation:
Cyber defamation includes both libel and defamation. It entails publishing defamatory data about the person on a website or circulating it in many of the social media platforms and in the friends circle of victims or in the work place that’s an clean approach to damage a women’s reputation by way of inflicting her grievous mental affliction and pain.

Morphing and cyber pornography:
Morphing is highly increasing it’s far carried out by using editing the unique picture to misuse it. A perpetrator because of internet can in few seconds download women’s pictures from social media, WhatsApp etc. and uploads morphed photographs on other web sites including social media web site, porn websites or for registering themselves anonymously. Cyber-pornography is some other danger to women due to the fact this consists of publishing pornographic materials in pornography web sites by using the use of computers and net wherein ladies will now not even be aware of such immoral publication of their own very picture.

Electronic mail spoofing:
It refers to an e-mail that emerges from one source but has been despatched from another source. It is done with the motive of economic harm.

Backlash:
Whenever a joke or fun made among the friends or in the group of certain number of people is one thing but when a joke is made in front of the whole world over the internet is very different. Whenever an offensive content is uploaded over the internet potentially its results in excessive feedbacks and it’s often results in very brutal manner. This is true with results in various issues especially with the issues related to politics and religion. Such back lashing can impact on someone future or distract mentally along with his reputational loss.

Phishing:
Phishing is a hacking technique using which a hacker replicates the most-accessed sites and traps the victim by sending that spoofed link. Combined with social engineering, it becomes one of the most commonly used and deadliest attack vectors. Once the victim tries to login or enters some data, the hacker gets that private information of the target victim using the Trojan running on the fake site.

Trolling:
Trolls spreads conflict on the internet, criminal starts quarrelling or upsetting victim by means of posting inflammatory or off-subject matter messages in an online network (inclusive of a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) on the way to provoke victims into an emotional, provoking response. Trolls are professional abusers who, by means of developing and the use of fake ids on social media, create a cold conflict environment within the cyber area and aren’t even easy to trace.

Harassment via E-mail:
Harassment via email is a form of harassment, which includes blackmailing, threatening, and constant sending of love letters in anonymous names or regular sending of embarrassing mails to one’s mail box.
Various cases on cybercrime are-
Dr.L.Prakash v. Superintendent-
In this case the accused was an orthopaedic surgeon forced women to perform sexual acts and later on upload and sale these videos as adult entertainment materials worldwide. He was 3 (2008) 3 MLJ (Crl) 578 charged under section 506 (part II of the section which prescribes punishment for criminal intimidation to cause death or grievous hurt), 367 (which deals with kidnapping or abduction for causing death or grievous hurt) and 120-B (criminal conspiracy) of the IPC and Section 67 of Information Technology Act, 2000 (which dealt with obscene publication in the internet). He was sentenced for life imprisonment and a pecuniary fine of Rupees 1, 25,000 under the Immoral Trafficking (Prevention) Act, 1956.

State of Tamil Nadu v. Suhas Katti:
In this case the accused Katti posted obscene, defamatory messages about a divorced woman in the yahoo message group and advertised her as a solicit for sex. This case is considered as one of the first cases to be booked under the Information Technology Act, 2000 (IT Act). He was convicted under section 469, 509 of Indian Penal Code (IPC) and 67 of the IT Act 2000 and was punished for 2 years rigorous imprisonment and fine.

Ritu Kohli Case:
Ritu Kohli Case was India’s first case of cyber stalking, in this case Mrs Ritu Kohli complained to police against a person, who was using her identity to chat over the Internet at the website http://www.micro.com/, mostly in Delhi channel for four consecutive days. Mrs. Kohli further complained that the person was chatting on the Net, using her name and giving her address and was talking obscene language. The same person was also deliberately giving her phone number to other chatters encouraging them to call Ritu Kohli at add hours. Consequently, Mrs. Kohli received almost 40 calls in three days mostly on add hours. The said call created a havoc in personal life of the complainant consequently IP addresses was traced and police investigated the entire matter and ultimately arrested the offender. A case was registered under the section 509, of IPC and thereafter he was released on bail. This is first time when a case of cyber stalking was reported.

The DPS MMS scandal–
The DPS MMS scandal refers to a sex scandal in November 2004 that involved the creation of pornographic MMS by two students of Delhi Public School, R. K. Puram (also known as DPS R. K. Puram) and its illegal distribution as well as bid to auction on eBay India (then known as Baazee.com) The alleged pornographic MMS clip was 2 minutes and 37 seconds long and was shot by the two 17-year-old students of DPS, R.K Puram school involved, on a Nokia 6600 Smartphone. It is reported that the sexual act as well as the making of the clip was a consensual activity as admitted by the students. While the two students in the sexual act and filming were underage students of Delhi Public School, once the video clip went viral on mobile phones, Raviraj Singh, an engineering student of IIT Kharagpur was prosecuted for allegedly selling the video clip on baazee.com. While the two producer-students were not prosecuted since they were minors and Raviraj Singh was acquitted because he had not made any sales of the clip yet and his possession of the clip could not be proved beyond certainty, the blame was then directed to Avnish Bajaj, the CEO of Baazee.com.

Mumbai police arrested the couples for pornography Mumbai, a Swiss couple gathered slum children and then forced them to appear for obscene photographs, which they took and then uploaded those photographs to websites specially designed for paedophiles. The Mumbai police arrested the couples for pornography.

The transcendental jurisdiction of net reasons the essential threat to the society in the form of cybercrime. The primary sufferer of this transgression can be considered women and youngsters. The study shows that we have fifty two million active internet customers in India which reached at seventy one million within the year 2009. Among them operating ladies internet users are 8% and 7% nonworking ladies inside the year 2009 and 37 percentage usage of all customers having access to net via cyber cafe it’s far very not unusual phenomenon that the crucial statistics of the net surfer is being disclosed without problems by means of the owners of cyber cafe and then it is used for unlawful functions. Although acquaintance with technology is wonderful thing that may be considered essential for the improvement of any us. But at the equal time it is turning into the supply to boom the crime fee with generation against the weaker phase of the society. The reason for the increasing cybercrime rate against women can be categorized into two folds; legal and sociological reasons.

The object of the IT Act is crystal clear from its preamble which shows that it was created mainly for enhancing ecommerce hence it covers commercial or financial crimes i.e. hacking, fraud, and breach of confidentiality etc. but the drafters were unaware about the safety of net users. The majority of cybercrimes are being prosecuted under Section 66 (Hacking), 67(publishing or transmitting obscene material in electronic form), 72(breach of confidentiality). Cyber defamation, cyber defamation, email spoofing, cybersex, hacking and trespassing into one’s privacy is domain is very common now days but IT Act is not expressly mentioning them under specific Sections or provisions. Whereas IPC, Criminal Procedure Code and Indian Constitution give special protection to women and children for instance modesty of women is protected under Section 506 and rape, forceful marriage, kidnapping and abortion against the will of the woman are offences and prosecuted under IPC. Indian constitution guarantees equal right to live, education, health, food and work to women. But the same modesty of women seems not to be protected in general except for Section 67 which covers cyber pornography.

Most of the cybercrimes remain unreported due to the hesitation and shyness of the victim and her fear of defamation of family’s name. Many times she believes that she herself is responsible for the crime done to her. The women are more susceptible to the danger of cybercrime as the criminal’s identity remains anonymous and he may constantly threaten and blackmail the victim with different names and identities. Although the women net users are very less in number as mentioned but the other groups targeting them above India, women still do not go to the police to complain against sexual harassment, whether it is in the real world or the virtual world they prefer to shut off the matter as they feel that it may disturb their family life.

KEY POINTS ON HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF

1) Passwords Should Not Be Given To Others.

2) Personal Information Should Not Be Disclosed.

3) Avoid Meeting Online People Alone.

4) Web Cam Should Be Used With Care.

5) Agreement Terms Should Be Read.

6) Avoid Free Downloading Sites as their files may contain Trojans.

source – legal desire.