Digital Harassment Against Women: Need for a Gender-Sensitive Legal Framework

Abstract

Human Digital technological advancement has transformed the way women experience gender-based violence to a larger extent, that it has moved from the physical world of harassment to the almost unsecured area of the cyberspace. It is sad that apart from physical integrity, security, and participation in public, vocational, and economic activities, women's rights also face threats from cyberstalking, consensual dissemination of intimate images without endorsement, doxxing, deepfake pornography, and orchestrated online harassment. The increase in technology-enabled crime has been highlighted by the National Crime Records Bureau in India, a conclusion that has been confirmed by other surveys of which more than 50% of the women have been attacked with some kind of cyber harassment like unsolicited sexual messages, and morphed and deepfake pictures. The existing legal frameworks are however patchy: the Information Technology Act, 2000 and the (Ministry of Home Affairs 2023) which are cyber and criminal statutes respectively do not deal with the harassing act as one entity, while the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace which was initially created for a physical workplace is no longer relevant as it is not the real case for professional women, journalists, gig workers, and remote employees who actually work. This paper contends that the digital forms of harassment should not only be through cyber law and criminal law without these two but it must also be proponents of the issue such as occupational health and labor rights that workers suffer from more in the remote working, gig-fitness and online business exchange model where they interact and overlap. By drawing on such materials as the International Labor Organization's Violence and Harassment Convention (No. 190), the CEDAW Committee's General Recommendation No. 35, and the United Kingdom's Online Safety Act, 2023, this paper states that a gender sensitive legal framework must recognize the digital and occupational space of working women as one, uniform space, and it winds up with firm suggestions for reforming the cyber, criminal, and labor law umbrella in India's context to such an extent.