Cyber Crimes against Women in India
- Debarati Halder - Professor, Legal studies Unitedworld School of Law, Ahmedabad, Gujarat
- K. Jaishankar - Professor and Head, Department of Criminology, Raksha Shakti University (Police and Internal Security University), Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India
Introductory Sociology
Cyber Crimes against Women in India reveals loopholes in the present laws and policies of the Indian judicial system, and what can be done to ensure safety in cyberspace.
The book is a significant contribution to socio-legal research on online crimes targeting teenage girls and women. It shows how they become soft targets of trolling, online grooming, privacy infringement, bullying, pornography, sexual defamation, morphing, spoofing and so on.
The authors address various raging debates in the country such as how women can be protected from cybercrimes; what steps can be taken as prevention and as recourse to legal aid and how useful and accessible cyber laws are. The book provides detailed answers to a wide array of questions that bother scholars and charts a way forward.
The strength of this book lies in its attempt to expand the terms of the discourse on cybercrimes against women within the Indian context where conservative attitudes and the all-important demand on women to appear pure and chaste makes prurient exposure in the cyber space particularly destructive of their sense of self and ability to live a normal life. While the authors recognize this reality and argue for the need to transform mindsets, including through school and college education, they are clearly more comfortable with a legalistic, criminologist framework in addressing such deviant behavior, rather than by adopting a sound feminist approach.
[The book] makes a useful contribution to contemporary debates on digital communications by examining cybercrimes and offences against girls and women in India. Crimes against women in the digital spaces have prompted wide discussions in the popular media, but scholarship on legal and policy issues is still evolving. The book comes as a timely contribution to address some of these gaps. It offers a good entry point with a detailed sociologic analysis of cyber offences against women… [The book] is commendable for offering a broad picture of the legal and institutional limitations as well as policy directions to address cybercrime against women in digital India.