How a social media upload can kill

The Salem suicide is a grim reminder that online harassment has become increasingly common and cyber-crime cells are ill-equipped to deal with complaints.
Earlier this week, a young woman from Salem in Tamil Nadu, A Vinupriya, committed suicide to escape the humiliation of having her morphed photographs splashed across Facebook. Enraged at being rejected by her, power loom worker P Suresh, 21, had doctored the pictures to make her look nude.
This kind of online harassment is becoming increasingly common. Earlier this month, a Chennai man killed his neighbour for blackmailing his wife with uploading lewd pictures of her. The posts reportedly resulted in the woman receiving obscene calls. In February this year, a class XII student from Karnataka's Madikeri began getting messages from an unknown number, asking for sexual favours. She ignored these till she received a nude image of herself on WhatsApp. Twenty days after she filed a complaint, cops tracked down the culprit ­ Shailendra Goje, a 58-year-old Secundrabad banker. Two years ago, a cyber-stalker from Ahmedabad “created“ and shared obscene pictures of a girl and her mother.
Sexual harassment forms a substantial subset of reported cyber crimes. According to 2014 data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 6.2% of the 9,622 cyber crimes registered were committed to “insult the modesty of women“. And, 3.7% were carried out with the objective of sexual exploitation.
Predators like Suresh and Goje bank on the victim's feelings of shame and self-doubt, says psychologist Avdesh Sharma. “ A victim who is not tech-savvy begins to feel there is no way out. Sexual predators often start at home and now technology has made the world their playground,“ he says.
Last February, activist Sunitha Krishnan turned this trend around on the predators. She started a campaign called “Shame the Rapist“ - she got hold of videos and pictures that rapists had recorded, featuring them committing the offence. She blurred the victims' faces and asked for help online in identifying the men. By May , three of the culprits were arrested. The offenders, she says, feel certain that they won't face consequences.“We (as a society) create that culture. We don't shame them enough,“ says Krishnan.
The NCRB figures, says Krishnan, are hardly representative of the actual number of such crimes. Her experience with cyber cells has been unsatisfactory. “They lack the skills and understanding of technology,“ says Krishnan, adding that investigations often hit a wall when they encounter foreign IP addresses associated with the offenders.
Mukesh Choudhary, who has trained over 2,500 law enforcement officers on cyber crime, admits that not all cases are registered. “At times, there isn't a proper setup for investigation. Other times, some officers may not understand the gravity of the situation,“ he says.
There is no uniformity to the manner in which cyber cells function. Some only investigate complaints forwarded to them through other police stations. Others can register complaints directly. In Karnataka, all police stations can register such cases. Six zonal cyber-crime police stations, operated by policemen and officers trained specifically for the task, act as consultants for officers investigating the cases. The CID runs its own cyber cells which look into high-profile crimes.
Choudhary says that the faster a complaint is filed, the greater the chance of finding the culprit. “You can go to your local thana and register a Zero FIR. It will be transferred to the relevant jurisdiction and cyber cell.“
Sharma says that it is common for offenders to predate on multiple targets. “It will start with one person, then two, and then they take bolder steps.“
(With inputs from Arun Dev in Bengaluru)