From Privacy Breach to ‘Virtual Rape’: Analyzing Revenge Porn as an Emerging Contour of Cybercrime against Women under the Indian Legal Framework

Abstract

Revenge pornography, often abbreviated as non-consensual intimate image (NCII) distribution, is a destructive evolution of cybercrime, with breaches of privacy rising to extreme degrees as a psychological crime akin to virtual rape. In India, it disproportionately befalls women with digital platforms being harnessed to promote gender-based violence through illicit circulation of intimate images or videos, post a relational discord. Indian legal framework, comprising of Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) 2023, Indian Information Technology (IT) Act 2000 and trigger laws in between, lacks a one-stop statute addressing the problems of obscenity, violation of the right to privacy and sexual harassment thereby revealing the systemic defects. The term virtual rape summarises the nature of this issue: victims face multiple digital attacks, including experiencing digital rejection, being at risk of losing a job, and even attempted suicides, as supported by a Cyber Peace Foundation report showing a 148 per cent increase in cases from 91 in 2019 to 227 in 2020. This framing breaks down traditional paradigms of rape in terms of BNS
Section 63 which places a special emphasis on physical penetration but there is an ever increasing judicial tendency to draw parallels to the dignity eroding consequences of NCII offenses in breach of bodily integrity. Feminist jurisprudence, borrowing from international precedents, for example, the United Kingdom's Online Safety Act 2023, calls for the recognition
of NCII as a sexual offence separate from autonomous rights of women to their digital autonomy.