‘Social media apps must take steps to make women feel safe online’

They must have a separate grievance cell to look after all issues related to women's safety, says Rashmi Karandikar, former DCP of Cyber Cell, Mumbai Police

Rashmi Karandikar has her heart in the right place. The former Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) of Cyber Cell in Mumbai investigated the Bulli Bai case in which photographs of hundreds of Muslims women were posted on an app and an online auction was conducted. She also probed the Clubhouse case where a verbal chatroom had hundreds of young boys and girls using vulgar language and talking about sexually assaulting women.

Ms. Karandikar, not only nabbed the accused in record-breaking time and also filed the chargesheet despite facing the inevitable challenges of tracking the world of social media. She has done her Ph.D. on the ‘Impact of Globalisation on Urban Women’ and is currently the DCP of Civil Defence.

She passionately talks to The Hindu about the need to counsel women who have been victims of abuse on social media and says that social media apps must step up and appoint grievance officers to make women feel safe virtually.

In both cases, the accused are very young. Their parents have no idea they have an alter ego in the virtual world, where they don't know each other personally but have group affinity. In both cases, the rules were the same — everyone had to be anonymous, use only international numbers and no gmail. They all have the same ideology — women should not step out of their homes and are staunch believers and followers of manusmriti. There is resentment towards a particular religious community and hatred towards the women of that community.

Counselling in a case like this is like sending an alcoholic for rehabilitation. Even if the abuser goes to the rehab regularly and does as he is told to do, he needs to be monitored once he is out of there. Similarly, you can give a young mind counselling for a couple of months, but what really matters is to track his social media behaviour after the sessions are over.

Even victims of social media abuse need counseling. The survivors have been subjected to online auctioning of their body parts through these apps. These women have experienced a very different form of abuse, sextortion — their photographs were morphed, vulgar language was being used against them — they definitely need counselling.

It is very unfortunate to know that people reduce a one-year-old child to one part of her body. It really goes to show that we are a sick society that has a very pervert outlook and mentality.