Navigating Online Sexual Harassment in India: Of Objectification and Threats

Trigger Warning: Mention of rape, digital harassment, cyber trolling, and online threats

In 2019, India passed the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act, which fast-tracked the citizenship of immigrants from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh who arrived in India before 2015, but excluded Muslims. Twitter users flooded the platform with opinions and hostile debates. While followers of the ruling right-wing government supported the law, others felt that it was a threat to India’s democracy and secularism.

I tweeted about the relevance of Shaheed Bhagat Singh and Babasaheb Ambedkar, two revolutionaries who were critical in the fight for India’s independence against the British ideology of secularism in a multicultural nation like India. I also tweeted some words of anger toward the far-right regime.

Soon, that tweet began to circulate amid social media users who aligned with the ideology I expressed — and, soon after that, among those who thought differently. I was called a pornstar. My DMs were flooded with followers of the right-wing regime asking for my “hourly rate” and telling me how they’d show me my place.

I panicked and deleted my tweet. I hurriedly changed my username, removed my profile picture, and made my Twitter account private.

And I am hardly the only woman who has had an experience like this.

The silencing of women online goes beyond trolling. Women’s fear of being violated should they speak out about their opinions, or anything at all, pushes them to remain silent and further segregates them from mainstream online spaces, reiterating the patriarchal hierarchy that exists offline.

A 2020 survey by Plan International, a humanitarian organization that aims to advance children’s rights and equality for girls, reported that over 58% of young females on social media faced harassment and abuse. In 2017, Amnesty International conducted a survey that showed out of women who stated they experienced abuse online, 26% had received threats of sexual assault, while around 46% of the women reported experiencing misogynistic abuse. Another report by Amnesty in 2020, which studied tweets published between March and May 2019, revealed one in every seven tweets directed toward women was problematic or abusive and one in every five tweets were sexist or misogynistic.

This treatment — which manifests in various forms of gendered hatred, harassment, and abusive behavior targeted at women and girls on the internet — can be considered a form of “gender trolling,” which Karla Mantilla, managing editor of Feminist Studies, defined in a 2013 article as gender-biased insults, vicious language, and credible threats. The widespread use of terms designed to insult women’s looks or describe violent acts (like rape or death threats), as well as the acts of doxing or revealing the person’s address and phone number, are also considered gender trolling.

Gender trolling is not dissimilar to sexual harassment, according to Mantilla, in that it’s used as a way to prevent women from occupying public places. For centuries, women and people of other marginalized gender identities had been restricted or restricted themselves to private places. But at its start, the internet offered something else; it was a public place that was open and free, one that wasn’t inherently gendered and hadn’t yet replicated existing hierarchies.

Yet, as time went on, the status quo was repeated in the digital world; it started replicating the offline world’s power dynamics.

In "Violence against Women in Democratic India: Let’s Talk Misogyny,” Jean Chapman argues that violence against women in public spaces is political, in that public spaces have historically been reserved for men. Violence against women in them, therefore, serves to intimidate women and their families from challenging this status quo. And this is what happens when men harass women online, too.

This harassment often takes a sexualized form because, as philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Ray Langdon point out, women are still generally considered things that exist for the use and pleasure of others in our society — as interchangeable, violable, silent, and lacking in agency. They are silenced, therefore, through the lens of how their oppressors view their value.

Gender-trolling can happen to any woman, but is heightened among those from historically marginalized communities, like those of religion, sexuality, gender, caste, class, disability, and other identities. Women of color face what researchers called “double marginality,” and this is a unique reality for Dalit women in particular; they are disproportionately at the receiving end of casteist and sexist slurs that invalidate their experiences.

“When they see your name, they feel they have the authority to shit on you,” Mehar*, a 20-year-old Muslim woman studying in Delhi, told the FBomb about her experience with trolls. “They don’t want you to occupy the online space as a Muslim woman. I have changed my usernames and profile pictures to hide myself. It’s really tough if you’re visibly Muslim. I have been pushed into silence.”

Nonbinary and transgender individuals have the “shared experience” with cisgender women of trolls jumping “to sexual remarks and abuse pretty quickly,” Chitra, a Bombay-based transwoman, told the FBomb. Yet, these individuals more often than not receive additional harassment that disregards their identities.

“I've been body-shamed and told that my appearance doesn't conform with the gender binary as if it was an insult,” Sujitha, a 25-year-old nonbinary professional based in Bangalore, said. “There have been many instances of people stalking my profile and personally attacking me for who they perceive me to be rather than placing a logical argument,” Sujitha added.

Like Sujitha, Delhi-based transwoman Riya has been on the receiving end of such harassment. “I have been spoken to in derogatory terms due to my masculine-sounding voice. The customer-service professional is an active user of Twitter Spaces and has routinely been discriminated against. “I have received comments like, “Oh, it’s a boy” followed by mocking laughter. I have been removed from Spaces many times by hosts.”

Many women who experience this kind of treatment experience irritation, anxiety, sadness, loneliness, vulnerability, and feelings of being unsafe. Gradually, pain, distress, shock, fear, terror, devastation, and violation can overwhelm them. After such repeated incidents, women begin to self-censor themselves.

I know, because I have.

The rampant misogyny online is a tiny facet of the larger violence and hostility women and queer folks face everywhere, the focus on attacking their bodies and sexuality a common denominator in all forms of patriarchal control.

Tired of the continuous digital harassment that her family of three receives, Chitra says, “These things reinforce our marginalization, and for every voice that is silenced, many others see it and realize that it is not worth speaking up.”

*name has been changed on request