Key Points
New Delhi: Indian courts treat cases of sexual harassment, bullying and other forms of online violence against women as less serious than offences committed in the physical world, a study by Indian advocacy group IT for Change has said.. Titled The Judiciarys Tryst with Online Gender-Based Violence: An Empirical Analysis of Indian Cases and Prevalent Judicial Attitudes, the study is based on the analysis of 94 court cases by Karnataka-based lawyers Malavika Rajkumar and Shreeja Sen...
The lack of recognition of the ever-evolving nature of online offences and gender-based violence on social media platforms has allowed perpetrators to evade prosecution, the study says, adding that courts in India often rely on sexist and patriarchal scrutiny of the complainants character rather than the alleged offences of the accused...
Talking about the study methodology, Rajkumar said they had seen that most of the chargesheet provisions [in related cases] taken to courts were based on two laws for online violence, the Indian Penal Code, 1860, and the Information Technology Act, 2000...
The requirement under Section 65B(4) of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872, for a certificate to authenticate secondary electronic evidence (a copy of the original evidence), can often lead to evidence not being considered altogether, it says.. The cases in our study show that courts did not consider evidence not accompanied by the Section 65B(4) certificate, depriving courts of material access to evidence, and consequently, access to justice for victims/survivors, the report states...
In India, where even marital rapes are not considered rapes, a very small number of women actually end up taking cases of online violence to courts, she said, adding that there was a need for deep gender sensitisation...
