Data, Gender, and Digital Harm: Rethinking Cyber-Crime Statistics on Women in India

Abstract

How many women are included in the list of digital violence victims in India, and who
does not count in our list? This paper challenges the cyber-crime statistics in India
that are rapidly increasing with the help of a feminist, data-critical approach. The 2023
report of the NCRB on Crime in India indicates that despite the increase in the number
of crimes being registered against women (approximately 4.5 lakh), overall
cybercrimes increased by approximately 31 per cent in 2022-23 to 86,420 cases. Other
legal studies on NCRB statistics approximate that approximately 28,903 of these
cybercrimes were specifically categorised as crimes against women, falling under
subsections on cyber-stalking, morphing, defamation and assault on modesty.
However, international and regional surveys indicate that the range of technologymediated gender-based violence (TF-GBV) is even broader: Economist Intelligence
Unit research mentioned by the UN Women states that 38 per cent of women have
experienced online violence in their personal lives, whereas a study of women
journalists reports that approximately three-quarters of them have been targeted
online. The paper is based on the idea that cyber-crime statistics are not neutral
reflections of harm but infrastructural products of gendered infrastructures, reporting
pathways and classification regimes, building upon the arguments of Safiya Noble on the existence of the so-called algorithms of oppression and Ruha Benjamin on the socalled discriminatory design, as well as on Data Feminism of D’Ignazio and Klein.
In access to administrative data, however, there persists a
mobile-internet gender gap, with women in low- and middle-income environments
remaining nearly 15 per cent less likely than men to use mobile internet across the
world and women merely 37 per cent of the global average using mobile internet on
their mobiles, with a gap of about 30 percentage points between women and men.
Marginalized women, such as rural, lower-caste, minority and youthful females, tend
of all to file police complaints or resort to online grievance portals, which increases
the silencing effect of statistics. Using the example of the Sulli Deals and Bulli Bai
“auction app that was targeting Muslim women activists, journalists and students and
recent cases of AI-morphed sexual extortion by predatory loan apps, the paper
demonstrates that the harm of platform architectures, communal hate networks and
data brokerage practices spill across legal categories (fraud, obscenity, defamation,
stalking) while being counted as discrete incidents. It compares NCRB data to other
sources of data on women on helplines or citizen-driven mapping projects such as
Safe-city, Wikipedia and qualitative testimonies, conceptualising the notion of digital
harm as cumulative, relational and labour-forming as opposed to episodic crime. The
abstract therefore establishes three interventions namely, a critique of the ways in
which the current categorizations of cyber-crime incite fragmented experiences of
women in violence, an intersectional explanation of missing data achieved through
digital divides and institutional prejudice, and a proposal to feminist indicators that
redefine cyber-crime statistics as a kind of broader governance of data, platforms and
safety. The paper argues that to make TF-GBV visible in SDG 5, digital-rights agendas
and national strategies that purport to empower women by using data to govern
women need to rethink cyber-crime statistics against women in India.