It is not an exaggeration to say that many people in cities cannot do without internet and its offshoots like Facebook these days. Several factors like faster, cheaper and convenient means to communicate, share and transfer of data are influencing this.
The explosive growth of internet users is also bringing maladies like Nigerian frauds, phishing and identity theft. While the key issue is monetary loss in many such instances, cases pertaining to attack on privacy and personal defamation are also rising alarmingly.
Strangely, women are becoming victims in most of the second category cases. Opening account in the name of the targeted woman on a social website with obscene messages and video links is one such growing pattern. The accused posts unwarranted messages in the woman’s name stating she required companionship and leave her mobile phone number along with e-mail id.
Suffer silently
Life of the woman becomes miserable from the next hour with a flood of pestering phone calls and e-mails. Worried of family prestige, many prefer to suffer silently instead of approaching police. Those knocking the doors of police are forced to undergo embarrassing moments of explaining personal details to investigators.
The instance of a former student of National Institute of Technology, Warangal, who was harassed by her senior by opening her account in Orkut, was a classic case. Hacking the e-mail id of a woman, collecting her private information and sending porn videos to her friends and family members with morphed images is another pattern.
Harrowing instances
Harrowing are the instances of persons, who move closely with the women, video-graphing their private moments clandestinely and posting the same on internet. “This is happening in cases where the woman completely trusts the other person who is using the visuals to defame or threaten her,” police observe.
A few months ago, a Central government officer’s daughter became a victim as the man she chatted online using web camera recorded her visuals and sent them to her friends to harass her. Eventually, the Hyderabad police arrested him.
A recent shocking case is that of a woman whose ‘friend’ is sending video images of the intimate moments she had with him to her family members. “The accused is in America and resorting to this since she rejected his marriage proposal,” the investigators said. Unlike the general crime against women, the law-enforcing agencies are able to do little in preventing cases of harassment using internet and its offshoots of social websites like Facebook or Orkut.
-Agencies