The endless digital afterlife of abuse

When sexual violence goes viral, the internet becomes a permanent crime scene where the victim’s trauma is reperformed for a voyeuristic public

By Chitrangada Sharma

The horrors of the Prajwal Revanna case are still fresh in public memory, and yet again we are faced with two new reports of impunity. The recent arrests of a Nashik godman, Ashok Kumar Kharat and that of Soham Naik, the son of a Goa Counsellor, expose how men use proximity to power as an excuse to prey on vulnerable women and sexually abuse them. In all three cases, the videos of sexual abuse became viral, leaving victims distressed and traumatised. It is pertinent to ask what it is about these viral images of abuse that contributes to the trauma of victims and why we should take them seriously.

The violence of sexual abuse exists on a continuum and is not just limited to the physical act of rape. It also extends to the act of recording the abuse and then circulating it online. The violation of a victim’s consent, agency, privacy and bodily autonomy happens in all three stages and hence the violence of recording and circulating the rape videos cannot be trivialised. The abuse continues and is reperformed online, each time the video is clicked and shared, thereby making them “crimes in perpetuity”. In 2018, the Sessions Court decision in State of West Bengal v. Animesh Boxi described this insidious and repeated nature of abuse and termed it as “virtual rape”.

While these videos feed morbid curiosity and function as an entertaining spectacle that is voyeuristically consumed by viewers, they are a permanent reminder of humiliation for victims. The circulation of these videos often has a chilling effect on victims. Many women are reluctant to come forward and complain about sexual abuse, fearing the risk of being identified not only by society but at times by their own family members. The social stigma of rape and the risk of societal ostracisation only add to their trauma. Out of approximately 100 victims identified in the sexual abuse videos allegedly recorded by former MP Revanna, only four filed a formal complaint. Many family members learned about the abuse after they were informed by neighbours who had identified the victims in the videos. The unwarranted exposure compelled many families to leave their homes and relocate to different cities.

The online circulation of these videos also creates conditions of further harm for victims, exposing them to sexist trolling, victim-blaming and rape threats. It endangers their physical safety when their personal details like name, address and place of work are doxxed online, leaving them vulnerable to stalking and harassment. The internet, therefore, becomes another hostile space which mimics the inequalities of the offline world, leaving victims at risk. The criminal legal system further reinforces the victim’s trauma through secondary victimisation. Women’s complaints of rape and digital violence are often met with disbelief by the police, who then refuse to register FIRs. On the rare occasion where the victim’s complaint does reach the criminal court, women are often exposed to humiliating questions about their past sexual history by the defence counsels in clandestine ways. The defence offers an interpretation of videos of sexual violence as those of consensual sexual encounters, converting the victim’s traumatic experience of rape into a sexual escapade. Instead of holding perpetrators accountable, victims get blamed for what is done to them.

In recent years, high courts in India have started issuing John Doe orders against nameless entities to address the virality of sexual abuse imagery by giving injunctions with respect to existing and future uploads of the same imagery on different websites. Though it is a laudable initiative, this only happens when the victims themselves approach the court with a list of website URLs where the imagery is currently circulating. The effectiveness of a court order also relies on the victims’ labour of constantly looking for videos of their abuse to resurface, which results in retraumatisation. How does one then ensure the victims’ right to be forgotten? Can one imagine a more trauma-informed way of assisting victims? Can there be any alternatives to the legal process itself or perhaps a more therapeutic application of law that focuses on protecting victims from such “crimes in perpetuity”? These are questions we are yet to find answers to.

The writer is a lawyer and PhD research scholar at CSLG, JNU