Technology-Facilitated Sexual Violence in India

Delving into the experiences of victimisation, responses to, and impacts of Technology-Facilitated Sexual Violence (TFSV) perpetrated by unknown individuals in India, this book unpacks five forms of victimisation that women identified and explained through their accounts: cyberstalking, gender-based sexualised vitriol, IBSA, doxxing, and unsolicited contact.

New technologies can reinforce gender inequalities and enable harmful, exclusionary behaviour. This book demonstrates how technology-facilitated victimisation incidents are interconnected along a continuum of harm, often co-occurring with offline violence and experienced by women as cumulative assaults on their well-being. Informed by interviews with 20 women survivors, it sheds light on how women are marginalised, and how intersecting layers of identity, like, religion, caste, and sex and gender, shape the socio-cultural contexts in which they experience victim-blaming, honour killings, and control over their sexuality. Consequently, the book highlights how TFSV is intertwined with intersecting structural inequalities in local and global contexts, arguing that failing to recognise this interconnectedness would inevitably limit our understanding of the wide range of harms that survivors face.

Filling an empirical gap in the literature on women's encounters with TFSV by unknown perpetrators in India, this book will be of value to students and scholars of criminology, cybercrime, socio-legal studies, feminist studies, victimisation, gender studies, and technology-facilitated sexual violence.