Time for a new framework that ensures women’s digital and physical safety

Every few years, India goes through the same ritual. A gruesome crime shocks the nation. This triggers outrage, television debates and candlelight marches. Governments promise punishment. A bill gets tabled. And silence! Alas, for all these developments, the machinery underneath remains much the same.

Institutions remain unsafe, reporting systems untrusted, survivors are left to fend for themselves, and trials drag on for years together.

Numbers tell a story:

It is a tragic irony that the figures of crimes against women and children are rising at an alarming pace, across the country.

India recorded 4.41 lakh crimes against women in 2024, while crimes against children rose from 1.62 lakh in 2022 to around 1.88 lakh in 2024. A POCSO case takes an average of 510 days to resolve, while the conviction rate is only a little over one in three.

It is time that we move past this cycle. Rather than coming up with a new law after every tragedy, there is a compelling need for a more comprehensive framework that can ensure every woman’s digital and physical safety.

Safety no longer ends at the front door:

A woman’s safety today doesn’t stop at her front door. It follows her onto her phone, into her data, photographs and online identity.

The line between physical and digital harm has nearly disappeared. A woman can be stalked online, have a private photograph morphed and used for extortion, or have a deepfake that destroys her reputation, as the 2023 deepfake targeting actress Rashmika Mandanna demonstrated.

Technology has made existing violence faster and harder to escape. A safety law written only for the street is already out of date. Of course, India has numerous laws in place. The problem is with enforcement.

Not short on legislation: The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, POCSO, POSH and provisions under the IT Act are all in place. However, enforcement and coordination remain the bane.

A compliance gap:

It is bizarre to note that fewer than one in six universities file the mandatory annual sexual-harassment compliance report that is required under POSH.

Among colleges, the figure is closer to one in 100.

These are not freak, unconnected incidents. The same weak points appear time and again: prevention, institutional accountability, response time, investigation, survivor privacy and support.

What the numbers don’t capture:

The physical numbers themselves almost certainly understate the problem. NCRB figures capture what is reported and formally logged. NFHS-5 found that nearly a third of married women report spousal violence — far more than what appears in NCRB tables.

Kidnapping and abduction, including trafficking and forced marriage, now account for nearly one-fifth of recorded crimes against women.

The digital blind spot:

The digital side is even less understood.

• 1,01,928 cybercrime cases were recorded in 2024

• 72.6% are involved in banking or investment fraud

• Online sexual exploitation accounted for 3.1 per cent

• 76,000+ complaints involving women were logged on India’s cybercrime portal in 2025

That does not imply that online sexual abuse is rare. It means a system designed to count money that has been lost has no good way to register fear, humiliation or a reputation destroyed.

In a way, underreporting is part of the problem

Many women do not know where to report cybercrimes. Others fear stigma, family pressure or further circulation of the offending material.

Incidentally, rural India faces a particular version of this problem: fewer police resources, less anonymity and consequences that can affect education and family standing.

The six factors needed for a functional framework:

1. Make institutions accountable: Every school, college, hostel, hospital, workplace and public institution needs enforceable safety obligations, independent audits and transparent grievance data.

2. Make reporting simple and time-bound: A complaint filed once should set the right machinery in motion, without forcing survivors to navigate different agencies.

3. Put clear duties on digital platforms: Platforms need legal duties around intimate-image abuse, deepfakes, impersonation and threats. Harmful content should be preserved as evidence and pronto removed from further circulation.

4. Build functioning crisis infrastructure:

Every district needs counsellors, legal aid, emergency shelter, medical support and trained cyber-investigators. A scheme without trained and paid staff cannot really be a scheme, in the first place.

5. Take prevention as seriously as punishment: Consent education, gender sensitisation and digital literacy belong in school and college curricula. Boys must be part of that conversation.

6. Tie funding to outcomes: India’s Nirbhaya Fund has used roughly 80 per cent of what has been allocated, but a disproportionate share has gone into CCTV cameras and control rooms. These cannot substitute for functioning of help centres, trained investigators, counsellors, safe transport or timely trials.

Telangana as the testing ground:

There is no need to invent the suggestions from scratch. Spain, Norway, Denmark and the United States offer models that make institutions more accountable and measurable outcomes.

Telangana is an ideal place to begin with. It boasts of SHE Teams, Bharosa Centres, a dedicated Cyber Security Bureau and India’s first child-friendly court.

The priority is in bringing these systems together through campus safety dashboards, rural digital-safety programmes, audited district response protocols and survivor feedback mechanisms. It may be noted that Dr Marri Channa Reddy Foundation runs pilots across urban and rural Telangana, including school safety audits and digital-safety sessions for young women. The goal is not another law shaped primarily by demands for harsher punishment and then left waiting in constitutional or administrative limbo.

Punishment matters. But so does the need to figure out if the complaint is taken seriously, whether an investigation is competent, how quickly protection arrives and whether institutions have earned public trust.

The Foundation is opening this up for public consultation because a law built to last requires students, communities, teachers, police officers, counsellors and survivors.

The principle is simple: a woman’s physical and digital safety should be treated as one continuous right — to move, study, work, speak and simply exist in public life without having to calculate the risk first. There is no need to wait for the next tragedy. It needs a law that can survive a change in government; is realistic enough to implement; and does its job before and during a crisis.

(The writer is a senior Congress leader, lead anchor for the Women Safety Parliament Bill Consortium and Chairman of Dr Marri Channa Reddy Foundation, Hyderabad)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marri Adithya Reddy

Marri Adithya Reddy