Not a safe space

The report produced by the Digital Rights Foundation on the Cyber Harassment Helpline it set up in November 2016 makes for some very interesting reading. The report, compiled on the basis of calls received during the first six months of the helpline, documents the experiences of women on the internet. What is most significant is that 70 percent of women, surveyed as part of an initial programme by the DRF measuring women’s experiences online, said they themselves or someone they knew had never reported cyber harassment to an agency. The most frequently reported cases, aside from those merely seeking information about reporting cybercrime, listed the setting up of fake profiles, blackmailing and unsolicited messages as the forms of harassment inflicted on them. There were also other complaints about hacking into personal accounts, the posting of Photoshopped pictures and the theft of data. Almost all the complaints were based on incidents that had occurred on Facebook.

While the DRF has reported that there is still insufficient awareness about cyber harassment or the helpline they had set up, it has also been noted that because the FIA’s National Response Centres for Cyber Crime are located only in Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Peshawar, Quetta, Karachi and Lahore many thousands of internet users are essentially left uncovered. Women in smaller cities report particular difficulty in accessing any kind of help in the event of them falling victim to cyber crime. Most calls have been received from Punjab, but aside from the population distribution, it is observed that this is also due to a lack of outreach in the smaller provinces and cities. It would seem obvious from the report that cyber harassment is a crime that a far greater number of women than those reporting suffer – usually in silence. In the past, some of the cases that have come to light have been horrendous, with blackmailers threatening to post Photoshopped pictures of women or girls in order to force them into remaining engaged in conversation or performing other involuntary actions. The cybercrime helpline is a first step towards documenting such incidents. It needs to be backed up strongly by law-enforcement agencies if it is to become an effective tool to combat a problem which plagues the world and is an especially dangerous form of harassment in Pakistan when women are so frequently subjected to moral judgments or social stigma.