ABSTRACT

Cybercrime against women has emerged as a pressing global concern as digital technologies increasingly mediate social, professional, and personal interactions. This article examines the nature, causes, and consequences of cybercrime targeting women, including cyberstalking, online harassment, image-based sexual abuse, identity theft, financial exploitation, sextortion, and reputation-based attacks. Drawing on recent empirical and policy research, the analysis finds that women are disproportionately victimised by non-financially motivated cybercrimes, with global studies estimating that between 16% and 58% of women and girls have experienced some form of online violence. Key enabling factors include perpetrator anonymity, gaps in digital literacy, inconsistent platform moderation policies, weak cross-border legal enforcement, and persistent social attitudes that normalise online abuse. The consequences for victims extend beyond the digital sphere, encompassing psychological distress, reputational and economic harm, and a broader “chilling effect” that discourages women’s participation in public and professional life. Drawing on a doctrinal review of secondary legal, institutional, and academic sources, the article reviews and comparatively analyzes existing legal and institutional responses, including India’s Information Technology Act and Cyber Crime Prevention against Women and Children scheme, the European Union’s 2024 Directive on combating violence against women and domestic violence, the Council of Europe’s Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, the United States’ federal cyberstalking framework under the Violence Against Women Act, and the United Kingdom’s platform-centered Online Safety Act 2023, noting persistent enforcement gaps and inconsistent data collection across jurisdictions. The article concludes that addressing cybercrime against women requires coordinated legal reform, improved platform accountability, digital literacy education, and cultural change to ensure equitable and safe participation in digital spaces.

KEYWORDS:

cybercrime, gender-based violence, cyberstalking, online harassment, image-based abuse, digital safety, women

INTRODUCTION

The rapid expansion of the internet, social media, and mobile technologies has reshaped nearly every aspect of social life, offering women unprecedented opportunities for education, employment, and self-expression. At the same time, this expansion has produced a parallel and troubling phenomenon: the migration of gender-based violence and harassment into digital spaces. Cybercrime against women refers to a broad category of offences—ranging from cyberstalking and online harassment to image-based sexual abuse and identity theft—that exploit digital technologies to intimidate, humiliate, exploit, or control women¹. Unlike many forms of offline violence, cybercrime can be perpetrated anonymously, instantaneously, and across borders, which complicates both detection and legal redress.

Global research indicates that the scale of this problem is substantial. Studies conducted across different countries and contexts have found that between 16% and 58% of women and girls report having been targeted by some form of online violence². This wide range reflects differences in definitions, survey methods, and legal recognition of cyber offenses, but the consistent finding across studies is that women are disproportionately affected by certain categories of online victimization, particularly those involving sexual content, stalking, and reputational harm³. This article examines the major forms of cybercrime against women, the social and technological factors that enable it, the consequences for victims, the existing legal and institutional responses, and proposed strategies for prevention and protection.

OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY

Against this background, the present study is guided by the following objectives: first, to examine and classify the major forms of cybercrime directed at women in the digital age, including cyberstalking, online harassment, image-based sexual abuse, identity theft, financial exploitation, sextortion, and reputation-based attacks; second, to identify and analyze the social, technological, and institutional factors that enable such victimization, including perpetrator anonymity, gaps in digital literacy, inconsistent platform moderation, and weak cross-border enforcement; third, to assess the psychological, social, and economic consequences of cyber victimization for women and its broader chilling effect on their participation in public and professional life; fourth, to undertake a comparative doctrinal analysis of the legal and institutional responses to cybercrime against women in India and other jurisdictions, including the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Council of Europe’s Budapest Convention framework; fifth, to trace the development of Indian judicial precedent on cybercrime against women in order to evaluate how courts have interpreted and applied the Information Technology Act, 2000 and related penal provisions in practice; and finally, to identify persistent gaps in law, enforcement, and platform accountability and to propose coordinated legal, technological, and educational strategies for the prevention and protection of women in digital spaces.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

This article adopts a qualitative, doctrinal research design grounded in a systematic review of secondary sources. Given that cybercrime against women is a rapidly evolving socio-legal phenomenon spanning multiple jurisdictions, a doctrinal and analytical approach was considered more appropriate than primary empirical data collection, allowing the study to synthesize dispersed legal, institutional, and academic material into a coherent comparative account. The research draws on three categories of sources: peer-reviewed journal articles addressing cyberstalking, image-based abuse, and online gender-based violence; institutional and policy reports produced by bodies such as the European Institute for Gender Equality, the United Nations Regional Information Centre, and national law-enforcement agencies; and primary legal instruments, including statutes, directives, and treaty texts governing cybercrime in India, the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, and under the Council of Europe’s Budapest Convention.

Sources were identified through targeted searches of academic databases, government and inter-governmental repositories, and official legislative portals, prioritizing material published between 2020 and 2025 to ensure that the analysis reflects the current legal and technological landscape, including recent developments such as generative-AI-enabled deepfake abuse and platform-level regulatory reforms. Sources were included where they addressed the definition, prevalence, causes, consequences, or legal regulation of cybercrime against women, and were excluded where they lacked institutional or peer-reviewed credibility or fell outside the 2020–2025 window without independent historical relevance. The material gathered was thematically organized into five analytical categories corresponding to the article’s structure: forms of victimization, enabling factors, consequences for victims, legal and institutional responses, and comparative international frameworks, with cross-jurisdictional legal material analyzed comparatively to identify convergences and divergences in scope, enforcement mechanisms, and gender-specificity. This approach has inherent limitations: it relies on secondary and largely English-language sources, which may under-represent jurisdictions with limited digital documentation, and the pace of legal reform in this field means that some provisions discussed may be superseded by subsequent legislative amendments.

LITERATURE REVIEW

A growing body of academic and policy literature has sought to document the scale and character of cybercrime against women, though this scholarship remains fragmented across disciplinary and jurisdictional lines. At the empirical end, Rai offers one of the most comprehensive taxonomies of the forms such victimisation takes in the Indian context, classifying offences ranging from cyberstalking to sextortion and financial exploitation⁴. Cross-national prevalence estimates compiled by the United Nations Regional Information Centre⁵ and the definitional framework developed by the European Institute for Gender Equality⁶ together indicate that, notwithstanding wide variation in survey methodology and legal recognition across jurisdictions, women are consistently and disproportionately targeted by non-financially motivated cyber offenses involving sexual content, stalking, and reputational harm.

A second strand of the literature moves beyond prevalence to examine the lived experience of victimization on specific platforms. Rajan’s empirical study of Indian digital platforms⁷ finds that women who occupy public-facing roles, including journalists, activists, and politicians, are subjected to markedly higher rates of coordinated harassment than their male counterparts, a pattern the author attributes to the combination of platform design choices and gendered social expectations about women’s participation in public discourse.

A third and closely related strand addresses the social, technological, and institutional conditions that enable such victimization to persist. Biswas situates online abuse within a broader continuum of victim-blaming attitudes that discourage reporting and normalize harassment as an ordinary cost of women’s online presence⁸, while Saxena’s policy-oriented review of crimes against women in India links weak or inconsistently enforced legal frameworks to persistently low investigation and prosecution rates⁹. Investigative and industry reporting reinforces these doctrinal findings empirically: the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project’s analysis of victimization data finds that women and minorities are disproportionately represented among cybercrime victims, and links this disparity, in some cases, to prior episodes of offline victimization¹⁰ , and AAG’s 2025 industry survey situates these patterns within the broader and rapidly growing volume of cybercrime reported globally¹¹.

Taken together, this literature establishes with reasonable consistency both the scale of cyber victimisation experienced by women and the social and technological conditions that sustain it. What remains comparatively underdeveloped, however, is a systematic account of how these empirical patterns map onto the legal and institutional responses adopted across jurisdictions, and in particular how Indian judicial reasoning has evolved to meet emerging forms of technology-facilitated abuse such as generative-AI deepfakes. It is this gap, between the empirical and doctrinal literatures, that the comparative legal analysis undertaken in the remainder of this article seeks to address.

DEFINING CYBERCRIME AGAINST WOMEN

Cybercrime against women is generally defined as any criminal or harmful act carried out through computers, mobile devices, or the internet that specifically targets women because of their gender, or that disproportionately harms women due to existing social inequalities¹². The European Institute for Gender Equality situates this concept within the broader category of cyber violence against women and girls (CVAWG), which it defines through legally recognized indicators including cyberstalking, cyber harassment, cyber incitement to hatred or violence, and the non-consensual sharing of intimate or manipulated material¹³.

MAJOR FORMS OF CYBERCRIME AGAINST WOMEN

Cyberstalking and Online Harassment

Cyberstalking involves the repeated use of digital communication tools to monitor, threaten, or instill fear in a victim. It frequently overlaps with offline stalking and intimate partner violence, as perpetrators use location-tracking applications, spyware, and social media surveillance to maintain control over current or former partners¹⁴. Online harassment, a related but broader category, includes unwanted sexual comments, threats, doxing (the publication of private information), and coordinated harassment campaigns, often referred to as “pile-ons,” in which large numbers of users target a single individual simultaneously. Research on Indian digital platforms found that women who participate in public discourse—journalists, activists, and politicians in particular—face substantially higher rates of coordinated harassment than their male counterparts¹⁵.

Image-Based Sexual Abuse

Image-based sexual abuse, commonly known as “revenge pornography,” refers to the non-consensual creation, possession, or distribution of intimate images or videos. This category has expanded significantly with the emergence of generative artificial intelligence, which now allows perpetrators to produce convincing deepfake pornography using a victim’s likeness without ever having obtained an actual intimate image¹⁶. A 2024 review by the Malwarebytes research team found that women are far more likely than men to be targeted in non-financially motivated cybercrimes such as cyberstalking and the dissemination of intimate images, and that women report feeling considerably less safe and less private online as a result¹⁷.

Identity Theft and Financial Exploitation

Women are also frequently targeted in financially motivated cybercrimes, including romance scams, identity theft, and online financial fraud. Romance scams, in which perpetrators build a fraudulent emotional relationship with a victim before requesting money, disproportionately target women in some regions; UK data from 2021 indicated that roughly half of identified romance-scam victims were women¹⁸. Identity theft involving women has also been linked, in some cases, to prior episodes of physical victimisation such as theft of a purse or wallet that exposed personal identification documents, illustrating the frequent overlap between offline and online victimization¹⁹.

Cyber Trafficking and Sextortion

A more severe category of cybercrime involves the use of digital platforms to recruit, groom, or exploit women and girls for trafficking or sexual exploitation. Sextortion, in which a perpetrator threatens to release intimate material unless the victim pays money or provides further images, has become an increasingly common tactic, particularly against younger women and girls²⁰. High-profile cases—such as allegations of trafficking and exploitation involving online influencers—have drawn public attention to how social media platforms and online financial systems can be misused to facilitate exploitation, sometimes with limited accountability for perpetrators who command large online followings²¹.

Cyberbullying and Reputation-Based Abuse

A further category of cybercrime against women involves coordinated reputation attacks, in which false or misleading information is deliberately circulated to damage a woman’s personal or professional standing. This can include the fabrication of compromising photographs, the spreading of rumors through anonymous accounts, or the creation of fake profiles impersonating the victim for defamatory purposes. Such tactics are frequently used against women in public-facing roles, including journalists, civil servants, and business leaders, and often intersect with political or professional rivalries²². Because reputational harm can spread rapidly across multiple platforms simultaneously, victims often find it extremely difficult to fully remove or correct the damaging content, even after it has been proven false.

CAUSES AND ENABLING FACTORS

Several interrelated factors contribute to the prevalence of cybercrime against women. First, the anonymity afforded by the internet substantially lowers the perceived risk of detection and punishment, emboldening perpetrators who might otherwise refrain from offline harassment²³. Second, persistent gender inequality in digital literacy and access means that many women, particularly in developing regions, lack the technical knowledge needed to identify risks, secure their accounts, or respond effectively once victimized²⁴. Third, weak or inconsistently enforced legal frameworks in many jurisdictions mean that even when cybercrimes are reported, investigation and prosecution rates remain low, partly due to the cross-border nature of digital offenses and the difficulty of attributing anonymous online conduct to a specific individual²⁵.

A fourth factor is the design and governance of digital platforms themselves. A review of the policies of seventeen major platforms conducted between April 2023 and March 2024 found substantial gaps in how platforms define, detect, and respond to gendered cyber violence, suggesting that content moderation systems are often not designed with the specific risks faced by women in mind²⁶. Finally, broader social attitudes that normalize victim-blaming and trivialize online harassment as “not real” violence contribute to underreporting and discourage women from seeking institutional support²⁷.

These causal factors do not operate in isolation; rather, they compound one another in ways that make cybercrime against women particularly difficult to address through any single intervention. For instance, even where strong legislation exists, low digital literacy among victims can delay reporting until evidence has already been deleted or altered. Similarly, even where platforms attempt to enforce stricter moderation policies, perpetrators often migrate to less-regulated platforms or use encrypted messaging applications to continue their conduct, a pattern of displacement that researchers describe as a major limitation of platform-level solutions alone²⁸. This interconnectedness underscores why experts increasingly call for coordinated, multi-stakeholder responses rather than isolated legal or technological fixes.

CONSEQUENCES FOR VICTIMS

The consequences of cybercrime victimisation extend well beyond the digital sphere. Psychologically, victims of cyberstalking, harassment, and image-based abuse commonly report anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress symptoms, and a diminished sense of safety, both online and offline²⁹. Socially, victims frequently experience reputational damage, withdrawal from public or professional life, and strained relationships, particularly when intimate images are shared without consent. Economically, victims of identity theft, romance scams, and sextortion can suffer significant financial losses, and in some cases the threat of financial ruin is itself used as a tool of coercion³⁰.

Perhaps most consequential at a societal level is the so-called “chilling effect,” in which women who experience or fear online harassment reduce their participation in public discourse, journalism, politics, or content creation altogether³¹. This withdrawal represents a high cost not only to individual women but to the broader goal of gender equality in digital and civic spaces, effectively reproducing offline patterns of silencing in a new technological context.

LEGAL AND INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSES

Legal responses to cybercrime against women vary considerably across jurisdictions. In India, the Information Technology Act of 2000, amended in 2008, established the primary legal framework for defining and penalizing cybercrime, and the government has since launched the Cyber Crime Prevention against Women and Children (CCPWC) scheme to fund forensic laboratories, train law enforcement personnel, and establish dedicated cybercrime units in several states³². India’s Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre has also created “Joint Cyber Coordination Teams” in regions identified as cybercrime hotspots to improve coordination among law enforcement agencies³³.

Indian Judicial Precedents on Cybercrime Against Women

Beyond the statutory framework, Indian courts have played a formative role in shaping the practical scope of protection available to women online, and four decisions in particular illustrate this development. The earliest and most cited is State of Tamil Nadu v. Suhas Katti³⁴, decided by the Chennai Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate’s Court in November 2004, which produced India’s first conviction under the newly enacted Information Technology Act, 2000. The accused had posted obscene and defamatory messages about the complainant, a divorcee who had refused his marriage proposal, in a Yahoo message group, and had opened a fake email account in her name to solicit further harassment. Relying on electronic evidence, including the traced messages and witness testimony, the court convicted the accused under Section 67 of the IT Act together with Sections 469 and 509 of the Indian Penal Code, and the case is widely regarded as having demonstrated, at an early stage, that anonymous online conduct could be reliably attributed and punished³⁵.

A decade later, the Supreme Court’s decision in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India³⁶ struck down Section 66A of the IT Act, which had criminalised sending “offensive” messages through a computer resource, on the ground that its vague and overbroad wording violated the constitutional guarantee of free speech under Article 19(1)(a). While the judgment is best known for its free-speech implications, it is equally significant for cybercrime jurisprudence concerning women because it clarified that online harassment could still be prosecuted under more precisely worded provisions of the IPC and the IT Act, such as those addressing obscenity, defamation, and outraging modesty, without relying on a vague catch-all offence susceptible to misuse³⁷.

The 2018 decision of the Tamluk District Court in State of West Bengal v. Animesh Boxi³⁸ is generally regarded as India’s first conviction in an image-based sexual abuse, or “revenge pornography,” case. The accused had obtained intimate images of his former partner during their relationship and, after she ended it, uploaded the images to pornography websites, coupled with prior blackmail demanding that she continue seeing him. The court convicted him under Sections 354A, 354C, and 509 of the IPC together with Sections 66E, 66C, 67, and 67A of the IT Act, sentencing him to five years’ imprisonment, and directed the state government to treat the victim as entitled to compensation under its victim compensation scheme, reasoning that reputational and psychological harm fell within the statutory conception of injury even absent physical violence³⁹. The judgment is frequently cited for recognizing that the non-consensual circulation of intimate images inflicts a continuing harm, since content once uploaded can be endlessly re-copied and re-hosted beyond the reach of any single takedown order.

Most recently, Indian courts have begun confronting generative-AI-enabled abuse. In Chaitanya Rohilla v. Union of India⁴⁰, a public interest litigation pending before the Delhi High Court, the petitioner sought directions requiring the central government to identify and block websites that provide deepfake-generation tools and to frame binding guidelines for the creation, detection, and removal of such content. The Delhi High Court, noting the disproportionate use of deepfake technology to produce sexually explicit content targeting women, directed the central government to constitute a dedicated committee, comprising representatives of intermediaries, telecom providers, and victims, to recommend a regulatory framework informed by comparable regimes such as the European Union’s approach⁴¹. In a related line of cases, the Delhi High Court has also granted interim injunctions directing platforms to take down sexually explicit deepfakes of named individuals within fixed timeframes and to disclose identifying information about the uploaders, grounding relief in the personality and privacy rights recognised in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India⁴². Commentators note, however, that such relief has so far been granted more readily to petitioners who can assert established personality or publicity rights, such as celebrities, leaving non-celebrity women who are more frequently the targets of sexualized deepfakes with comparatively less settled recourse, an emerging gap that the pending central government rules and any Supreme Court guidance are expected to address.

Read together, these decisions trace a discernible arc in Indian judicial thinking: from the early willingness in Suhas Katti to convict on the strength of traceable electronic evidence, through Shreya Singhal’s insistence that penal cyber-provisions be precisely drawn rather than vague and speech-chilling, to Animesh Boxi’s recognition of the distinctive, self-perpetuating harm of image-based abuse, and finally to the courts’ still-developing response to AI-generated abuse in the Rohilla line of cases. This trajectory suggests that while Indian courts have proven capable of adapting existing doctrine to novel forms of technology-facilitated harm, statutory reform remains necessary to ensure that protection does not depend on ad hoc extensions of personality-rights doctrine or on the accident of whether a victim is a public figure.

At a regional level, the European Union’s 2024 Directive on combating violence against women and domestic violence represents one of the most comprehensive legal responses to date, formally criminalizing cyberstalking, cyber harassment, cyber incitement to violence, and the non-consensual sharing of intimate material, while also obligating member states to collect standardized statistics and provide victim support services⁴³. This Directive works alongside the EU’s Digital Services Act, which places greater responsibility on online platforms to moderate harmful content and cooperate with law enforcement⁴⁴.

Comparative International Frameworks: The Budapest Convention, the United States, and the United Kingdom

At the multilateral level, the Council of Europe’s Convention on Cybercrime, commonly known as the Budapest Convention, remains the first and most widely ratified international treaty addressing internet and computer crime, and it provides the main global framework for harmonising substantive offenses and cross-border investigative powers⁴⁵. Although the Convention was not drafted with a gender-specific mandate, its provisions on illegal access, data interference, and computer-related offences supply much of the procedural architecture used to investigate cyberstalking, image-based abuse, and related offences, and its 24/7 network of national contact points facilitates the urgent preservation of electronic evidence across borders⁴⁶. Commentators note, however, that the cybercrime field addressed by the Convention remains largely gender-neutral, since offenses committed against women online are not separately conceptualized within its text; a complementary reading of the Budapest Convention alongside the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention on violence against women has therefore been proposed, pairing the former’s investigative tools with the latter’s explicit recognition of the gendered nature of the harm⁴⁷.

In the United States, the primary federal instrument is the Interstate Stalking Punishment and Prevention Act, enacted as part of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) of 1994 and later amended to expand the statutory definition of stalking to cover electronic communications, now codified at 18 U.S.C. § 2261A⁴⁸. The statute criminalizes the use of the mail, the internet, or any other facility of interstate commerce to engage in a course of conduct that places a person in reasonable fear of death or serious bodily injury or causes substantial emotional distress, and it carries penalties of up to five years’ imprisonment, rising to life imprisonment where the conduct results in the victim’s death⁴⁹. The 2022 reauthorization of VAWA further strengthened the federal response by creating a grant program to support state, tribal, and local investigation of technology-facilitated crimes, establishing a National Resource Centre on Cybercrimes Against Individuals, and creating a federal civil cause of action for victims whose intimate images are disclosed without consent⁵⁰. Unlike the EU Directive, however, the American framework remains fragmented across a patchwork of federal and state statutes rather than a single harmonized instrument, and it does not impose EU-style due diligence obligations directly on online platforms.

The United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act 2023 illustrates a third regulatory model, one centered on platform accountability rather than solely on individual criminal liability. The Act imposes statutory duties of care on user-to-user and search services to identify, mitigate, and remove illegal content, and it designates offenses such as stalking, harassment, coercive control, cyberflashing, and intimate-image abuse as “priority” content that platforms must proactively detect and remove⁵¹. Section 188 of the Act inserted new offenses into the Sexual Offences Act 2003 criminalizing the non-consensual sharing of intimate images, including AI-generated deepfakes, without requiring proof that the perpetrator intended to cause distress, thereby lowering the evidentiary threshold that had constrained earlier prosecutions⁵². Subsequent regulatory activity has continued to extend this platform-centered model: in early 2026, the communications regulator Ofcom opened a formal investigation into a major social media platform over the misuse of an integrated AI tool to generate non-consensual sexualized imagery, and the government confirmed that new offenses criminalizing the creation and request of such images would enter into force in February 2026⁵³. Some commentators nonetheless argue that the framework does not go far enough, since misogynistic abuse that falls short of a designated offense is treated as “legal but harmful” content rather than automatically illegal, leaving a residual gap in protection⁵⁴.

Read together, these frameworks reveal a spectrum of regulatory philosophies rather than a single global standard. India’s IT Act and CCPWC scheme emphasize criminal enforcement capacity-building at the state level but stop short of imposing binding, gender-specific duties on platforms. The Budapest Convention offers the broadest cross-border procedural reach but was drafted as a gender-neutral cybercrime instrument, requiring supplementary interpretive work to address violence against women specifically. The EU’s 2024 Directive is the only instrument among those examined to combine gender-specific criminalization with mandatory platform cooperation and standardized data collection, positioning it as the most comprehensive model to date. The United States relies on a victim-protection statute embedded within its broader violence-against-women legislation, prosecuted case by case at the federal or state level, while the United Kingdom has moved furthest toward proactive, systemic platform regulation, requiring companies to detect and remove priority offenses before individual harm is reported. This divergence in regulatory philosophy—criminal deterrence, procedural cooperation, victim-centered civil remedies, and platform accountability—helps explain why, despite growing legislative attention, cross-border enforcement and consistent data collection remain persistently difficult to achieve.

Despite these developments, significant gaps remain. Cross-border jurisdictional issues continue to hinder investigation and prosecution, since perpetrators and victims are frequently located in different countries with differing legal standards⁵⁵. Additionally, administrative data on cyber violence remains limited and inconsistently defined across countries, making it difficult to assess the true scale of the problem or evaluate the effectiveness of interventions⁵⁶.

Beyond India and the European Union, several other countries have introduced targeted legislation in recent years, reflecting a broader global trend toward formal recognition of online gender-based violence as a distinct legal category rather than a subset of general harassment law. Some jurisdictions have created specific offenses for non-consensual image sharing, while others have amended existing stalking and harassment statutes to explicitly cover digital conduct. However, the pace and consistency of this legal evolution varies considerably, and many countries still lack any statute that directly addresses cyberstalking, sextortion, or AI-generated non-consensual imagery, leaving victims in those jurisdictions reliant on broader, often poorly suited, criminal or civil provisions⁵⁷.

STRATEGIES FOR PREVENTION AND PROTECTION

Addressing cybercrime against women requires a multi-pronged strategy that combines legal reform, technological innovation, education, and cultural change. Legally, governments should work toward harmonized international standards for defining and prosecuting cyber violence, supported by mutual legal assistance treaties that facilitate cross-border investigations⁵⁸. Institutionally, dedicated cybercrime units staffed with trained personnel, along with accessible reporting mechanisms designed specifically for gender-based online offenses, can reduce the barriers victims face when seeking help⁵⁹.

Technologically, platforms should be encouraged—or required, as under the EU’s Digital Services Act—to invest in detection algorithms capable of identifying harassment, non-consensual imagery, and coordinated abuse campaigns, while also providing victims with rapid takedown and reporting tools⁶⁰. Education and digital literacy campaigns aimed at women and girls can improve awareness of privacy settings, secure password practices, and the warning signs of grooming or exploitation, while simultaneously challenging the misconception that technical fields and cybersecurity are unsuitable for women⁶¹. Finally, broader public awareness campaigns are needed to shift cultural attitudes that minimize online harassment, encouraging bystanders and institutions alike to treat digital abuse with the same seriousness as offline violence.

CONCLUSION

Cybercrime against women is a multifaceted problem rooted in the intersection of rapid technological change and persistent gender inequality. From cyberstalking and image-based sexual abuse to financial exploitation and trafficking, the forms this victimisation takes are diverse, but they share common enabling conditions: anonymity, weak enforcement, platform design gaps, and social attitudes that normalise online abuse. Legal frameworks such as India’s IT Act and the European Union’s 2024 Violence Against Women Directive demonstrate growing recognition of the problem, yet enforcement gaps, cross-border jurisdictional challenges, and inconsistent data collection continue to limit their effectiveness. Meaningful progress will require coordinated

action across legal systems, technology platforms, educational institutions, and civil society to ensure that the digital spaces increasingly central to modern life are safe and equitable for women.

FOOTNOTES

1. O.P. Rai, Cybercrime Against Women in India: Causes, Patterns, and Emerging Forms in the Digital Age, 5 J. ADVANCED EDUC. & SCI. 86, 86 (2025). ↩︎
2. United Nations Regional Information Centre, Cyberviolence Against Women and Girls: The Growing Threat of the
   Digital Age (Dec. 9, 2024), https://unric.org/en/cyberviolence-against-women-and-girls-the-growing-threat-of-the-digital-age/. ↩︎
3. European Institute for Gender Equality, Cyber Violence Against Women (2025), https://eige.europa.eu/gender-based-violence/cyber-violence-against-women. ↩︎
4. Rai, supra note 1. ↩︎
5. UNRIC, supra note 2. ↩︎
6. EIGE, supra note 3. ↩︎
7. B. Rajan, Online Harassment and Abuse of Indian Women on Digital Platforms, 11 HUMAN. & SOC. SCI. COMMC'NS 1, 1 (2024). ↩︎
8. A. Biswas, The Great Gender Glitch: Women and Online Violence, OBSERVER RSCH. FOUND. (Mar. 8, 2023), https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/the-great-gender-glitch. ↩︎
9. T. Saxena, Crimes Against Women in India: Trends, Challenges, and Policy Responses, SOC. & POL. RSCH. FOUND. (Oct. 13, 2025), https://sprf.in/crimes-against-women-in-india-trends-challenges-and-policy-responses/. ↩︎
10. Organised Crime & Corruption Reporting Project, Report: Minorities and Women Are More Likely Victims of
    Cyber Crime, https://www.occrp.org/en/news/report-minorities-and-women-are-more-likely-victims-of-cyber-crime (last visited July 16, 2026). ↩︎
11. AAG IT Support, The Latest Cyber Crime Statistics (July 2025), https://aag-it.com/the-latest-cyber-crime-statistics/. ↩︎
12. Rai, supra note 1. ↩︎
13. EIGE, supra note 3 ↩︎
14. Rajan, supra note 5. ↩︎
15. Rajan, supra note 5 ↩︎
16. Rai, supra note 1. ↩︎
17. OCCRP, supra note 10. ↩︎
18. AAG IT Support, supra note 11. ↩︎
19. OCCRP, supra note 10. ↩︎
20. Rai, supra note 1. ↩︎
21. Rai, supra note 1. ↩︎
22. Saxena, supra note 9. ↩︎
23. Rai, supra note 1. ↩︎
24. Rai, supra note 1. ↩︎
25. Saxena, supra note 9. ↩︎
26. EIGE, supra note 3. ↩︎
27. Biswas, supra note 8. ↩︎
28. EIGE, supra note 3. ↩︎
29. Rajan, supra note 5. ↩︎
30. OCCRP, supra note 10. ↩︎
31. Biswas, supra note 8. ↩︎
32. Rai, supra note 1. ↩︎
33. Rai, supra note 1. ↩︎
34. State of Tamil Nadu v. Suhas Katti, C.C. No. 4680 of 2004 (Addl. Chief Metro. Magistrate's Ct., Egmore, Chennai, Nov. 5, 2004). ↩︎
35. Suhas Katti, supra note 34. ↩︎
36. Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, (2015) 5 S.C.C. 1 (India). ↩︎
37. Shreya Singhal, supra note 36. ↩︎
38. State of West Bengal v. Animesh Boxi, G.R. No. 1587/2017 (J.M. 1st Class, Tamluk, Purba Medinipur, 2018). ↩︎
39. Animesh Boxi, supra note 38 ↩︎
40. Chaitanya Rohilla v. Union of India, W.P.(C) No. 15596/2023 (Del. H.C.) (India). ↩︎
41. Chaitanya Rohilla, supra note 40. ↩︎
42. Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India, (2017) 10 S.C.C. 1 (India). ↩︎
43. EIGE, supra note 3. ↩︎
44. UNRIC, supra note 2. ↩︎
45. Convention on Cybercrime, Nov. 23, 2001, E.T.S. No. 185 (Council of Europe) [hereinafter Budapest Convention ↩︎
46. Budapest Convention, supra note 45. ↩︎
47. Council of Europe, How Two Key Council of Europe Conventions Can Tackle Online Violence Against Women (Dec. 7, 2021) ↩︎
48. Cong. Rsch. Serv., R45410, The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA): Historical Overview, Funding, and Reauthorization (2019); see 18 U.S.C. § 2261A. ↩︎
49. LegalClarity, 18 U.S.C. § 2261A: Stalking, Cyberstalking and Penalties (2026), https://legalclarity.org/18-u-s-c-2261a-federal-stalking-and-harassment-laws-explained/. ↩︎
50. LegalClarity, supra note 49 ↩︎
51. Ofcom, The Online Safety Act: A Safer Life Online for Women and Girls (Nov. 25, 2025), https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/the-online-safety-act-a-safer-life-online-for-women-and-girls2. ↩︎
52. Ofcom, supra note 51; see Online Safety Act 2023, c. 50, § 188 (UK) (amending Sexual Offences Act 2003, c. 42 (UK)). ↩︎
53. House of Commons Library, Tackling Digital Exploitation of Women and Girls, CDP-2026-0016 (2026), https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-2026-0016/. ↩︎
54. Ofcom, supra note 51. ↩︎
55. Saxena, supra note 9. ↩︎
56. EIGE, supra note 3. ↩︎
57. Saxena, supra note 9. ↩︎
58. Saxena, supra note 9. ↩︎
59. Rai, supra note 1. ↩︎
60. UNRIC, supra note 2. ↩︎
61. Rai, supra note 1. ↩︎