Why Indian laws fail to protect women online

When even an advocate who defends the rights of others every day ends up “completely helpless”, it lays bare crucial failures in laws and procedures meant to ensure women’s safety.

In July, a Chennai-based lawyer approached the Madras High Court after her former partner had secretly filmed their intimate moments during a relationship built on false promises of marriage. Without her knowledge or consent, he uploaded these videos across the internet.

These events formed the basis of the case X vs Union of India.

By the time a friend told her about the videos, the damage was widespread. The videos were on more than 70 platforms: pornographic sites, Twitter or X, Telegram channels, Google Drive links. The videos kept spreading with shifting URLs, multiple accounts and relentless re-uploads.

She took every step required. A first information report was registered on April 1. She made formal representations to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in June, asking for removal under Section 67A of the IT Act. Still, by July, nothing moved. The videos kept circulating. As a lawyer, she found herself publicly and professionally shamed.

Reflecting upon the slow pace of action in this and other such cases, Justice N Anand Venkatesh noted that “the right to privacy and dignity guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution were being violated every second”.

If someone equipped with legal knowledge and access is helpless, what chance does anyone else have?

Structural pattern

Research across 10 countries shows that one in five people experience Image-Based Sexual Abuse, with women carrying the burden and suffering the harshest consequences.

In India, public exposure can mean familial disgrace, social ostracism and professional ruin.

On paper, Indian laws promise urgency: the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Amendment Rules, 2025, require platforms to remove flagged content within 24 hours. But complainants wait weeks, sometimes months, for even the first takedown order. In the internet where “what’s online once is online forever”, 24 hours is already too late.

Images spread, screenshots multiply, re-uploads appear faster than any notice can reach them. Instead of swift protection, survivors have to deal with police apathy, unanswered ministry emails and endless legal processes. Platforms shrug off responsibility while perpetrators operate with near-total impunity.

Even in this case, despite registering an FIR, the advocate waited three months before the court intervened.

Law without protection

When the law refuses to acknowledge the gendered nature of the harm, it reproduces it, leaving women to absorb the fallout.

The IT Act frames such harms as “privacy violations” and “obscenity”. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, which has replaced the Indian Penal Code, scatters relevant offences across unrelated provisions as though the non-consensual sharing of intimate images is a technical problem rather than a targeted act of gendered abuse.

That framing makes a violation of trust, autonomy and dignity into a routine content issue. It also shapes institutional behaviour: police routinely dismiss these cases as “relationship disputes” and platforms treat them as terms-of-service infringements.

Platform accountability is an illusion. The IT Rules have a 24-hour removal requirement, but platforms have to take down only the specific links flagged to them. There is no statutory duty to prevent re-uploads, no requirement to use hash-matching, no obligation to coordinate with other platforms and no mechanism to track circulation across the digital ecosystem.

Survivors end up playing an exhausting game of whack-a-mole while platforms meet minimal compliance thresholds and perpetrators shift to the next space.

Most critically, India offers survivors no civil remedies at all. Criminal law is the only path and it depends on police cooperation, digital evidence that survives long enough to be collected and years of proceedings in an overburdened system.

Even when a conviction is eventually secured under the IT Act or Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, any fine imposed goes to the state, not to the woman who lost work, safety, relationships and mental health. The offender is punished symbolically while the survivor is left to deal with the real consequences.

Comparative models

Examples from Canada, Germany and Australia show that online safety for women demands proactive safeguards and institutions that understand the toll survivors carry long after images spread across the internet.

In 2016, an Ontario court awarded an 18-year-old woman $100,000 after she sued her former romantic partner for breach of privacy for sharing intimate videos of her on a pornography website. In addition to ordering takedowns, the court recognised measurable harm such as therapy costs, reputational damage, career loss and continuing psychological trauma. It noted the “permanent and irreversible” nature of online distribution.

Similarly, Germany’s Network Enforcement Act, 2017, imposes fines of up to 50 million euros on platforms that fail to remove illegal content, including non-consensual intimate imagery, within 24 hours of notification. The NetzDG law creates financial incentives for proactive content moderation systems, with mandatory transparency reports detailing complaint volumes and response times.

While criticised for potential over-removal, the model shows that financial consequences can encourage platforms to shift from minimal compliance to systemic investment in safety infrastructure.

In India, where platforms routinely resist compliance citing technical limitations or procedural ambiguities, Germany’s deterrent-based framework shows how to bring about enforceable accountability.

In 2015, Australia established the world’s first eSafety Commissioner, with dedicated powers to issue removal notices for image-based abuse. The commissioner can order platforms to take down content within 24 hours and levy penalties up to 111,000 Australian dollars for non-compliance.

It is a survivor-centered procedure: victims report to one authority rather than navigating multiple platforms and the commissioner coordinates takedowns across platforms simultaneously, preventing the exhausting pattern of content reappearing on new platforms.

This contrasts with the case of the Indian lawyer who had to separately approach the information and technology ministry, the police and more than 70 platforms while content continued spreading.

Systemic accountability

Rather than sweeping new laws to protect women online, India needs a legal and practical system that works as promised.

India can learn from other countries to build its own version by creating a unified framework, placing responsibility on platforms rather than victims, and ensuring compensation and timely support.

Digital safety is a human rights concern that cannot be addressed with technical fixes. Shifting the burden of proof from survivors onto platforms and perpetrators can help make online spaces where women are equal participants.

Vidya Kakra is a lawyer working to support women survivors of sexual and gender-based violence at the Migration and Asylum Project.