As India witnessed the public shaming of a few Delhi school students who created an Instagram group, ‘Bois locker room’, to glorify rape culture, social media sites were bombarded with two more similar groups where women were a victim of cyberbullying.
One such group is ‘r/srmbeauties’. The subreddit was created allegedly by a few men from a reputed university in Chennai. It was exposed by a student whistleblower, who took to Twitter and shared screenshots of the heinous conversations on the subreddit. The men had shared nude photographs and exchanged derogatory comments on women students. The incident has been doing rounds on social media for a long time now, but due to inadequate knowledge of subreddits, people whose pictures had been shared couldn’t take it down.
This has been going on for a long time and we girls have no idea how to take a subreddit down who use our pictures on a daily basis to have absolutely derogatory conversations about us.
These are all my batchmates and juniors being spoken about. pic.twitter.com/pX6LcwzmLf— frankyramdayal (@sweetusboy) May 3, 2020
In this series of calling out sexual predators, next in line are a few men from a reputed institute in Kolkata who took it to the next level. These men, who hold accountable positions in MUN circles, created a Google Drive link that was filled with semi-nude and nude pictures. The link was reportedly used to threaten the women whose pictures had been shared.
What south Delhi boys do in the form of #boyslockerroom, Kolkata men take it a step further and create a Google drive account using pictures of women.
— Aiyoobrows (@zindagiiksuffer) May 4, 2020
In a country like India, which thrives on sexism and toxic masculinity, this behaviour is not happening for the first time. The country thrives on a culture in which women are slut-shamed, harassed and bullied, and rape is the new normal. However, it’s not necessary that each of these times, only women have received such behaviour. Men have also been victims of such cyberbullying, harassment and objectification.
As the world continues to grapple with the deadly coronavirus, India is fighting an alternative battle, one against cybercrime. According to the National Commission for Women, 54 cases of cybercrime have been registered in April 2020 as compared to 37 in March and 21 in February. Akanksha Srivastava, founder of Akanksha Srivastava Foundation said that there has been a tenfold increase in cybercrime cases pertaining to threats, ransom demands, obscene pictures etc.