By Saritha Irugalbandara   “He made another profile,” I remember telling my friend over the phone, adding: “I’m so tired.” A few weeks prior, I had begun receiving messages from an unknown person on Instagram. If you’re a woman with a public online presence, this is nothing new, and incessant messaging from men is both annoyingly and disturbingly commonplace. Generally, I, like most women, ignore, delete, and block, and go about the day. I did the same this time around. A few hours later, there was another profile. I would block and delete, but new profiles would sprout in their place, with the messages ranging from hellos, to declarations of love, to choice words about my body and what he would do to it.  The final straw was when he created three profiles in under an hour. I was exhausted. Ignoring had not worked. Blocking was futile. Confrontation only seemed to harden his resolve to try and contact me.  “There’s nothing we can do; contact the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) Cyber Crime Unit,” said the Sri Lanka Computer Emergency Readiness Team (SLCERT), which is “the single trusted source of advice about the latest threats and vulnerabilities affecting computer systems and networks”, according to their official website. The breadth of their “incident handling”, I was told, was to deal with hacking.  A stoic voice at the Cyber Crime Unit at the CID told me that all they could do was block the email address connected to the account. Instead of reassurance, I was curtly told to submit a form detailing “the problem”. I was never actually given confirmation that even the blocking of the email had been done. Further legal action would require a visit to the local Police station, I was told, before the officer hung up on the other end.  Setting aside that blocking an email was as ineffective as trying to empty the ocean using a bucket, there are still two profiles that are sequestered to my message requests; by now I had learnt that blocking would mean new profiles.   A cultural problem Sri Lanka is not a safe space for women, and that extends to our internet. Online violence, after all, is an extension of that which takes place offline. The culture of shame and guilt associated with sexuality, especially that of women and anyone else who is not a heterosexual man, also subdues victims into silence when violence occurs.  A sitting President made international headlines for threatening to whip, with a stingray tail, those who “desecrated the culture” because a woman’s undergarment was thrown on stage at a concert. I wondered then whether the response would be the same if it was a man’s underwear.  The status quo has always been one that suppresses women’s sex and sexuality, where even the allusion of sexuality will be enough for the victim to be blamed, or in the least be met with veiled accusations of somehow inviting violation. The ease of access to the internet and social media has created a new modality for sexuality and gender-based violence. While community standards and related safety mechanisms have marginally improved over the last few years due to growing pressure from advocacy groups, women and girls remain largely unprotected.  In the last two weeks, a popular Sri Lankan artist found herself on the receiving end of widespread sexual harassment over a video that was not even of her. After a tearful interview in which she expressed her frustration at what was transpiring, the public was still divided; some empathised, while some insisted that this was a publicity stunt.  As someone monitoring and reporting incidences of such violence, I can confirm that she is only one out of the many whose images were disseminated and shared due to a “leak”; she just happens to be the only one with a public presence. In fact, women need not even have an online presence to endure violence; there are plenty of photos taken without consent, with identities and contact details revealed on public groups, and these women often have no knowledge if and when they are faced with a barrage of harassing and abusive messages.  I wonder if the man who created over 15 profiles to harass me also found me through one of these pages. I wonder, during every work day, pouring over page after page of images of women being used and shared without their consent, for purposes they did not consent to, whether I will ever come across my own images.   New measures for taking action The newly proposed reforms to the Penal Code promise to bring about positive change in the form of legal redress for survivors of cyber violence and exploitation. The Committee led by the Ministry of Youth and Sports and consisting of several partner organisations is in the process of reforming and introducing Amendments to the Penal Code, including six new offences related to cyber violence.  Truthfully, I am staunchly suspicious of the merits of punitive justice, and this only grows stronger every passing day in this Police State. However, the involvement of non-governmental organisations with years of experience in advocating for justice for cyber violence gave me reason to approach this with a little more optimism than usual. Six new cyber-related offences are proposed: harassment, bullying, voyeurism, non-consensual intimate detail sharing (revenge porn), stalking, and doxxing (the act of publicly revealing, without consent, private, personal, identifying information about an individual or organisation, usually through the internet, and usually with malice aforethought and for malicious purposes).  “The proposed Laws cover an array of situations that haven’t been previously governed, and we are advocating for Laws to keep pace with developing issues so that victims have recourse to justice, and that these protections extend to cyberspace,” says Women in Need (WIN) organisation Legal and Project Manager Attorney-at-Law (AAL) Mariam Wadood. She highlights the interlinked barriers of the lack of Police action geared towards protecting victims and a lack of laws governing technology-facilitated violence. Wadood points out how in her own work at WIN, the observation is that even when external organisations offer legal and psychological support for victims, this does not necessarily translate to effective redress. “At the end of the day, it is the law enforcement who need to take action. When there’s no criminal sanctions, the Police have no way of forging forward.” So what does this mean for victim-centricity? “The legal system of Sri Lanka – from the laws, to law enforcement, to the Judiciary – are not sensitive to victims, to women, to people’s privacy,” says Wadood. She points to how at the hands of law enforcement unequipped with the sensitivity training, technical knowledge, and infrastructure to deal with complaints of cyber crime, survivors are often re-victimised.  As a first step in what WIN is hopeful would be the right direction, introducing these new offences and penalties will transform the approach to GBV, particularly in resisting against the culture of stigma and shame associated with cyber sexual violence. iProbono in Sri Lanka Director AAL Aritha Wickramasinghe maintains that the introduction of these offences into the letter of the law would bring in much needed clarity in this area, and that their suggestions were based on buttressing survivors’ access to justice.  “There are no specific laws which address issues of harassment in general. Laws that address sexual violence are very specific in that they pertain to contexts such as rape and forms of sexual abuse which require a form of physical presence. As such, they are very inadequate in their ability to address cyber sexual violence, revenge porn, even voyeurism,” he adds, hoping that the introduction of new, specific offences with detailed examples and illustrations will push law enforcement to recognise and take expedient action. In the long-term, the hope is that this enhanced clarity will translate into subverting the stigma and victim-blaming that impede access to and the granting of justice for survivors.   Tackling issues at their root While legal reform may provide some answers to the ever-growing concern of safety for women and girls online, I am personally not entirely convinced that new laws adequately address what is intrinsically a cultural and structural issue. That is not to discredit the work and considerations of organisations such as WIN and iProbono that would inform these new Amendments. My grievances with the legal system, in how it deals with violence against women and girls could span a thesis of its own.  In a society that routinely engages in the misogynistic mental gymnastics required to suppress women’s agency while simultaneously insisting that any violence – especially sexual violence – was invited and provoked, are new laws going to make much of a difference in the way of bridging the justice gap? Grassrooted Trust organisation Programme Manager and Coalition of Feminists for Social Change (COFEM) Advocacy Consultant Sharanya Sekaram believes that while legal reform is not wholly unwelcome, the issue is with the non-implementation of current laws. It does little in the way of remedying the culture of shame and stigma around cyber sexual violence, and the demonisation of the internet as some new evil, instead of understanding this form of violence as an extension of the existing evil of normalised sexual violence against women, girls, and gender minorities.  “Most of the existing laws can be used. The problem is that they are not used at all. Insisting on implementing the existing ones properly and letting that inform what new laws are needed is a better approach,” she says, and I am inclined to agree. While the specific offences created would, on paper, provide more concrete grounds for legal recourse for victims, does it remedy the deeper structural issues of a maladapted law enforcement institution? A good case for this would be how the local Police handle cases of domestic abuse. Even though the Prevention of Domestic Violence Act, No 34 has been in force since 2005, women making formal reports under its provisions do not receive much in the way of justice or support from the law enforcement. According to the Women’s Wellbeing Survey - 2019, one in five Sri Lankan women have experienced intimate partner violence, and 37.3% of women sought formal support from the Police, but the proportion of women satisfied by the support they received was comparatively low compared to other formal support systems, including health care services and even religious leaders.    The problem in the process The stories are numerous of the law enforcement treating such violence as a civil dispute; women are told to make peace, and to “sort it out” between the husband and wife. If offline violence, understood normatively as violence, is treated this way, what guarantees are there that the new laws would ensure that the Police, who are even less equipped to counter online violence, would treat it with more seriousness? When women choose to report, the process is also one that re-victimises and re-traumatises. As Wadood puts it: “Women in general are subject to lots of pressures when approaching the Police, not just for cyber violence. There is a lot of victim-blaming, there’s a question of ‘what did you do to provoke this?’. It’s a lot to unpack with that attitude.”  Cyber sexual violence is still not fully understood as a matter of consent, power, and a legitimate form of violence. Because it is conceived of as a consequence of women abusing the internet and victimising themselves, the blaming and shaming is bound to be heightened.  “The system itself is not supportive towards victims. Police officers not trained to be sensitive, the process is de-humanising and long, you’re asked extremely painful personal details, and the assumption is that you’re not telling the truth,” added Sekaram, an all too familiar experience for many of us who have ever spoken about experiences of sexual violence. As such, another intended effect of the new laws is to build and buttress the capacity of the local Police to act as the first response to cyber violence.  But would this be adequate to alleviate the absence of clear institutional direction, the lack of clear cross-institution communication, leading to the bottleneck that takes place at the Cyber Crime Unit of the CID, and the legal backlog due to a snail-paced judicial mechanism that has made justice become a costly process, both psychologically and financially?  While I am yet again skeptical of how new laws would effectively translate to alleviating the structural issues which persist, I am also cautiously optimistic. If the anecdote at the beginning of this is any evidence, it is that even in circumstances where someone has access to the necessary knowledge of the avenues of justice available, the system is still relentlessly anti-victim.  As such, my one wish is that these laws would validate forms of cyber violence as legitimate forms of violence, and as such compel the local Police to act as the first point of response. Whether this would happen is yet to be seen and it is still too premature to make conclusions, but as with any change, it is a waiting game.    (The author is a Social Media Analyst at the Hashtag Generation)   ===PUT THIS IN A SMALL BOX=== CID Cyber Crime Unit – 0112326979 SLCERT – 0112-691692 Women In Need – 0775676555 ============================