Anup Ojha

Three months ago a message popped up on Simi’s Facebook messenger. The message was from an unknown man praising her beauty.

The man kept messaging her, saying that he was from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and that he knew about her. When the girl became familiar with him on Facebook Messenger, the man said he is looking for a girl to work in a UAE-based dance club, and such an employee would get a monthly salary of Dirham 49,839.61 (equivalent to Rs 1.8 million). There was also a free ticket and free visa on offer. Simi, 19, a high school dropout, said ‘yes’.

Then the man asked Simi to send her nude videos and pictures, as it was supposedly a mandatory requirement for her selection at the club. She again agreed.

But a few days later, the man started blackmailing her. He asked for her Gmail username and password. She refused this time. Then the man asked for her Facebook account’s user ID and password.

But when she declined that as well, the man began circulating her nude photos among her friends and family members on Facebook Messenger. Her pictures were circulated via Whatsapp, too.

Simi then lodged a complaint with the Nepal Police Cyber Bureau, at Bhotahity, Kathmandu.

In another case, five months ago, 23-year-old Ramita had just started going live on another social media app, TikTok. It kept her engaged and in time she made some new friends too.

During her TikTok live session, a man who was a regular attendant would send her expensive gifts. Gradually, he started sending her messages through the app.

They then started talking over Instagram and got familiar with each other. One night, the man asked her to send him pictures of her private parts, and without giving a second thought, Ramita did so. Then, she deleted all photos from her chatbox.

However, after getting her nude pictures, the man demanded Rs200,000 and started blackmailing Ramita, telling her that he would share her pictures with her parents and relatives.

Ramita, just like Simi, then lodged a complaint with the Cyber Bureau.

Similarly, Amrita, 38, last week got a repeated video call on her Messenger from an unknown person. She declined the call, but when the person started calling repeatedly, she picked up. The man told her that he did not have a friend and wanted to talk to her. Amrita, a divorced woman and a mother of a teenage girl, could sympathise.

“As I was a lonely woman, I thought he too was a little lonely himself and so I listened to him,” reported Amrita to the Superintendent of Police, Pashupati Kumar Ray, who is also a spokesperson at the Bureau.

Gradually, they became intimate. With Amrita’s consent, the man recorded videos of their physical intimacy in a closed room at a hotel in Kathmandu. Later, the man started asking her for money. When Amrita blocked him, he started threatening her that she either pay up or he would send the videos to her daughter and relatives.

These three anecdotes are a few examples of ‘revenge porn’ cases that have been lodged at the Cyber Bureau and show how easily women are being victimised.

According to the Cyber Bureau spokesperson Ray, all the three perpetrators have already been nabbed and sent to judicial custody. They are being punished under section 47 of the Electronic Transactions Act, 2063 (2008) that prohibits the publication of illegal material in electronic form.

Revenge porn is defined as distribution of sexually explicit images or videos of a person without their consent and with a bad intent. This has become a common form of abuse, and is particularly harming young women.

According to data given by the Bureau, in the last fiscal, 4,646 cyber crimes related cases were registered with it, which included incidents of hate speech on social media, defamation, banking frauds, identity theft and other information technology-related frauds. Of the registered cases, 1,011 were related to revenge porn.

In the first six months of the current fiscal year, 3,747 complaints have already been lodged with the cyber bureau. Of them, 680 cases are related to revenge porn.

Pointing to the four bundles of cyber crime-related complaints on the table of his room on the third floor of the Cyber Bureau at Bhotahity, Ray, the bureau spokesperson, said that the police are struggling to handle the sheer volume of these cases. He said incidents of cyber crimes shot up during the Covid pandemic, which forced people indoors for months.

“Along with other cyber crimes, the number of complaints related to revenge porn has gone up in an unprecedented manner as well,” said Ray.

He said the perpetrators have uploaded explicit pictures and videos on porn sites and disseminated them through social media such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Twitter direct messaging.

“Besides the above-mentioned anecdotes, others who are involved in revenge porn are trusted friends of the victims. There are also some cases of boyfriends and girlfriends exchanging sensitive pictures and videos of their intimacy. But later, when things go wrong, they try to take revenge. This trend seems to be gaining traction here in Nepal,” said Ray. He said that many men too are reporting such problems, but compared to men, there are far more cases involving women.

Cyber security experts, however, say lack of specific cyber laws focused on revenge porn is a great problem. With time, the incidents of such crimes will only increase as the country lacks enough cyber experts to control them. Also, anyone with a criminal bent who has access to the internet can commit such a crime from any place.

There are 38.38 million internet subscribers in Nepal as of mid-October 2022, according to the Nepal Telecommunications Authority.

Information Communication Technology (ICT) expert Satish Krishna Kharel said lack of cyber regulation creates multiple problems in a country like Nepal where the number of internet users is high but internet literacy is low.

“Compared to many developed countries, Nepal has more internet users, but we don’t have laws to regulate cyber crimes,” said Kharel.

Meanwhile, Rajib Subba, another ICT expert, says that the nature of cyber crimes is different to the nature of real-world crimes, in that the same person can commit multiple crimes online under different identities and from different locations.

“The servers of the internet we use here are abroad, and it’s hard for the police to track criminals who can work from different geographical locations,” said Subba, who is also a former deputy inspector general of Nepal Police.

“We don’t have any authority to regulate the content online and not having a separate law is making things worse,” said Kharel.

Nepal’s Electronic Transactions Act, 2063 (2008) is silent on revenge porn or any other specific cyber crime. Section 47 of the Act states that publication of illegal materials that harm public morality or decent behaviour could lead to a fine of Rs100,000 and up to five years of imprisonment.

In the US, in 2019, lawmakers in the state of New York passed a bill to outlaw revenge porn, while 41 other states had already outlawed it by the time.

However, our neighbouring India too does not have a specific law on revenge porn or online blackmailing, but it offers legal remedies against crimes committed under the provision of the Indian Penal Code (1860) and Information Technology Act (2000).

Sociologists suspect online crimes of this kind will become more common in the days ahead.

“Ours is a patriarchal society, where males’ romantic relationships are glorified and women’s sexuality is taken as a matter of shame,” said sociologist Narayani Devkota, a lecturer at Tribhuvan University.

She says most Nepali males wear different masks at different times.

“For example, in his press meet on Sunday, former deputy prime minister and home minister Rabi Lamichhane said that he is privy to many private messages of male editors and he openly blackmailed them. He openly asked what would happen to those editors saying if the messages were sent to their wives,” Devkota added.

She said the utter lack of sensitivity among such high-profile people suggests a high level of women’s sexual vulnerability. “That is why, the new trend of revenge porn could create more social troubles. For instance, driving more women to have suicidal thoughts as they know that if the details of their private lives are made public, it is not males but they who will suffer social ostracism.”

Devkota, however, asked girls and women who are so victimised to nonetheless come forward and lodge formal complaints against the perpetrators.

ICT experts Kharel and Subba advise people, especially girls and women, against sharing sensitive images and videos under any circumstances.

“With regard to cyber crimes like revenge porn, the state should disseminate awareness messages through different mediums. Moreover, the dos and don’ts of online communication should be taught from primary school level given how early kids these days start using mobile phones and internet,” said Kharel.

Published on: 9 February 2023 | The Kathmandu Post