Inlaks Fellow for Social Engagement: Anjali Menon
Anjali Menon (she/her) is an independent writer, researcher reporting on gender, violence, internet, and culture. She graduated from Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology in 2020. She received the Inlaks Fellowship for Social Engagement in 2022.
In this week’s blog, we share an excerpt of a an article she wrote, ‘Virtual Sexual Violence Is Everywhere, From Chat Rooms To Webinars’ for BehanBox.com. The piece is about the violence against women and other marginalised groups on the internet.
BANGALORE: As a pre-teen, Shivani*, a non-binary person, spent a lot of time on Gaia Online, an anime-themed virtual hangout space that gained popularity in 2008-10. All members of the platform, known as Gaians, had personal avatars that could be part of various virtual forums and interact with other Gaians while remaining completely anonymous.
Shivani often hung around in a virtual parking lot that the platform offered. In it, avatars could have customised cars and drive them around. They enjoyed conversations with other people, played racing games, and made new friends. One day, a male avatar began following them around. To begin with it seemed like a random, weird incident, but soon he began doing this to others in this space as well – persistently following people, randomly interrupting conversations, making explicit remarks, and even sharing sexual content without any warning.
In October last year, I spoke to Shivani, now in their mid-20s and a trained game-designer. Their voice was both uneasy and angry as they narrated this experience. In retrospect, they are deeply bothered by how unregulated the space was: tons of sexual content was shared, generally without consent. No one really knew how old any of the avatars were – a man well into his 30s could be speaking to pre-teens and minors. You got information about the other person only if it was shared with you. And since all of this sharing happened through conversations in a chat box, there was no way to verify any information about the other person.
What was it like to deal with virtual stalking as a 12-year-old? “A random person is just following you around in a space — it doesn’t matter if it’s virtual or real, you do feel uncomfortable,” Shivani said. Too young to understand the predatory nature of the conversations, they felt just a recurring sense of discomfort. Eventually Shivani left the platform.
While virtual stalking is disturbing, it does not fit into society’s conventional understanding of violence or even harassment. Shivani feels that people tend to disregard emotional trauma with lines like “Oh, but nothing actually happened to you”.
A few years later, when they were 15, they decided to break off a sexual relationship because it was not working out. In response, the boy sent a string of unsolicited phallic images. It was horrible, and they felt deeply violated. There was an added layer of distress with this incident – he was a known person.
***
In the 2011 book, Why Loiter, authors Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan, and Shilpa Ranade argue that public spaces belong to everyone, and access to them should not come with any barriers. The internet too is a virtual public space, and the same questions – of freedom and equal access – should be asked of it.
The women and queer persons I interviewed were all in their 20s. The internet continues to be an integral part of their lives – it is where they date, work, make friends, seek pleasure, and express themselves. They grew up surrounded by Reddit threads, dating apps and chat-rooms. While their stories become cautionary tales of the digital space, as witnesses of the space’s evolution, they are also its biggest defenders. After being subjected to violence, most of them became slightly cautious of what they shared online, or decided to leave specific platforms — but leaving the internet was out of the question. They all choose to continue occupying space on the web, fully aware of its pitfalls.
Towards the end of March 2020, when India entered the first lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, everyday social interactions increasingly shifted online. Young people were already spending considerable amounts of time hanging out on social media — in discord rooms, Zoom calls, and chat boxes — and the pandemic heightened this tendency. During both the lockdowns, many women and queer youth found themselves stuck at home with families they could not communicate with. Digital gatherings were spaces where they accessed emotional support.
It was around this time that Pahel* made a new friend online. Conversations with him were initially harmless, but they abruptly turned into unwanted sexual advances. Pahel doesn’t remember how exactly this switch happened, only that this person would bring up their sexual preferences and kinks, making her instantly uncomfortable. “I didn’t want to be subjected to someone else’s fantasies,” Pahel told me. “But I didn’t know how to say no.” Changing the topic of discussion did not help, the friend would invariably bring sex back into the conversation.
On one occasion, he casually steered the conversation towards sexting and Pahel’s inbox had unsolicited naked pictures from him. This went on for weeks though Pahel forbade him from contacting her. It finally ended with her blocking the person on all platforms including email and call.
When we sat down to speak last year, Pahel was close to the end of a law degree. Throughout the conversation, she remained composed and self-assured, it was evident that she was aware of her rights, and that she should not have been put through this experience at all. Considering Pahel was a law student; I wanted to know whether she considered legal action. Her response was direct and telling. “I have studied enough law to know that it wasn’t going to play out in my favour. Even though I did not consent to it, I did participate. So, because I sent him messages as well, on the face of it, it would look consensual,” Pahel said.
Months later, Pahel had an upcoming job interview and noticed that one of the interviewers had the same name as the “friend” and the thought of running into him was petrifying. “A huge part of me was freaking out — I knew it was irrational and I was overthinking. But I was so distressed that even the mention of his name puts me off,” she said.
While the Zoom interview was a false alarm, Pahel has run into her friend-turned abuser more than once. She left the dating app Hinge when she came across his profile, only to spot him on Bumble, another dating app. She decided to block and report him on Bumble, but stayed on the app.
“How many places was I going to leave?”
***
A study conducted by the website Feminism in India reports that 36% of respondents who experienced online harassment did not take any official action. The study also observes that while online violence is a serious, deeply upsetting issue for survivors, they lack the support or resources to respond effectively to it. Most people are likely to block abusers instead of reporting them – legally or to the platform. A deeper problem is the limiting cultural narrative around sexual violence, which is focussed on the physical.
The media gaze on the violence that cis-gender women experience at the hands of men is often fetishised. Consider the reporting on the gruesome killing of Shradha Wadkar by her live-in partner. She was attacked for using a dating app and then for choosing a partner from a different religion, unleashing a stream of Islamophobic content. We watched as cameras zoomed in on fake skulls, and reporters went hunting for body parts in Delhi’s Chattarpur forest.
In this kind of narrative-building focused on physical brutalities, there seems to be no room to account for digital violence. Reporting on digital violence is usually about verbal abuse and trolling. We rarely speak about the new concerns and questions that have surfaced in women’s lives owing to digital technology.
In his essay, A Rape in Cyberspace, tech journalist Julian Dibbell talks about an aggressive rape inside a multi-player virtual reality room. The incident was deeply scarring for the survivors, and those forced to witness it. Echoing Shivani’s experience, a woman revealed that she left a VR video game after being groped by another avatar. Virtual stalking, virtual sexual assault, unsolicited pictures, non-consensual sexting – these are all widespread issues that women and queer youth tussle with on a regular basis.
Their experiences raise questions about how we perceive violence in the context of a disembodied self. Can we really dismiss assault and harassment, or the trauma it causes, just because the incident took place in a virtual space?
[*Names of all interviewees have been changed to protect their identity.]
Read the full article at: https://behanbox.com/2023/05/19/virtual-sexual-violence-is-everywhere-from-chat-rooms-to-webinars/?fbclid=PAAaZH2mChsQF47lXP9FprtHSTLRa9G4an74zDfZeyzsi
