Speaking Out Comes At A Cost As Gendered Violence Online Escalates

When Anasuya Bharadwaj spoke about women’s autonomy and clothing she did not imagine that she would be stepping into a battlefield on online abuse.

A popular Telugu actor and television host, Bharadwaj has spent over a decade in the public eye, and has over 1.7 million followers across social media platforms.

Speaking her mind, she says, has always felt natural. “It was not a speech or a statement,” she told Outlook. “It was a casual remark, posted on X on my way to work.”

The comment was prompted by a male actor’s remark on how women should dress. His language, Bharadwaj says, was not merely conservative, it was offensive and personal. Watching the clip, she reacted instinctively. “It’s my body. Not yours,” she says. “Silence should not be mistaken for acceptance.”

What followed was not disagreement, but punishment online accounts accused “me of  crossing a line.” 

Speaking in Telugu, a language that can carry intimacy and insult with equal force, sexist and ageist remarks were barraged on Bharadwaj. “Once those remarks went online, it was like a switch had been flipped,” she says.

The abuse came in layers and she received comments like: As a married woman and a mother, she should dress “appropriately.” That she should not go to the gym. That her behaviour was “unexpected” of someone like her. Her children were dragged into it. Her husband was mocked for “allowing” her to speak.

“It followed a script,” Bharadwaj says. “First, moral judgement. Then sexualisation. Then character assassination.”

Much of the abuse fixated obsessively on her body. The bikinis she wears, her short dresses, and even film stills were pulled out of context and circulated as evidence of her supposed moral failure. 

Misogyny wrapped itself in the language of culture, tradition, and decency that Bharadwaj assumed would pass. “I thought it was just a nonsensical crowd. I believed it would die down in a few days.” Instead, it kept on escalating. Her argument about autonomy and choice was erased and was replaced with a false binary that a male actor was defending modesty while a woman was allegedly encouraging indecency. She felt her viewpoint disappeared under layers of distortion. 

Then the abuse crossed screens, and came offline. Social media “influencers” began holding informal “debates” in neighbourhood parks where elderly residents gathered for evening. They discussed Bharadwaj’s character, her clothing and how she was ruining the Sanskriti. Some of these conversations took place uncomfortably close to her home. “I felt these were potential assaulters. People who could harm you physically, not just online.”

What frightened her most was repetition of the same misinformation, recycled endlessly, until it sound like truth. Algorithms amplified them and her social media feeds became hostile mirrors, reflecting back the abuse she was trying to avoid.

The violence took another turn when AI-generated morphed images began circulating online, Bharadwaj decided to approach police. “I saved all the hateful content as evidence,” she says.

Visible, Vocal & Vulnerable

For someone publicly perceived as confident and outspoken, the impact was deeply personal. At home, she was trying to focus on her teenage sons’ examinations. Instead, her phone became a source of constant anxiety. “I’m generally strong, but when they could make someone like me feel this weak, I kept thinking what happens to women who don’t have visibility, support, or resources?”

The moment that broke her composure came unexpectedly. A Hyderabad-based rights group organised a solidarity meeting. Bharadwaj joined quietly online. As women spoke in solidarity for me, something shifted. “That’s when I broke down,” she says. “Because I realised I wasn’t alone.”

Two weeks after the abuse began, Bharadwaj decided to act, and supported by her husband, she went to the police.

In the days that followed, Cyberabad police registered FIR against 73 individuals, including media professionals, for online abuse, who were booked under provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the Information Technology Act. 

Bharadwaj knows the legal process will be slow and exhausting. Still, she is unwavering. “This is a fight worth fighting,” she told Outlook. “Not just for me, but for women who don’t have the strength or support to do it on their own.” “I’m ready to take this bullet.”

Bharadwaj’s experience is not an exception as online spaces have become a new frontier for women who are visible, vocal, or politically inconvenient are disciplined. Digital violence also mirrors India’s offline hierarchies as gender opens the door, while caste, religion, and sexuality deepen the punishment. 

Identity Under Siege: Caste And Queer Voices

For Deepthi Sirla, the abuse did not arrive suddenly. It settled in slowly, then stayed. Sirla, a Hyderabad-based development professional, works on issues of gender and social justice.

She’s openly Dalit and queer, and speaks about caste and sexuality without apology. On social media, she expresses feminist and liberal views, often connecting everyday discrimination to larger systems of power. That visibility, she says, has made her a permanent target.

Over time, online hostility stopped feeling episodic and began to feel structural to her.

“People tell me to go and clean toilets,” Sirla says. “They call me chamar whenever I speak.”

“It doesn’t even matter what I say anymore,” she explains. “The abuse comes because I am a woman, I am vocal, and I speak from a caste location that makes people uncomfortable.”

Unlike public figures with large fan bases or legal teams, Sirla navigates online abuse without institutional buffers. 

A group of trolls who appear repeatedly, monitoring her posts, responding in patterns, escalating when she refuses to disengage. “They’ve been after me for years. It’s not random. It’s coordinated.”

“This is how patriarchy works online in India, not as a single axis of oppression, but as an interlocking one. Gender opens the door, caste sharpens the weapon,” she says.

Abuse to Sirla escalated when at one point, her personal photographs along with images of several other women were  morphed and circulated online. 

“The images were altered to humiliate and intimidate, turning private material into public violation. It felt violating in a way that is hard to explain,” she says. “Not just because of the images, but because of what they were trying to do that is to reduce us to objects.”

An FIR was eventually filed and the perpetrators were traced to an NRI and his associates. On paper, the system worked, but in reality, it stalled. “After that, nothing much happened,” Sirla says. “There was no accountability.”

For her, this gap between filing a complaint and seeing justice is as much a part of the violence as the abuse itself. The law acknowledges harm but fails to pursue it with urgency, and survivors are left waiting, reliving the incident each time they are asked for evidence. 

Sirla does not romanticise resilience, and does not describe herself as unaffected. What she emphasises instead is refusal, as she says: “In the real world, the space for women to express opinions is already very limited. Now they want us to give up digital space too.”

She has chosen not to. “I reclaim this space. I have become more assertive.” She continues to post, and continues to speak. She blocks and documents when necessary, but she does not disappear.

Research supports what her experience reveals as studies on online gender-based violence in India show that women from marginalised communities like Dalit, Adivasi, Muslim, queer are more likely to face compounded abuse. 

A recent study by Breakthrough and Equality Now, Experiencing Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence in India: Survivor Narratives and Legal Responses, finds that women and LGBTQI+ people are disproportionately targeted online, with caste, tribe, class, and disability heightening vulnerability. 

Amanda Manyame from Equality Now says: “India’s justice system is not equipped to deal with the evolving nature of technology-facilitated gender-based violence. Legal and policy reform that is fit for purpose is urgently required to make digital spaces safer. Survivors need stronger laws, swifter justice, greater support, with tech companies taking real responsibility for harms happening on their platforms.”

Sirla’s experience illustrates why many women never file complaints. Legal redress demands time, emotional labour, and repeated engagement with institutions that may not respond. For women already navigating caste discrimination in workplaces and communities, the cost is often too high.

While celebrity interventions may produce action, everyday survivors are left to negotiate systems that rarely prioritise them. 

The same mechanisms that targeted Bharadwaj like humiliation, sexualisation, algorithmic amplification operate here too. The difference lies in scale, not intent. Patriarchy does not need fame to function, it only needs visibility, Sirla says, “They want you to feel alone,” she says. “That’s part of the strategy.”

She adds, “But once you see the pattern, you understand that this is not about anything you says. It’s about who you are.”

Targeting Muslim Women Online

Activist Khalida Parveen has learned to recognise the rhythm of online violence. “It comes in waves,” she says. “You post something. Then the attacks follow. Defamatory posts. Threats. Abuse.”

Parveen is a civil liberties activist who has spent more than two decades questioning encounter killings. Her work places her squarely against popular narratives of instant justice and majoritarian nationalism. That alone makes her visible, and that she is a Muslim woman makes her vulnerable.

“For me, this violence is political. I work on encounters. I insist that the law must be followed. When it isn’t, it is a failure of the system.”

In 2022, Parveen, 67, was among the Muslim women targeted in the Bulli Bai app incident, where photographs of women journalists, students, and activists were scraped from social media and displayed on a platform that mockingly listed them as being “for sale.” The message was unmistakable. Muslim women who speak will be publicly humiliated.

Complaints were filed. FIRs were registered. Arrests were made. And then, quietly, those arrested were released. “They were out within two months,” Parveen says. She did not pursue the case further. “It would have meant compromising on our work. And that work is too important.”

Parveen’s coping strategy is strategic disengagement. She posts her views, but avoids the comment section. “I know there will be hundreds of them, and most of them full of hate and threats.” Still, sometimes she looks. “It’s overwhelming. The negativity is crushing.”

She is clear that the abuse is not organic. “Some of the trolls are paid,” she says. The objective is not argument, but exhaustion. Across cases, across identities, a pattern emerges. When women speak publicly, whether about bodily autonomy, caste violence, state power, or minority rights, the response is not counter-speech but coercion. Sexualised abuse, character assassination, and threats are deployed to push women out of the conversation altogether, she says.

Law Struggles To Keep Pace

Cyber law expert Pavan Duggal says emerging technologies have outpaced legal frameworks. “We do not have laws that are fit for purpose. Women are left navigating outdated provisions while perpetrators exploit anonymity and scale,” he says. 

India’s primary legal framework governing cybercrimes, the Information Technology Act, 2000 (IT Act), focuses mainly on offences against property and data rather than harm against persons. While the Act is gender-neutral, it’s not gender-responsive, leaving it ill-equipped to address the gendered dimensions of technology-facilitated abuse. It also contains no provision to deal with online stalking, which disproportionately affects women and LGBTQI+ persons.

Section 66A of the IT Act, which previously criminalised a broad range of “offensive” online speech, was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2015 for being unconstitutional, overreaching, and prone to misuse. 

Platforms, meanwhile, respond unevenly and content takedowns are slow. Local-language abuse remains poorly moderated. By the time material is removed, it has often been copied, archived, and redistributed. The harm lingers long after the post disappears, he says.

India’s Information Technology Act, 2000 and provisions under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita address fragments of digital harm, but there is no comprehensive law dealing specifically with technology-facilitated gender-based violence. 

AI-generated abuse remains in a legal grey zone, marked by jurisdictional confusion. FIRs are fragmented, and survivors are forced to document, persist, and relive harm, often without any assurance of outcome.

A minimal understanding of the psychological and social impacts of technology-facilitated gender-based violence, combined with the absence of survivor-centred approaches, leaves India’s justice system focused on punishment rather than victim support and recovery, says Manyame.