Recently, an international bank wanted to fire a few people from their workplace in Karachi. As preparations were being made to carry this out, someone from the supervisor’s office leaked the information to the employees. On learning that their jobs were soon to be in peril, around 20 of them went up to the supervisor to confront him. The supervisor clarified his position by saying that the decision came from the head of the human resource department who was being “pig headed” about the entire issue.

The employees confronted the head of HR who showed ignorance about the issue and agreed to check with the supervisor instead. But by then the employees were suspicious of the HR person’s involvement in the issue based on the supervisor’s misinformation.

Since the head of the HR was a woman, says Shahzad Ahmad director of the Islamabad-based Bytes for All, they didn’t pursue the matter directly. “Instead, they took a deplorable route. They made a fake Gmail account in her name and sent sexually explicit pictures and requests to the entire office,” he added. After fighting her case for a month, the head of HR quietly resigned from her position. A week later, the supervisor fired the employees he had initially planned to.

From Qandeel Baloch to Sabeen Mahmud, women are disproportionately cyber bullied and stalked; what legal and non-legal options are available to help them combat this?

In another instance, which occurred in the Punjab, an Ahmadi girl’s fake profile on Facebook came to the fore in the beginning of 2016. “The man she was earlier in a relationship with used the fake Facebook account to spread misinformation about her relationship with him,” says Ahmad. “He created a fake account, took screenshots of their made-up conversations on Facebook and threatened to show it to her potential in-laws,” he added.

According to the director, the man wanted to ‘convert’ her with an added aim of having sexual relations with her. After debating whether to take the legal route, the family of the girl decided to mediate with the man whom they considered powerful as he boasted of having connections with religious groups that could harm the girl’s father or brother if she married another man. However, when the family asked him to marry the girl, he refused. The case is still pending as the family is thinking about whether to pay off the man off or continue speaking to him and reach another conclusion.

Similar cases were reported by Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) in the beginning of 2016. According to the deputy director of the Cyber Crime Wing, Zaeem Ahmed, these had been in the loop for six months.

“Women are among the majority when it comes to cases pertaining to facing harassment on Facebook and Twitter. Eighteen cases of a similar nature were reported in 2015. Men usually don’t report such cases but are more likely to report property and online fraud. We received five such requests of property or online banking frauds reported from Karachi,” he said. However, he added that the reporting of these cases is not an issue but the fact that women don’t follow through on the cases till the end.

The FIA, which created the Cyber Crime Wing under the National Response Centre in 2007, currently faces issues when it comes to gaining user records specifically from Twitter, Gmail and Yahoo. A source said that most of the problems also stem from the fact that the officials hired to work on cybercrime cases are not aware of internet policies.

Going for the non-legal route

With the fight against cybercrime still muddled to a large extent, organisations dealing with such crime, such as Bytes for All, use mediation between the perpetrators and the victim in almost all of the cases. “We have no other way out. The police have a sketchy or minimal knowledge of cybercrime and a lot of time is unnecessarily wasted in looking for the right article to apply. Families are usually scared of approaching the FIA fearing court cases and public humiliation so they seek our help,” adds Ahmad.

Even while seeking the help of organisations, there is no guarantee whether the two parties will let bygones be and ‘settle.’ The reason people rely on mediation is because the law enforcement agencies do not understand cyber bullying as a crime, adds Ahmad. Explaining further, he said that “We already have the required articles in our constitution and law to try the perpetrators in court. Yet, the articles put in by the police while registering an FIR are so weak that it ends up helping the perpetrator and weakening the victim’s case.”

Bullied in cyber space and real life

In a report titled Technology-driven Violence against Women published by Bytes for All, lead researcher Gul Bukhari says that there are no prevailing cybercrime laws as such, but that the current statutes can be applied. It includes Section 25D of the Telegraph Act 1885 which is penalty for causing annoyance; Section 29 of the Telegraph Act 1885 related to transmission of indecent or obscene messages; Sections 36 of the Electronic Transactions Ordinance (ETO) 2002 violation of privacy of information; and Section 38 of ETO.

“The modus operandi is the same in all of these cases,” adds Ahmad. “After tracking the lives of these prominent women, we have seen that threats and abuse on the internet, translates into real life and creates havoc for the person involved.”

The researcher in the case also traces the lives of three women, Aisha (pseudonym for an alleged rape victim from Punjab), Bayhaya (a human rights activist who chose the pseudonym for herself after being repeatedly called the name on the internet) and Baaghi (an activist and a columnist).

All three women represent the repercussions of being publicly visible with their opinions, decisions and stance against violence. They have received vicious threats on social media and have been repeatedly called prostitutes for naming and shaming misogynists on social media or during television transmissions.

“The modus operandi is the same in all of these cases,” adds Ahmad. “After tracking the lives of these prominent women, we have seen that threats and abuse on the internet translates into real life and creates havoc for the person involved.”

Rights activist Sabeen Mahmud is the most glaring example of online violence translating into real life. From her campaign against sectarianism and religious violence to celebrating Valentine’s Day against the wishes of the bigots, to opening her forum at The Second Floor for anyone with a different idea or thought, she was out there with her opinions and ideas and hoped others would be the same.

Her murder by armed assailants in April 2015 silenced even the staunchest of rights activists.

Ahmad and other activists, who are trying to stand against cybercrime, are of the opinion that if some things are fixed, other elements of the investigations will be fixed as well. This means mainly the registration of an FIR, the charges under which the perpetrator is framed, and legislative mechanisms such as the state helping in hiring skilled public prosecutors.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, July 24th, 2016