Women and cyber crime: Computer put to wrong use

KOCHI: Are you aware that there could be a lot of teasing and violence through the non-physical medium of the computer? That the computer which can do stupendous things like helping us to have a paperless society and communicating across the globe rapidly, efficiently and accurately, can also be used or misused to transmit smutty and obscene stuff; that all the data that you may have stored could get misappropriated, that your email could get ‘hacked’ or stolen and that you may stand the chance of being defrauded by someone asking you to invest in his company or help the person stating that he/she is in distress?
Have you received e-mails stating that you are the lucky winner of a lottery with a million pounds?  These and many forms of dishonesty affecting women more than men have been in evidence for sometime and everyone is waking up to the need to control such crimes.
The difficulty lies in not being able to get hold of the offender easily because inter alia he or she may be operating from a site outside your geographical ambit, and the person has enough time to vanish or escape.

This modern marvel which is used for waging wars or striking terror,or as a teaching aide or for designing systems or a myriad other things, can be put to wrong use, just like any aspect of science.. In other words, although it is an instrument to empower, the computer can be used also for dishonest and fraudulent purposes. Both men and women are victims of such endeavours. But women are the greater sufferers because they are not as comfortable with or exposed to computer use as men.
It is only now that more and more women are coming up to the level of men in terms of numbers in literacy and education and in the operation of computers.
And young adolescents could easily be ensnared by rowdies who promise them the stars. If you want to use the computer and not fall prey to crime and if you want your family, especially the children at adolescent stage, to be safe from computer marauders, then we have to be aware about what to watch out for as crime, what preventive measures could be taken for protecting ourselves, and what legal and other remedies there are.
Different forms of cyber crime
Amongst the most common ways of teasing, is the harassment through emails, which is just like black mailing through letters and intended to achieve the purpose of harassment.
   There could be threats of many varieties and/or cheating and bullying. All this through fake IDs, which makes it  harder to identify the sender.
  Cyber Stalking is also known to be increasing. It follows a person’s movement across the internet by posting messages and entering the victim’s ‘chat room’.
    It includes the sending of obscene emails to the victim, robbing identity, posting false profiles of
the victim, following the victim from site to site, building hate websites and so on.  
    It is said that women are three times more likely  to be cyber-stalked than to be raped. In most of the cases the stalkers are known people and not strangers. They could be obsessed lovers, vengeful friends, racist stalkers and hate-obsessed persons.  
    In cyber pornography, obscene messages and pictures are sent. There are pornographic websites and magazines in computers which are used to publish and print obscene material.There are full movies available on this, as well as video clips.  Even children can access such websites-and hence they should be monitored while using the computer.
Cyber Defamation
This is another way of cheating and causing mischief--someone sends mail to the friends of that person or publishes information containing defamatory information about her. Or publishes derogatory/defamatorymatter about someone on a website.
Morphing
This is a horrible way of showing hate or vengeance or plain mischief to a person by downloading female pictures and reposting them on different websites by creating fake profiles, or superimposing the face with another’s body. Email spoofing is misrepresenting the original mail and shows the origin to be different from which it actually originates. The wording is tampered with and gives a distorted meaning.
All these are in addition to hacking, soliciting funds in ways that appear honourable and declaring you as a lottery winner. In many instances, people have suffered monetary losses, having been taken in by what seemed very genuine and believable.
What should you do by way of protecting yourself?
1.See whether your computer could be fitted with ‘pornographic blocking ability’. You may  like to explore the possibility of  installing “firewalls” in the computer ( like pop-up blockers) for protection.
2. Closely monitor your children when they are handling the computers. Children nowadays show greater skills with the computer than adults-so you  better be well-trained in the handling of computers.
Is there any  recourse to assistance?
Yes many cities have Police Cyber Crime Cells. For instance in Trivandrum we have a cell functioning for this in  Pattom. They have satisfactorily solved many cases of  defamation, and  of  publishing hate material against a certain community particularly their women with intention to ruffle religious feelings and create communal disharmony.
(Padma Ramachandran is  former Chief Secretary to the Govt of Kerala and former Vice-Chancellor of MS University, Baroda. Email: padmar70@gmail.com.  The views in the article are the writer’s own).