Cyberbullying And Online Harassment: Legal Challenges And Social Realities - Indian Aspect
- IJLLR Journal
- 7 hours ago
- 2 min read
Joe Thomas & A L Krishnapriya, Bharat Matha School of Legal Studies, Choondy Aluva
Introduction
The internet has transformed social life in India. Smartphones, affordable data, and a flourishing social media ecosystem have expanded opportunities for communication, learning, commerce, and civic participation. But alongside these benefits has come a darker reality: cyberbullying, online harassment, doxxing, coordinated trolling, and image-based abuse. These harms affect children and adults, students and professionals, public figures and private citizens. They can cause psychological trauma, reputational damage, financial loss, and, in extreme cases, self-harm. Understanding cyberbullying in India therefore requires a socio-legal lens: one that examines how social factors (culture, family, schools, economic inequalities, and platform design) interact with the legal framework, enforcement capacities, and public policy responses.
This article maps the contours of cyberbullying and online harassment in India. It outlines the forms these harms take, reviews the domestic legal architecture and recent rule-making, examines enforcement and evidentiary challenges, assesses social realities that complicate legal responses, and offers a set of practical recommendations for lawmakers, platforms, schools, and civil society.
1. Defining cyberbullying and online harassment
Cyberbullying refers to intentional and repeated aggressive behavior conducted through digital devices and online platforms with the purpose of harming, humiliating, intimidating, or excluding a person. Online harassment is a broader umbrella that includes bullying but also one-off attacks, doxxing (publishing private information), revenge pornography, coordinated smear campaigns, impersonation, threats, and persistent stalking via messaging platforms or social networks. Both terms capture actions that exploit the affordances of the internet—anonymity, scale, speed, permanence, virality—to magnify harm.
2. Scale and trends in India
Quantifying cyberbullying is difficult because it overlaps with many categories of cybercrime and because many victims do not report incidents. Nevertheless, official crime statistics and international surveys paint a worrying picture: India has seen a steady rise in cybercrimes in recent years, with the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) reporting a significant jump in registered cyber incidents in 2023. The increase is driven largely by fraud and financial exploitation, but categories involving harassment, impersonation, and attempts to cause disrepute are also prominent among recorded offences.
International surveys show that online bullying is widespread among young people; UNICEF’s global polls, for example, indicate that roughly one in three young people report being victimized online—an alarming statistic with important implications for India’s large youth population.
