‘Has Your Family Seen This?’ Using Non-Sexual Images as Sexual Control in India

2nd January 2025, 10.00 AM: It’s the first morning of a New Year - new beginnings. A Kannada regional news channel is covering New Year’s celebrations in Bengaluru. The headlines read “Drunk young woman fights with police,” “Woman falls on the road and struggles” in an urgent yellow color against a black backdrop with thrilling music. Then the frame moves to women: drunk to varying degrees, wearing ‘revealing’ Western clothing. Sometimes they are being carried away by ‘responsible’ boyfriends or police personnel, other times they are screaming or fighting with guards, guests, or camerapersons.

 The same, unedited video of a drunk woman being carried by men to safety, with other generic clips of the crowd, has gone viral on platforms like X, Instagram and Facebook. The comment section reads “Destroyed by Western culture and some have problems with hijab and all”, “Girls are doing more drugs than boys, women empowerment is being taken full advantage of in the country”, and “Isko time pr parents ne treatment diya hota to ye haal nahi hota” (“If her parents had controlled her behavior earlier, this wouldn’t have happened”). 

Regardless of the geography or level of inebriation, the people captured and put on blast every year with such coverage have some things in common: they are mostly women, feminine-presenting, or queer; and they do not consent to it and do not anticipate being filmed and broadcast in a vulnerable state.

The objective of such media coverage, or indeed any coverage of such nature, is to use images to exercise social, moral, and sexual control on the bodies of its subjects and engineer a loss of dignity, autonomy, and privacy. In this way, an image need not necessarily constitute nudity, genital exposure, or sexual activity to cause harm. Understanding this underlying objective allows us to develop a more nuanced and culturally situated definition of image-based abuse. Crucially, it forces us to examine and expand on the different components of the traditional definition - do socio-cultural factors shape what counts as ‘intimate’ images? How does this impact the outcomes of the sharing of intimate images, including on people’s safety and well-being? 

Image-based sexual abuse (IBSA) refers to the creation (by capturing or manipulation), threat, or disclosure of intimate images of individuals to third parties without their consent.

Below, I present an Indian perspective on the use of non-explicit, non-consensual images to exercise sexual control and coercion on women’s and queer people’s bodies. I explore the role of AI technology in such abuse. Finally, I make the case for a more nuanced articulation of what ‘counts’ as image-based sexual abuse (IBSA) in India’s socio-cultural and legal context. 

‘Expanding’ IBSA: An Indian Perspective

Across India, women, assigned female at birth (AFAB), and femme-presenting people are excessively controlled from a young age to prevent, monitor, and control sexual activity and agency to prevent exogamy and pregnancy outside of caste-endogamous and externally-mediated marriage. This control is exerted in various social institutions like religion, education, and family by enforcing a complex and varying socio-cultural standard of modesty or propriety in behavior and presentation. Over time, this form of control becomes normalized under the guise of safety and care. Any behaviors or activities that do not adhere to this standard are then associated with deep personal, public, and generational shame. 

Against this context, women and queer people are forced to carve out spaces for themselves outside the purview of immediate family or community, where they can openly express their gender identity, gender expression or sometimes even consume alcohol, tobacco or drugs and dancing, i.e., activities that are culturally considered ‘shameful’. In this way, these activities become deeply personal or ‘intimate’. Thus, based on the socio-cultural norms they are bound by, the same image (like one taken during a meal or while lying down) may be intimate for one person and not so for another. Accordingly, while an act may not be sexual in nature, it may still qualify as intimate, and images of women, girls, and queer folks engaged in it may attract reputational damage for individuals and families.

Women and queer people are forced to carve out spaces for themselves, where they can openly express their gender identity.

This is especially true when images are used for coercion or manipulation, or to defame or ‘out’ a queer person. Punitive consequences imposed by family or community elders often follow, such as restricted mobility, restricted phone or internet use, forced marriage with the intent to ‘convert’ queer people, forced withdrawal from school, work, or social circles, emotional neglect or abuse, and (sometimes fatal) physical violence. By tightening the regulation of women’s and queer people’s sexualized bodies and limiting their bodily autonomy, harm is perpetrated using the same logic of sexual control as in IBSA, using images that are not sexual in nature. 

What Can Such Images Look Like, and How Are They Captured?

A phenomenon of particular note is the retroactive sexualization of photos and videos captured in public without consent, such as through discrete phone cameras, sensationalized mass media coverage, the use of Meta Glasses, or using Grok to undress or expose adults and children.

The proliferation of tech-facilitated image manipulation and circulation methods poses a unique risk for image-based abuse in the Indian context. First, it is becoming increasingly easier to generate or manipulate hyper-realistic deep-fake images that can be used to misattribute sexual and other activities to individuals without consent. Secondly, there is an increased uptake of digital social media like WhatsApp, and Facebook among the middle-aged and older Indian demographic, which is largely responsible for decision-making in families and communities. Finally, despite a nation-wide push for increased internet and mobile usage (including for digital banking and many bureaucratic processes), there are structural challenges like limited media literacy, as well as platform-specific hurdles like the inability to trace origins of ‘forwarded’ messages on WhatsApp or flag AI content on Facebook.

Unfortunately, the socio-cultural and functional nuances of the scope of IBSA are flattened by traditional legal definitions, which are non-comprehensive in the face of the fast-evolving nature of harm and means of perpetration. 

Recognizing a Loss of Autonomy Over Modesty

Traditionally, legislation in India around image-based abuse primarily deals with images that are directly sexual in nature. It uses the logic that such abuse outrages the modesty of women. Thus, it is primarily concerned with the contents of images - complete or partial nudity, genital exposure, or engagement in a sexual or ‘private’ act like using the lavatory; and the prevention of circulation and representation of such images. Accordingly, the broad legal framework is based on colonial-era notions of preserving women’s modesty, anti-voyeurism, and anti-obscenity1 rather than the violation of consent and privacy. 

Although legal recourse may be sought against the creation, modification, or circulation of non-consensual, non-sexual images through laws around defamation, criminal intimidation, or stalking, these provisions do not capture the nuances of how images can be used to cause gendered harm. However, a judicial foundation of a right-to-privacy-based approach does exist, with judgments like R. Rajagopal vs. State of Tamil Nadu (1994) and Justice K.S. Puttaswamy vs. Union of India (2017) providing constitutional anchors for the right to privacy and one’s own name and likeness. More recently, the Madurai Branch of India’s Madras High Court noted that morphed images (such as with AI) are a ‘calculated assault on privacy, reputation, and emotional security’.

To apply a sensitive definition of image-based sexual abuse, we must challenge socio-cultural norms around gendered modesty, consent, intimacy, privacy and well-being.

Yet, this ad-hoc response and the limitations in how IBSA is institutionally defined push us to ask if an inclusive definition is possible. Importantly, such a definition would address the gendered nature of image-based harm in terms of social and sexual control and classify it based on intent as a violation of consent, privacy, and autonomy rather than an outrage of modesty. A definition of such scope would also move beyond purely sexually explicit images to account for retroactive sexualization and circulation of non-sexual, culturally-defined ‘intimate’ images to exert sexual control. It would also be useful for such articulation to acknowledge that the harm caused to women and queer people by image-based abuse is often a result of harmful internalized standards of modesty, inherited in legislation and social organization from a shared history of colonialization and, in some countries, patriarchal caste structures that predate colonialism. 

To pick apart, reframe, and meaningfully apply a more contextually sensitive definition of image-based sexual abuse is an exercise that invites us to challenge socio-cultural norms around gendered modesty, consent, intimacy, privacy, and well-being and expand the way we understand, define, and address gender-based violence.