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Digital Gender-Based Violence: Sexualisation Of Girls’ School Uniform

Sramana Sabnam (they/them)

Trigger warning: pedophilia, sexual violence, cybercrime, suicide

When you go to Google and type ‘girls’ school dress’, some of the images that you will see might make you uncomfortable. Before assuming that is the case with skirts and shirts and that Indian schools should only stick to salwar-kameez as a uniform choice, it’s important to recognize another truth: Indian girls wearing salwar-kameez is often the subject of searches in pornography.

It’s important to note that this discussion isn’t about what clothing the girls were wearing when they experienced gender-based violence but rather how they were viewed and objectified.

The National Family Health Survey-5 report published by the Government of India suggests that nearly 30% of women in India endure physical or sexual violence. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data stated that out of 52,974 incidents of cybercrime reported in 2021, 10,730 which is 20.2 percent were reported as cases of crime against women.

It is not about the clothes: Understanding male gaze

“You will be punished if your skirt is not below the knee length and your socks cover most of your legs” – most of the people who had worn girls’ school uniforms had heard this statement in school. People who visit schools for work purposes still find this statement lingering around in the classrooms. Variations of this statement are passed on to girls mostly by older women like teachers, mothers, aunts, neighbours. The argument is ‘there will be boys/ men, a girl must cover up and not provoke thoughts’. Statistically, most of the crimes against girls and women are perpetrated by familiar people rather than strangers (Source NCRB, 2021). 

The big question is how gender-based violence takes shape and makes a girl in school uniform the subject. There’s no one answer to this question but there is an important concept that goes back to the time of Aristotle. Human beings are most imitative creatures and learn by imitation, Aristotle found that out and this theory is still true if we study behavioural sciences. A lot of our actions find origins in what we see and/or hear.

It’s the male gaze that decided that Kalki Koechlin playing the role of a school girl in the Bollywood movie Dev.D (2009) will be sexualised.

One of the key incidents that traumatised Leni (played by Kalki Koechlin) in the movie was when Leni’s video of an intimate act with her boyfriend became a widely circulated MMS and led to a juvenile sex scandal. In the movie, Leni’s father died by suicide as a result of the scandal. In this MMS Kalki was wearing a school uniform, and in a later phase of life, Leni chose school dress as her sex-work attire. Unethical pornography is one of the largest moneymaking industries globally and locally.

As per an article published in The Guardian, “the online porn industry’s revenue in 2018 estimated for the US range from $9bn to $97bn a year. The latter figure looks excessive, but a conservative estimate is $15bn. That makes it bigger than not only Netflix ($11.7bn) but also Hollywood as a whole ($11.1bn) and Viacom ($13.3bn). In other words, online porn is huge”. 

Indian school girl category on pornography websites has a large-scale view base. Ranging from girls in skirt-shirt to salwar-kameez, there is no one type of girls’ school uniform that is left behind. Often these pornographic videos are violent, aggressive, non-consensual, and forced in nature. 

Digital gender-based violence and Girls’ bodily autonomy

Girls in India grow up learning that they have to ‘protect’ their bodies.

In my recent conversation with a 15-year-old girl studying in a government school in Delhi, I was told that it is not okay for girls to post their pictures on social media; upon asking the reason, I was baffled to know that the 15-year-old’s boyfriend has threatened to ‘morph’ her picture and share it in the neighbourhood if ‘she dares to share her picture with anybody other than her boyfriend’.

The 17-year-old boyfriend has imposed that ‘she belongs to him’. We don’t have to dig too deep to understand that girls and women are treated as properties to be saved before marriage and transferred after marriage. Bollywood movies like Kabir Singh (2019) strengthen the idea that it is men’s and boys’ rightful duty to be hypervigilant about their girlfriends, female friends, sisters, and mothers.

It comes at a sociological cost- girls internalise that they don’t have autonomy over their bodies, they don’t own their bodies and society’s eyes are always tracking their footprints; one step out of society’s expectation box and their entire life could go haywire.

Digital gender-based violence can be explained as the (mis)use of digital mediums to enable/ catalyse/ aggravate/ target any form of violence that threatens the online or offline safety of the victim(s). Some of the common forms of digital gender-based violence against girls in India are:

Along with all the above-mentioned types of digital gender-based violence, girls experience threats to their offline safety via social media in the form of physical stalking outside their school, coaching centres, or frequent places that are published on their social media accounts.

Don’t take away their digital devices: Teach them digital safety

School uniform for a girl holds hope and dream. In India, for some, it is a symbol of undoing generations of gendered or community-based oppression. The solution to digital gender-based violence against girls studying in school is not debarring them from using digital devices and technology but teaching them about digital safety.

The current trend of EdTech and digital learning and the aspiration of a digital India can only be fulfilled when we don’t leave behind girls. School life being one of the foundations of educational curiosity, learning, and interest is also the time when we should enable girls to learn about the world without threatening their online or offline safety. We all are witness to how digital platforms and online classrooms have been enablers of education and livelihood for people who had access to digital devices and the internet during the peak covid-19 induced pandemic months.

A starting point for building awareness among girls can be including a curriculum on digital safety and rights when institutions/ organisations approach digital learning. The internet and digital world hold immense possibilities in formal as well as alternative education and we must not take that away from girls. How can it be digital India if digital safety is not a part of the agenda?

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