During the Budget Session 2026–27, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Empowerment of Women tabled the Fourth Report on Cyber Crimes and Cyber Safety of Women. The report identifies several facets of cybercrime ecosystem afflicting women in India, probes gaps in policy, and makes corresponding recommendations.

A primary concern with the report is the absence of cohesive and reliable public datasets. To begin with, the report systematically underrepresents tech-facilitated gender-based violence (TF-GBV). TF-GBV is defined by the United Nations Population Fund as, “an act of violence that is committed, assisted, aggravated and amplified in part or fully by the use of information and communication technologies or digital media against a person on the basis of gender.”

The Statistics on Cybercrime Against Women

The report data over-indexes financial cybercrime. A staggering 72.6 percent of the total 1,01,928 offences reported in 2024 having been recorded as either banking or investment fraud, even higher than the 65 percent recorded in 2023. Cases of online sexual exploitation account for a meagre 3.1 percent. This is because the classification of cybercrime privileges economic harm over relational and reputational harm. TF-GBV is located in this cross-section. Gendered harm in the online realm seldom has to do with financial loss alone; it is more a function of harassment, humiliation, and denigration.

Second, emerging harms like AI-generated deepfakes, doxxing, and targeted misogyny find no settled classification at all.

Additionally, with the transition from the Indian Penal Code (IPC) to Bhartiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), it is difficult to trace a year-on-year comparison of how the cybercrimes are reported. Many cyber offences against women which were earlier charged under legacy IPC sections do not map cleanly onto BNS parallels due to several rearrangements and compressions in the text. Moreover, the Principle Offence Rule further obscures digital harms through definitional obscuring, meaning that composite crimes that have both online and offline elements (such as cyber stalking leading to murder) are compressed and collapsed into a single data point representing only the most serious harm (for example, murder, with the cyber stalking element lost in translation).

Read the full article about cybercrime against women by Kashvi Verma at India Development Review.