India has almost 624 million internet users and 448 million social media users. However, the advent of the internet was accompanied by a range of cybercrimes. While the Indian Constitution has recognised the right to privacy as a facet of fundamental rights under the right to life under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution, there exists no specific law to counter the emerging pernicious problem of digital violence. Other jurisdictions, such as the United Kingdom, have taken prudent legal measures acknowledging and attempting to counter the formidable issue. For instance, the Criminal Justice and Courts Act, 2015 explicitly criminalised the act of distributing images without consent. Similarly, the United States legal framework provides a platform for victims whose images were shared without consent to initiate civil action through the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act, 2022. India also disregards the lacunae that exist in delivering consent education, which has been done in countries such as Australia through their Government’s Consent and Respectful Relationship Education initiative.   

The central legal issue here is that non-consensual dissemination of intimate images (NCDII) often gets lumped into laws about obscenity and sexually explicit content, which shifts the focus away from privacy and autonomy to morality. In Mr X v. Union of India, the Delhi High Court acknowledged that NCII is more extensive than just revenge porn and pointed out the social ostracism, humiliation, and psychological damage that victims endure. In the case of Sherlyn Chopra, despite her claiming that the private content of her had been pirated and disseminated online without her consent, she herself was booked under the criminal provisions of India. In Suhas Katti v Tamil Nadu, adjudicated by the Egmore Metropolitan Magistrate on 5^th November 2004 India witnessed the first conviction for obscene and defamatory online messages. The accused was convicted for posting obscene online messages about a woman who rejected his marriage proposal, evidenced by a matching IP address and witness evidence. Since then, expanding access, anonymity, and the rise of organised cybercrime have significantly amplified such harms. In the year 2023, which is the latest published data on Crime in India (National Crime Records Bureau data are released with a structural lag), approximately 19,510 cybercrime incidents involved crimes against women out of 86,420 total cybercrime cases. According to a survey conducted in  2017, 19 per cent of the couples in India who participated in this survey admitted to recording their intimate moments.  While the creation of intimate content with a consensual private relationship is a legitimate exercise of autonomy, its legitimacy depends on informed, explicit and continuing consent, covering not just the act of recording but also storage and potential dissemination. However, non-consensual dissemination should be a crime, as it victimises the one whose content was shared without their consent. In India, such non-consensual dissemination of intimate images has become an acute problem. As per the National Crime Record Bureau report titled “Crime in India 2022”, a total of 6,896 cases were registered under the broad category of publication/ transmission of obscene, sexually explicit acts in India. However, this figure does not indicate how many cases involved the non-consensual dissemination of intimate images, as NCRB does not separately classify such cases based on the depicted person’s consent. Further, a study conducted by the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative on non-consensual pornography showcases that 93 per cent of victims of such abuse suffer significant social distress, 51 per cent experience suicidal thoughts, and 82 per cent face social or occupational impairment.

While revenge porn typically involves sharing intimate images post-relationship for revenge, other cases involve non-consensual recording or distribution without the women’s knowledge. Revenge porn thus remains a narrow, motive-specific subset which refers to disclosure of intimate images with the intention to harm, humiliate or retaliate, typically in the context of a breakdown of a relationship. The defining element here is that revenge is the purpose. In contrast, NCDII is a broader consent-centric category. It covers all instances where intimate images are shared without the subject’s consent, regardless of why. The legal and academic discourse has taken a normative shift in this aspect and moved from motive to the lack of consent as the central issue. The word shifts the focus from morality or “revenge” to the core issue of consent, privacy and autonomy. The term also helps frame such acts as a serious violation of dignity and informational privacy. The distinction remains significant because the terminology “revenge” in itself is reinforcing victim-blaming and moralistic perceptions. The move towards the broader concept of NCII therefore is representative of a shift from judging the victim’s conduct or the perpetrator’s motive and towards recognising the unauthorised dissemination in itself as an act of violation. For instance, in 2024, a social media post revealed the shocking experience of a woman who found a mobile phone hidden in the waste bin of the washroom of one of Bengaluru’s popular outlets. The phone camera was pointed towards the toilet seat and was recording a video. These incidents are not isolated, but reflect a broader pattern of technology-enabled voyeurism invading private spaces. In another incident, which occurred on 29^th August 2024, hidden cameras installed in a women’s washroom resulted in the circulation of over 300 non-consensual videos, highlighting the scale and ease with which such violations can occur. There are cases where the victim who originally recorded the images does not intend to distribute them, but a voyeur wants them for personal consumption, however, there is a possibility that the images may be leaked or stolen from their device or online accounts. The concern is that consensual pornography is often treated alongside such image-based abuse content, as indicated in statistics by the National Crime Records Bureau. NCRB’s broad classification of 7,893 cases in 2023 and 6,990 in 2024 does not distinguish consensual pornography from non-consensual dissemination, highlighting a significant gap in how image-based abuse is categorised and measured.

 The aggregation of such statistics obscure the central role of consent in defining harm and also the legal distinction between pornography and image-based sexual abuse. This absence may expose victims to the risk of being treated as participants in the production of obscene content, which Indian law criminalises. Such an approach can effectively punish the victim for the sexual nature of the material itself, despite the absence of consent to its dissemination. Thus, such conflation reinforces a morality-based framework, hindering accurate assessment and targeted legal responses to image-based sexual abuse.

Looking from an international law perspective, Article 16 of the UN Convention against Cybercrime, titled “non-consensual dissemination of intimate images”, requires the state parties to criminalise the intentional sharing of a person’s intimate image that was private at the time when it was recorded. While India has actively participated in the five year drafting process, they did not yet sign the Hanoi Convention. The reasons that were cited by the government were sovereignty, data-sharing assistance obligations and governance concerns. With the already identified legal vacuum in Indian law relating to NCDII, India not being a signatory to the convention further exposes this gap.

In this underlying gap, the focus is shifted from privacy and autonomy to morality and obscenity, which leads to misapplied laws, weaker remedies, and sometimes even victim-blaming. A coherent legal framework must therefore disentangle consensual expression from non-consensual harm, reorienting both law and data systems towards consent as the decisive criterion rather than obscenity or moral judgement.