ABSTRACT

Cybercrime against women in India is markedly and persistently underreported, a pattern documented across victimisation surveys, institutional complaint data, and doctrinal literature alike.^[1] This paper undertakes a doctrinal study of the legal and procedural barriers that contribute to this underreporting, distinguishing it from the substantive-law gaps that dominate existing scholarship on cyber-crimes against women. Rather than asking whether particular offences are adequately criminalised, this paper asks why women who are victimised frequently do not, or cannot, translate that victimisation into a registered complaint capable of triggering legal protection. The study examines the procedural architecture governing complaint registration including First Information Report (FIR) registration under Section 173 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, the Zero FIR mechanism, and the evidentiary certificate requirements for electronic records under Section 63 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 and identifies the specific procedural junctures at which underreporting is generated or entrenched. Drawing on National Crime Records Bureau data and secondary victimisation literature, the paper argues that India’s procedural law, notwithstanding significant recent reform, continues to impose evidentiary and institutional burdens that fall disproportionately on women reporting technology-facilitated offences, and that these procedural barriers operate independently of, and in addition to, the well-documented socio-cultural drivers of underreporting such as stigma and fear of retaliation.

Keywords: underreporting, cyber-crime against women, FIR registration, Zero FIR, electronic evidence, Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, secondary victimisation.

1. INTRODUCTION

Official crime statistics in India present a paradox that has troubled criminologists for over a decade: registered cybercrime figures rise sharply year on year, even as independent victimisation research and institutional complaint data suggest that the great majority of women who experience online victimisation never convert that experience into a formal police complaint. The National Crime Records Bureau’s Crime in India 2024 report recorded cybercrime crossing the one-lakh mark nationally for the first time, a rise of 17.9 per cent over the previous year, even as crimes against women recorded under conventional heads declined marginally.^[2] Over 1.2 lakh cybercrime cases remained pending investigation and nearly 75,000 pending trial at the time of that report, pointing to significant capacity constraints even for the cases that are registered.^[3] Meanwhile, the National Commission for Women’s Annual Report 2023-24 recorded only 657 cybercrime-related complaints nationally a figure that, set against any plausible estimate of actual online victimisation of women in a country with over 900 million internet users, indicates a very substantial degree of underreporting.^[4]

This underreporting has historically been explained primarily through socio-cultural factors: stigma, victim-blaming, fear of social or family reprisal, and lack of digital literacy.^[5] These explanations remain valid and important. However, they are not the only forces at work. This paper argues that a parallel and comparatively neglected set of barriers operates at the level of legal procedure itself the rules governing how, where, and in what form a complaint of cyber victimisation must be made, and what evidentiary threshold it must clear to be registered, investigated, and prosecuted. These procedural barriers are doctrinally tractable in a way that socio-cultural barriers are not, and are therefore an appropriate and productive object of doctrinal legal research.

India’s procedural and evidentiary framework has itself undergone substantial reform in the period under study. The Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 (BNSS) replaced the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 with effect from 1 July 2024, recasting the law on FIR registration under Section 173.^[6] The Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 (BSA) simultaneously replaced the Indian Evidence Act, 1872, recasting the law on the admissibility of electronic records under Section 63.^[7] This paper examines whether these reforms have reduced, left unchanged, or in some respects entrenched the procedural barriers that discourage or defeat the reporting of cybercrimes against women.

[1]Debarati Halder and K. Jaishankar, ‘Cyber Victimization in India: A Baseline Survey Report’ (Centre for Cyber Victim Counselling, 2010).

[2]National Crime Records Bureau, Crime in India 2024 (Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, 2026).

[3]NCRB, Crime in India 2024 (n 2).

[4]National Commission for Women, Annual Report 2023-24 (NCW, 2024).

[5]Halder and Jaishankar (n 1).

[6]Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita 2023, s 173.

[7]Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam 2023, s 63.