The accused also allegedly sent their pictures to his followers privately, assuring them of a sexual encounter for money. There were plenty of comments, mostly vulgar, from those who have come across these pictures. Rates have been offered for these girls.

One cannot comprehend the trauma, distress and humiliation these young girls and their families must have had to go through.

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It is time to put these criminals behind bars. This cannot be brushed away as not real or flippant because it has happened on social media and not in the real or physical world. The damage it does is as much as if this molestation and worse had happened in the real world.

Criminals have stalked and attacked women in cyberspace. Recently, we had a communal app targeting Muslim women with lines like go and get your woman for the day. While that had a communal angle, there are similarities. To degrade, cause pain and distress, deep hate and take sadistic pleasure, making women into commodities, not seeing them as human beings.

In the earlier case, it is the same dehumanising and dastardly pattern. Because it is so easy to do this, the anonymity and therefore the relative ‘secrecy’ and deception social media facilitates, emboldens the sick, perverts who resort to this behaviour online.

Fitting punishment needs to be meted out to the perpetrators, as a lesson and also an example that just because this is cyberspace, it is certainly not excusable or a ‘lesser’ evil in any way.