Union Minister for Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi has announced that the government is working towards developing an online portal to fight against increasing instances of cybercrime against women and children, The Indian Express reported.
The central reporting mechanism will be dedicated towards handling complaints of cybercrime targeted against women and children.
The portal will be used to indicate and eliminate all kinds of images and videos related to child pornography and violence against women including rape/gang-rape imagery, revenge porn, and any other sexually abusive material.
The decision comes after a meeting chaired by Gandhi on Tuesday, 5 June, in which she suggested to Twitter representatives to come up with a way to screen and filter words of “violent and offensive nature like whore, bitch or rape” while checking for the context the words are used, instead of imposing an all pervasive blanket ban.
As per the report, Gandhi claimed that the training of analysts will be funded by the ministry in order to identify what would qualify as pornographic material.
The portal which will be hosted by the Ministry of Home Affairs, is a sub-project that will receive funding under the ‘Nirbhaya’ initiative for the protection and prevention of cybercrime against women.
In November 2017, the Ministry of Women and Child Development also launched the ‘SHe Box’ portal, an online complaint management system to report sexual harassment at the work place.
Presently, all complaints related to cyber crimes are registered with the police who further report the matter to the cyber crime cell and subsequently to other government departments.
According to officials, the portal is aimed at accelerating resolution of complaints related to cyber crime against women and children so that the matter is resolved within 24 hours in order to block the content and and start prosecution of the culprits at the earliest.
(With inputs from The Indian Express)
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