Maneka Gandhi steps up against trolling and online abuse of women

As much as social media has been a benefit to us in expanding our networks, it has also produced banes in the form of cyber bullying, trolling and online abuse against everyone, but most specifically women. Women and Child Development minister, Maneka Gandhi has now decided to take the matter in her hand. For this she will meet with Home Ministry and Ministry of Information Technology to come up with the most appropriate solution. This meeting will also have officials from Facebook and Twitter, the two main social media websites, who will assist Maneka Gandhi in dealing with the issue.

Gandhi came to this idea after seeing posts by Bollywood singer Sona Mohapatra who received a lot of flak in terms of abuse and trolling after she spoke against Salman Khan’s “raped woman” comment. She also came across the incident of singer Abhijeet abusing a woman journalist.

Also read: How to handle cyber sexism? Stand up to it!

For starters, on Tuesday, Gandhi tweeted that women facing any kind of online trolling and abuse can email her on her personal email ID- gandhim@nic.in.

She received quite a few complaints of which one was from a woman who was received obscene comments to her on Twitter from a fake account of Arvind Kejriwal. Another woman from Chennai complained that her sister-in-law was posting offensive comments on her social media websites. This is a very common scenario as on the web, people think that they can say whatever they want without any restriction and get away with it. It is about time that some concrete regulation should be in place for such incidents.

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Meanwhile, Gandhi has resolved to inform the National Commission for Women about these incidents along with the Commissioners of Police, Delhi and Mumbai. She has asked them to take a speedy action into the woman journalist’s case.

Feature Image Credit: DNA