Trolling to be considered a crime: Maneka Gandhi

"Women have to deal with tremendous viciousness online," said Maneka Gandhi while speaking on NDTV's Agenda.

For all the advantages of the internet and the new digital age, there are quite a few negatives that one has to contend with as well. For women especially, it's a new kind of violence that they face on social media, called trolling.

The Women and Child Development Minister, Maneka Gandhi has now taken up this issue. She has already written about it to the Home ministry and requested to formulate a code of online behaviour. This issue is a part of the women’s agenda that the ministry has come up with. Gandhi pointed out that it was actually a journalist’s complaint that attracted her attention to this problem. This led to a process of sensitization towards trolling by the ministry and hence it was decided that it would come under violence now.

On the issue of actual implementation of any code , she stated that earlier operators never cooperated with the minister, but now they have also collaborated in order to tackle this social evil.

Gandhi also touched on the issue of maternal leaves, as she is now vying for eight months maternal leaves for women employes. She said that she feels even more close to this issue since she is also a single mother. For this, the WCD ministry has written to the Labour ministry, but the response hasn’t come yet.

As for the issue of marital rape, she was keen to clarify her recent statement, but also admitted that no solution to this has been found in her ministry. She claimed that she also met lawyers like Indira Jaisingh but even she couldn’t come up with a viable resolve to the act of marital rape.

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Feature Image Credit: DNA