For International Women’s Day 2022, Sanjana Rathi was featured by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) as part of its #WomenCyber campaign, which highlighted women working to prevent and counter cybercrime around the world.
The message
The feature carried this statement: gender-based violence is one of the worst forms of human rights abuse, and women’s participation in preventing and countering cybercrime is not a ‘luxury’ but a necessity.
Technology-facilitated abuse is experienced disproportionately by women. Its solutions cannot be designed without them.
Why representation matters here
Online harassment, stalkerware, image-based abuse and coercive control through devices are not edge cases in cybercrime — they are among its most common forms, and they fall heavily on women and girls. Yet the teams that write the laws, build the tools and run the investigations remain overwhelmingly male.
That gap shows up in outcomes: in what gets prioritised as a “real” cybercrime, in how complaints are handled, and in whether products are designed with abusive partners in mind. Bringing more women into cybersecurity, law enforcement and policy is a practical improvement to the work, not a quota exercise.
It was an honour to be featured alongside women from across the world doing this work, and a reminder of why we continue to run awareness programmes for women’s groups, parents and community organisations in India.
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