The Supreme Court on Friday upheld the conviction of a Tamil Nadu man on charges of criminal intimidation after he threatened a woman to upload a video of herself bathing on social media, saying it was a “threat to attribute immorality” to a woman. The Supreme Court further said that women’s chastity should be viewed in the changing perspective of sexual autonomy, dignity and privacy.
A bench of Justices Sanjay Karol and N Koteswar Singh was hearing the plea of a man who promised to marry his girlfriend and had sexual relations but later rejected her marriage proposal. When she insisted, he threatened to make a public video of her showering, which he secretly filmed on his mobile phone. Since the video could not be recovered, the accused challenged his conviction under Section 506 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) which punishes criminal intimidation. The Court of First Instance and the Supreme Court upheld his conviction under this ruling, and he appealed against it to the Supreme Court.
“We are of the view that in view of the changed perspective on women’s sexuality, video recording of the victim in a nude state while bathing and threatening to upload it on digital social media can be construed as an act amounting to a threat to impute non-chastity within the meaning of Part II of Section 506 of the IPC,” the bench said.
The court said that since the right to privacy is now a fundamental right under Article 21 of the Constitution of India, “debauchery” must be read as an act that interferes with the privacy and autonomy of consensual sexual activities. “Any such interference would be a violation of the constitutional understanding of both privacy and dignity under Article 21,” the ruling said, adding: “Any unjustified interference with this sexual autonomy could be said to impute unchastity, insofar as it prevents the affected person from controlling the information and choices she chooses to make in relation to her sexuality.”
The court said that such a shameful act which seeks to belittle or distort a woman’s dignity with regard to her autonomy and sexual identity, which she seeks to jealously protect, can be said to be an assault on her chastity amounting to imputing impurity to the woman.
Moreover, if a woman is subjected to extreme disgrace, distress and embarrassment due to the fear of her nude photograph being shown to the public, such an act would certainly be a cause for concern, the court said, while holding that the offense under Section 506 is clearly stated.
In this case, the court said that it was not important that the video had already been recovered by the prosecution, as the crime should be viewed from the perspective of the victim and not the accused. “The mere threat that the appellant would upload the prosecutor’s video of herself naked on social media is an extremely painful and frightening proposition for the woman,” the court said.
Justice Singh, who wrote the judgment, said: “In the age of the Internet, a person’s dignity is intrinsically linked to his person and reputation as perceived online. Any private content circulated online with the intention of adversely affecting his reputation can be understood as causing damage to a person’s reputation.” The ruling said that such content in the possession of another person can be instantly “distorted and altered” to create sexual connotations in such a way that the victim is in no position to control the narrative surrounding him.
From this perspective, the court said: “Any consensual sexual act is one for which an individual, especially a woman, would reasonably wish to preserve his privacy and retain his autonomy, and is therefore an act deserving of protection.”
The court concluded that chastity should not be viewed from a purely moral perspective focusing on virtue alone, but rather should be viewed from the perspective of the dignity and individual autonomy of women to decide their sexual preferences and habits, enabling them to reject what is undesirable and agree to what is acceptable to them.
“This independence in deciding what is acceptable or unacceptable must be based on internal self-determination and not dictated by external societal norms which have been the determining factor for centuries. Thus, chastity must be determined not only by societal values but also on the basis of her individual sensitivities regarding her sexuality,” the order said.
The FIR in this case was registered by the woman victim in 2015 and the accused was sentenced to three years imprisonment for the offense of criminal intimidation by the trial court in 2017 and the Madras High Court in 2024. Considering the lapse of time, the high court allowed the man to be released based on the sentence already passed.
