About us
Advisory Committee
Steering Committee
Knowledge and Narratives
When Justice Backfires: Criminalization, Gender and Human Rights in the Digital Era
Introduction
When Justice Backfires: Criminalization, Gender and Human Rights in the Digital Era explores how punitive legal approaches to digital harms often exacerbate injustice rather than address it. Drawing on case studies from Sri Lanka and Malaysia, the report analyzes how colonial-era laws and value systems come together with modern digital-era regulations to criminalize and/or target certain forms of personal expression - particularly if this expression is seen as breaking established social gender norms, or expressing sexuality in any way. . It highlights how these laws serve to control marginalized communities and entrench patriarchal and authoritarian power, by also empowering dominant social groups to regulate, surveil and curtail on the behalf of the state and for the protection of social order The report calls for intersectional feminist alternatives to criminalization that center human rights, collective care, and cross-movement collaboration to resist digital and social repression.
Summary
*Trigger warning: suicide
When Justice Backfires: Criminalization, Gender and Human Rights in the Digital Era explores how criminalisation, especially within digital contexts, often threatens gender justice and human rights instead of safeguarding them. Using case studies from Malaysia and Sri Lanka, the report interrogates how colonial laws and modern digital regulations are used together to police gender, sexuality and dissent, disproportionately harming marginalized communities, empowering dominant social groups and the state, and ultimately impeding gender justice agendas.
In Malaysisa, Esha, a young woman, died by suicide after facing harassment on TikTok. Despite Esha reporting the violence, authorities failed to adequately respond until after her death. The resulting arrests and new proposals for harsh cyberbullying penalties, including prison terms of up to 10 years, reveal how punitive measures are reactive and often fail to address systemic misogyny, embedded within families, the community and the state, and how harmful social norms are perpetuated with impunity. These measures support patriarchal state control and deepen marginalization impacting those already vulnerable.
In Sri Lanka, laws inherited from British colonial rule include many facets of the country’s Penal Code, for example, the Vagrants’ Ordinance, and the Obscene Publications Ordinance - together these continue to criminalize same-sex intimacy, sex work, poverty, and non-normative gender and sexual expression. These laws were originally introduced to sustain colonial moral codes and police and punish native people, undermining their autonomy and suppressing dissent. But these laws remain on the books, embraced by successive governments of independent Sri Lanka. In contemporary times, legislation such as Sri Lanka’s 2024 Online Safety Act further strengthens state power to censor and penalize expression under the pretext of “safety”.
A 2017 case study is used to highlight these dynamics: a couple was detained for privately viewing pornography at home, exposing how blurred lines between public and private digital behaviour invite state overreach. Gender bias was blunt: the woman was forced to undergo a sexually transmitted diseases test and the man was not, highlighting how archaic patriarchal assumptions and social mores underpin present-day police work, in a way which disproportionately focuses on women’s and gender-diverse people’s bodies and sexuality.
Both cases highlight how laws created to “protect” are used to harm marginalized people, and invites further policing from dominant social groups. They expose false distinctions between digital and physical harm and illustrate how online behaviour impacts one’s physical safety and life. The publication encourages feminist activists and those working on issues such as gender-based violence online, to reject protectionist criminalisation approaches and instead use strategies grounded in feminism, intersectionality, care, accountability, human rights and finally, strategies which aim to transform social conditions which breed inequality and injustice. It calls for decolonial rights-based frameworks that promote digital rights and foster cross-movement solidarity to state systems which use these laws to control, silence, regulate and punish.
Download the full article (English) here!