Five years ago, I started an inquiry into the untoward experiences of women educators online during COVID-19 after coming across extensive coverage in news and social media about incidents of cyberbullying of teachers online (Iftikhar, 2020). Most teachers had little preparation and limited digital literacy. With the shift to online teaching, many found themselves on screen. My study looked at how their limited digital skills during the transition shaped instances of them being recorded without consent online for YouTube or Instagram trending videos and then subjected to intended repeated instances of harm. Many adopted strategies like blocking comments or messages in classes to muting all attendees – slow adaptations to a changing world. I learnt these were not acts of empowered choices, but silent and careful withdrawals shaped by exhaustion and fear.
Back then, I framed these instances as cyberbullying, unaware of the fact that these were not isolated incidents of individuals using technology for the first time amidst a major technological transformation (Hinduja & Patchin, n.d.; Patchin & Hinduja, 2006). Over the years, gathering stories of women and their mobile media interactions revealed that these dynamics are experienced by every woman user, in a new shape and version.
Fast forward to January 2026, when I came across a sixteen-year-old girl in a rural pocket of the largely industrialised district of Dhanbad in the east Indian state of Jharkhand. Gifted a phone less than a year ago, she was navigating the same challenges as the women educators. But what made her case different were two things: she was a minor and it was not strangers but immediate peers who caused her harm.
In rural settings where the collectivist nature of the society makes privacy a challenge, women’s digital presence is seen beyond communication. Instead, it becomes an activity through which intimacy and sexuality are inferred, monitored, and morally evaluated within the community. This peer surveillance of digital presence functions as a form of moral control: regulating what a woman does online, and what kind of intimacies she is permitted to engage with and imagine
While her young age drew scrutiny and discipline from parents and other elders, this young girl’s peers deemed her an ‘expert,’ a term that ironically did not signal her technical skill. It pertained to her visibility and the reputation of being ‘online all the time.’ This was accompanied by openly criticising her offline, from unwanted comments on her usage to complaints to her parents when she posted something that her peers did not agree with.
What struck me was that her story was no different from that of the hundreds of other women living in rural communities across Punjab and Jharkhand I have come across over the years. She described how she had not only made her public Instagram account private and hidden her ‘last seen’ status on WhatsApp, but actively spends time on blocking people who comment negatively on her content. Her strategies, like those of the women educators in 2021, have been adapted to combat the situation.
The experiences she shared went beyond the platforms and the device itself; the harassment was offline, enforced by friends, family, and peers. As we talk of Digital Intimacies and Sexualities, this is where the language of cyberbullying or online harassment falls short. What unfolded with her, and many others like her living in collectivist settings, is better explained through the weaponisation of affordances (the possibilities and facilities offered through digital access) – using surveillance to enforce rules and expectations of moral behaviour through constant watching (Chadda & Deb, 2013).
Most of the dominant scholarship on surveillance imagines it as a vertical process: nations monitoring citizens, companies extracting our data, algorithms looking at individuals and institutions watching populations (Marwick & boyd, 2014; Nissenbaum, n.d.). But in collectivist settings where physical privacy doesn’t exist, this assumes a horizontal form. Enforced through and by peers, family members, spouses and even neighbours, there is a constant experience of being watched. This is intrinsic to the organisation of living spaces and social structures within a village where doors are not closed, and communal spaces within and beyond households continue to exist. But what is interesting is the transition of this physical proximity and intimacy to online spaces, which often assumes a moral imperative.
As I found in our research with women living in rural communities in Punjab, women routinely shared phone passwords with husbands, children, and in-laws. Locked phones were acceptable only insofar as they protected devices from outsiders, not family members. To withhold access was to invite suspicion. A locked phone suggested that a woman had ‘something to hide’(Chakraborty & Garg, 2025).
Privacy in such a social setting is not understood as an individual right or even a boundary. To be accurate, it is a moral performance that centres accountability to social structures and peers. Privacy scholars have described this context-driven perception of potential audience as a key factor to privacy decisions (Trepte et al., 2020). What I observed is that in collectivist settings, this audience is rarely one person but instead an entire community and peer network. Shared phones, visible screens, co-owned accounts complicate things further. Openness about everything is expected; the line between private and public is blurred, especially in relationships with peers.
So, what transpires online is rarely contained online. Like the young girl reprimanded and questioned for her phone usage, the act of being online is not only subjected to surveillance, but even her attempts to safeguard herself from such surveillance are met with critique. She is ridiculed as the ‘expert’ because she chooses privacy, and her peers equate it with her ‘having something to hide’(Solove, 2007, 2008). Her experience of surveillance is not an external intrusion but a core social process. It is even framed as an act of care: a moral duty of peers concerned for a young girl being online ‘too much’. In such a setting, intimacy becomes the surveillance infrastructure. While mobile phones and online platforms promise private connection, the lived realities of the user and the social context rarely allow the space for privacy. Instead, affordances like visible online status, timestamps of posts and statuses, and even last online status allow for scrutiny even when she is not actively posting.
For women, this is not just a form of control or discipline, but also a pre-emptive policing of the possibility of intimacy. In case a woman, especially someone who is young, draws a boundary to distance herself from the social infrastructures that watch and police her digital presence, it is perceived as a moral failure on her part. In such a setting, ‘knowing too much’ refers to being visibly fluent – knowing how the technology works, understanding when others are online, and knowing how to withdraw from view by limiting account access or blocking them.
Simple acts that we see as digital literacy or skills are perceived as a transgression as they do not conform to social expectations. They signal agency, and potential intimacy beyond what is acceptable. Online presence despite constant peer surveillance, then, becomes something that must be explained, monitored, and corrected. We need to understand that digital intimacies in collectivist settings are governed less by individual choice and more by peer surveillance. This affects sexual expression of any kind, policed pre-emptively within the community and by women themselves. The potential opportunities for digital intimacy are compromised to a huge extent. For young women in such settings, being online ‘too much’ becomes a way to judge and discipline them for their sexuality. Without this understanding, our conversations around online safety and empowerment will remain incomplete, as the conversations need to discuss access first. The question is not only how girls are protected online, but what kinds of intimacy they are permitted to have and under whose watch.
References
Chadda, R., & Deb, K. (2013). Indian family systems, collectivistic society and psychotherapy. Indian Journal of Psychiatry, 55(6), 299. https://doi.org/10.4103/0019-5545.105555
Chakraborty, D., & Garg, C. (2025). “(Virtuous) Wives Don’t Have Anything to Hide”: Understanding Digital Privacy Perceptions and Behavior of Married Women in Rural India. Social Media + Society, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051251313665
Hinduja, S., & Patchin, J. W. (n.d.). Cyberbullying Fact Sheet What you need to know about online aggression. https://cyberbullying.org/cyberbullying_fact_sheet.pdf
Iftikhar, F. (2020). DU teachers complain of harassment, abusive posts during online classes. In Hindustan Times. https://www.hindustantimes.com/delhi-news/du-teachers-complain-of-harassment-abusive-posts-during-online-classes/story-cLVokQNgV0yNG2M67bC4EL.html
Marwick, A. E., & boyd, danah. (2014). Networked privacy: How teenagers negotiate context in social media. New Media & Society, 16(7), 1051–1067. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814543995
Nissenbaum, H. (n.d.). Privacy in Context. In Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life. Stanford University Press. https://doi.org/doi:10.1515/9780804772891
Patchin, J. W., & Hinduja, S. (2006). Bullies Move Beyond the Schoolyard: A Preliminary Look at Cyberbullying. Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, 4(2), 148–169. https://doi.org/10.1177/1541204006286288
Solove, D. J. (2007). “I’ve Got Nothing to Hide” and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy. San Diego Law Review, 44, 745.
Solove, D. J. (2008). Understanding Privacy. Harvard University Press. https://books.google.co.in/books?id=KCNPPgAACAAJ
Trepte, S., Scharkow, M., & Dienlin, T. (2020). The privacy calculus contextualized: The influence of affordances. Computers in Human Behavior, 104, 106115.
Cover image by Tobias Tullius on Unsplash
