One In Every Three Indian Women Gets Lewd Calls, Messages

One in every three women in India gets sexually inappropriate calls or messages. And victims of such harassment receive at least one such call a week.

These are the findings of a survey conducted by Truecaller. Women in India have to deal with blank calls from strangers, friends and stalkers and also with sexually explicit content, the survey of 2,000 respondents by the caller ID app found.

“When we started scratching the surface, we realised that women actually report more spam calls than men,” Alan Mamedi, Truecaller chief executive, told BloombergQuint in an interaction. “In fact, it's more than 80 percent, so we wanted to dig deeper into this.”

India is the worst spam-call plagued nation in the world. But women surveyed discerned between pesky calls from telemarketers, salesman and fraudsters and blank calls or anonymous calls made with an intent to threaten, harass or offend. They termed spam calls a “nuisance” and the rest “harassment”.

The Truecaller survey reveals that among the women who get lewd or blank calls, 78 percent face such harassment once a week. 82 percent of the surveyed women said the get unsolicited sexually inappropriate videos and pictures on their mobile phones once a week.

Also Read: One Indian Telecom Operator Allowed 31 Million Spam Calls In 2017, Says Truecaller

While half of these texts and calls were made by strangers, 11 percent come from those who could be classified as stalkers and 3 percent from people already known to them.

Jaipur earned the dubious title of the city with maximum incidents of such harassment, according to the report. 90 percent of the women surveyed in the pink city said they felt harassed with offensive sexual images or videos each week.

What's encouraging is that women are speaking up about such incidents of harassment and are taking concrete action. Nearly 62 percent of the women surveyed have taken measures against these calls by either blocking a number, searching for a number online and in some cases even reporting the matter to the authorities. A small number of the women actually decided to shame the spammer on social media.