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Cell stalked!

Harassment has gone hi-tech with mobile phones becoming handy tools to society's sickos

Hello? Hello? Hello? And at the other end, silence. Or heavy breathing. Or crackling followed by unabashed obscenities in a deadpan voice. Or incoherent speech that keeps you screaming: "Hello? Who's this?" Followed by your fear and then your own threats.

Now isn't that a very familiar experience for most women? Housewives, college students, corporate executives... Just no one is spared.

Technology has helped the sickos to enhance their modes of victimising — blank calls, prank calls, calls where the caller is known or unknown, calls in the middle of night, in the middle of work, calls lurking at every corner of your mind, 12 missed calls in 15 minutes... just about anything to play with your mind.

Veena Prakash (name changed), 34, was shocked when one day she got a call from a guy telling her in a mix of Kannada and English: "Ladies beku andre nimage phone madokke helidru." (They told me if I wanted women I should call you.) A shocked Veena blew a fuse and warned him not to call her ever. Four more calls followed with the same halting statement. "I called back on the same number. I should have known. It was a public telephone booth number," she says, visibly disgusted. The calls stopped only after she threatened to bring the police into the picture.

Stalking is taking on new avatars. It's the age of SMS and MMS stalking. Obscene text and images are bombarded on unsuspecting people, mostly women. The fact that caller line identification is easily available is no deterrent. Most mobile service providers refuse to block a call till a customer being harassed by an obscene caller files an FIR with the police first. Ask around and I can bet you will find someone in your circle of family or friends who would have definitely, at some point in time, been the victim of such harassment.

While in the days of the landline sans any caller identification when such calls were rampant, one would believe that the mobile phone culture would bring such a menace down. Not really, though.

In fact, this obsessive behaviour of making obscene phone calls has become so commonplace that psychiatrists have even given it a name: telephone scatologia. "Most often, people who suffer from this condition have sexual paraphilia or abnormal ways of sexual gratification. The person gets a thrill and excitement from making lewd and suggestive remarks to one or more women," explains S.G. Murali Raj, a consultant psychiatrist.

In the last two years he has come across at least four women who have come to him in various states of distress over persistent telephonic harassment. Women who receive such calls often get angry or panic. Some cope with the situation, and resign themselves to the fact that they can do nothing to change their situation. Few women are willing to talk about it or seek help, he says. "Very often women feel degraded and in a few cases where they talk about it, the blame usually falls on the woman herself."

No stranger

While American and European studies show that the caller is often a random stranger, in India, it's often been found that the caller usually knows the woman, says Dr. Murali Raj. "The caller may be doing this out of anger or aggression. Very often it's the jilted lover or colleague who has been rebuffed. Or an ex-husband — people who are not able to express their anger directly. These men get excitement out of imagining the anxiety the women go through with such calls." Calls are usually made from a public booth and the woman's moves are tracked. "In case of working women, it becomes inevitable that they take calls on their cell while at work. But such unrelenting calls can affect their work, send them into depression and even force them to resign."

Fifty-year-old Alo Mukhopadhyay couldn't believe it when she started getting blank and sometimes obscene calls on her landline. A homemaker, there was no other young girl at her home and often she was the one in the family to pick up the phone. "I used to get very scared. Some three young men, who sound mostly in their 20s, used to call and say they wanted to talk to me because they get peace of mind by talking to me and that they wanted to discuss their problems. For a long time I thought it was someone I knew playing mischief on me. How else did they get my number?" Slowly the calls died down by themselves. She was often driven to anger when they made perverse remarks or made blank calls. "But I was able to ignore them, because I am not young. But I can imagine how difficult it must be for young women," says Alo. She felt she was able to handle the situation and never felt the necessity to have the call traced.

Another middle-aged woman, the target of persistent obscene calls and messages on her cell, yelled at the caller in English, only to be told that she speak in the local language. She did, in a few choice words and with a threat to call the police. That was the end of that caller at least.

Most often the targets of such obsessive calls are actors and stars — a reason why many of them don't pick up unrecognised numbers and change their numbers every two months. It's also interesting to note how films like Darr starring Shah Rukh Khan as the obsessive lover inspired young men of the day into such acts. There have been many such cases in Mumbai where the stars, when they complained to the police, were brusquely told that dealing with such calls was part of their profession.

"Text bullying", where one's cellphone is flooded with nasty and intimidating messages, is now a disturbing phenomenon in countries like Australia and New Zealand, especially among young students.

This is usually part of school bullying, which can assume horrendous proportions, pushing the victim to the brink of depression, or worse.

"This phenomenon is more common than it is thought to be," admits Dr. Murali Raj. But, he assures, there are solutions — both for the victim and perpetrator — a combination of medication, counselling and therapy can help solve the problem.

Calling the cops

To imagine the scale of harassment on telephones, read this bizarre report in a Delhi daily:"Obscene caller to police control room nabbed: The Delhi Police Special Cell has nabbed a person who had been making obscene calls to women operators in the Police Control Room (PCR), MTNL and customer care service operators.

The accused, Pawan Kumar (42), resident of Paharganj, had made 1,627 calls out of which 885 were to the police control room, 137 to the MTNL operators and 595 to customer care services of mobile companies.

He told the police that he used to make the calls between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. under influence of liquor.

He also said that he loved talking to women on the phone. Moreover, these numbers were free of charge."

BHUMIKA K.

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