The Supreme Court on Friday upheld the conviction of a man from Tamil Nadu for criminal intimidation after he allegedly threatened a woman with uploading a video of her bathing on social media, holding it to be a “threat to impute unchastity” to a woman. The top court further said that a woman’s chastity should be viewed in the changed perspective of sexual autonomy, dignity and privacy.SC upholds conviction of man threatening to leak nudesThe bench of justices Sanjay Karol and N Kotiswar Singh was hearing the plea of a man who promised to marry his girlfriend and established sexual relations but later snubbed her demand to get married. When she insisted, he threatened to make her video of having a bath public which he had 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) that punishes criminal intimidation. His conviction under this provision was upheld by the trial court and high court against which he approached the top court.“We are of the opinion that in the light of the changed perspective of women’s sexuality, the act of video-recording the victim in a naked state while she was taking a bath and the threat to upload it on digital social media can be construed to be an act amounting to a threat to impute unchastity within the meaning of Part II of Section 506 IPC,” the bench said.The court said that with right to privacy now a fundamental right under Article 21 of the Constitution of India, ‘unchastity’ should be read as an action that interferes with the privacy and autonomy of one’s own consensual sexual activities. “Any such interference would be a violation of the constitutional understanding of both privacy and dignity under Article 21,” the judgment said, adding, “Any unwarranted interference with such sexual autonomy can be said to impute unchastity, insofar as it prevents the affected person from controlling the information and choices that she chooses to make with respect to her sexual life.”The court said that such reprehensible act which seeks to lower or tarnish the dignity of a woman relating to her sexual autonomy and identity, which she seeks to jealously guard, can be said to be an assault on her chastity amounting to imputing unchastity to the woman.Further, if acute shame, distress, and embarrassment are visited upon a woman due to fear that her nude picture would be displayed to the public, there can be no doubt that such an act would certainly be a cause for alarm, the court said, while holding that the offence under section 506 is clearly made out.In the present case, the court said that it was immaterial if the video was actually recovered by the prosecution as the offence must be seen from the perspective of the victim and not the accused. The court said, “The mere threat that the appellant would upload the video of the prosecutrix in a nude state on social media is quite a distressing and frightening proposition for a woman.”Justice Singh, writing the judgment for the bench, said, “In the age of the internet, the dignity of a person is intrinsically tied to their person and reputation as perceived online. Any private content circulated online with intent to negatively impact their reputation can be understood to cause harm to one’s reputation.” Such content in the possession of another person can immediately be “warped and altered” to create sexual connotations in a manner where the victim will not be in a condition to control the narrative around it, the judgment said.Seen in this perspective, the court said, “any consensual sexual act is one that an individual, more particularly a woman would reasonably want to keep private and retain autonomy over, and is, therefore, an act that deserves protection.”The court concluded that chastity is not to be considered purely from a moral perspective focused on virtue alone but has to be seen from the prism of dignity and autonomy of the individual woman to decide her sexual preferences and habits, and empowering her to reprobate what is not desirable and approbate what is acceptable to her.“This autonomy to decide what is acceptable or not is to be based on inner self-determination and not dictated by external societal norms which had been the determining factor for centuries..Chastity, thus, has to be determined not only by societal values but also based on her individual sensitivities as regards her sexuality,” the order said.The FIR in this case was registered by the victim woman in 2015 and the accused was sentenced to undergo three years imprisonment for the offence of criminal intimidation both by the trial court in 2017 and the Madras high court in 2024. Considering the time lapse, the top court allowed the man to be released based on the sentence already undergone.