A recent series of brutal rape cases in India, which attracted international media coverage and provoked domestic protests, seems to have finally prompted India’s government to take more seriously the problem of sexual violence. For instance, India’s Parliament has created a number of new sex-related crimes—stalking, disrobing, voyeurism—and is now considering an executive order introducing the death penalty for rapists of children under the age of 12. Strikingly, even India’s new anticorruption legislation—the Prevention of Corruption (Amendment) Act, 2018 (Amendment)—tries to address the sexual violence problem as well. The Amendment, passed in July 2018, introduced a number of changes to the country’s thirty-year-old anticorruption legislation (the PCA), which criminalizes bribery involving public officials. Among the changes is an expansion of what corruption and bribery can entail, to include not just money or material goods, but also sexual favors. Previously, the PCA had defined bribery as providing a “financial or other advantage” to public officials, but in response to criticism that this language was too narrow, the Amendment replaced this phrase with the term “undue advantage,” and further specified that “undue advantage” is not restricted to those advantages that are “pecuniary” or “estimable in money.” This means that the law, while not explicitly mentioning sex, now apparently covers the offer, request, or extortion of sexual favors as something covered by the criminal prohibition on bribery of or by a public official.

On its face, expanding the scope of the anticorruption legislation to include corrupt sexual extortion, or “sextortion,” seems to be a move in the right direction. And indeed there’s a good case to be made that recognizing the extortion of sexual favors not only as a crime of sexual assault, but also as a form of public corruption, is compelling. But in fact, by implicitly treating sextortion as essentially the same as the extortion of monetary bribes, the Amendment will do little to combat sextortion as a form of corruption, and in fact is likely to do more harm than good. There are three interrelated reasons for this: Continue reading →