Safety for girls and young women

The phone in your hand may not be yours. You borrowed it from your father, your brother or your husband, and it goes back tonight. Somebody may scroll through it after you.

Every step in this lesson is built for that phone. Not for a phone you own and can lock.

Most of us are on a phone we do not own

In Uttar Pradesh, about 75 out of every 100 rural women use a mobile phone. Only about 43 own one. Those figures come from a government survey done in early 2025.

That gap changes everything. Safety advice written for a phone owner does not fit you. It assumes you can lock the phone and refuse to hand it over.

Research with women in Kanpur and in villages of Uttar Pradesh found the hard part. Saying no to a father, a brother or an elder is read as disrespect. So refusing is not really an option in most houses.

This lesson never asks you to refuse. It teaches you to leave no mark instead.

Leaving no mark on a shared phone

The same research looked at what women actually do. Locks and app passwords failed. A brother learns the PIN in a few days. Worse, a lock makes people ask what you are hiding.

Deleting worked far better. It leaves nothing behind. It also does not look like hiding.

So build one small habit. Before you hand the phone back, do four things.

• Sign out of any app you signed into.
• Delete the chat you just had.
• Clear what the app has saved about you. Many AI apps keep notes from old chats, in the settings.
• Stay signed out of anything personal. Not your email, not an AI app, not a social account.

Two honest warnings go with this. Your browser has a setting that leaves no mark of what you read. It is a separate window you open from the browser menu. It hides the pages you visit, but it does not hide a file you download or a page you save.

The second one catches many people. If the phone is signed into a family Google account, clearing the browser is not enough. Your searches also sit in that account’s own activity record. So check who is signed in before you start.

That is a good moment to reread what happens to what you type. The short list in what you must never type into an AI matters even more on a borrowed phone.

If the phone’s owner agrees, a second user profile gives you your own space on the same phone. Only the owner can add one, so you have to ask. Try words like these.

Bhaiya, can you make a second profile on this phone for me?
My study apps and videos will stay in my part only.
Your WhatsApp and your photos will not get mixed with mine.

One thing not to bother with. The newer hidden space feature on Android only works for the main owner of the phone. If the phone is your father’s, it is closed to you.

The harm this lesson is really about

Somebody takes a photo of you from a social media page. It is an ordinary photo, from a wedding or a college day. They feed it into an AI app that edits pictures. The app returns a fake picture that looks real, sometimes without clothes.

Then it is sent around, or used to threaten you for money or for more photos.

Read this next part slowly. That fake picture is a crime in India. It does not matter that the picture is not real. India treats fake and AI made intimate pictures the same as real ones when it comes to taking them down.

The person who made it broke the law. You did not. Nothing you wore, posted or wrote made this your doing.

Police in India have arrested people for making morphed pictures and blackmailing women with them. The government has also ordered a big platform to clean up an AI tool being misused this way. So complaints do lead somewhere. Spotting fake pictures, voices and videos shows how these images are made.

Make yourself harder to target

None of this is about your mistakes. These steps only make the raw material harder for a stranger to collect.

• Set your photo sharing so only people you know can see your posts.
• Restrict your profile picture too. Most apps let you pick who sees it.
• If the app has a setting that stops people downloading your photos, turn it on.
• Be careful with a clear face photo in a group where you do not know everyone. A job group or a wedding group often has strangers in it.
• A close photo of your face alone is the easiest to misuse. A group photo is harder.

This is not a rule to stop living. It is one small decision each time you post something.

If it happens, do this first

The first feeling is panic. The second is shame. Both push you to delete everything and hope it disappears. Do not delete.

Do these six things, in this order.

1. Leave the post, the message and the account where they are.
2. Write down the link, the account name, the app and the date you first saw it.
3. Screenshot the threats and messages sent to you. Those are words, and words are safe to keep.
4. Do not save or send the picture itself. More on that below.
5. Tell one person you trust. A friend, a teacher, an ASHA didi, an Anganwadi worker or a didi from your self-help group.
6. Report it, in the app and on the government portal.

Keep the record short and clear. Something like this is enough.

What: a fake photo of me, made with an AI app
Where: (name of the app or website)
Link: (paste the full link here)
Account: (the username that posted it)
First seen: (date and time)

You do not need to hold the picture, because reporting preserves it. The app keeps its own copy once you report the post, and the portal keeps your complaint. Save the complaint number instead. That number is safe to carry on any phone.

Now the part that changes everything. You do not have to be the one who files it. India’s takedown route accepts a complaint from the woman affected or from somebody acting for her. A friend, a teacher or a worker at a One Stop Centre can file it for you. So you do not have to tell your family first.

Big platforms are now required to act fast on such reports once they receive them. That clock only starts when somebody reports. Every hour you wait is an hour the picture spreads.

Where to report, and what you can choose

Remember two things. Only two.

cybercrime.gov.in is the government cyber crime portal. It has a section for crimes against women and children. There you can complain without giving your name, your number or your email.

1930 is the helpline for cyber crime where money is involved. If money has gone, or you paid somebody, call it the same day.

Here is the choice the portal gives you, stated honestly.

Think about which number you would be giving. On a shared phone, that number may be your father’s. The police may then call it. Choose with that in your mind, because nobody else can weigh it for you.

Also report the picture inside the app where it appears. Every big app has a report option on a post and on a profile.

Never share, and never pay

Two rules that hold for everyone. First, never send an intimate photo of yourself to anybody. Not to a boy who says he loves you. Not to a man who says he will marry you. Not to a stranger who has been kind to you online. Once it leaves your phone, you cannot pull it back.

Second, never pay a blackmailer. Not one rupee.

If you have already paid, call 1930 the same day and file at cybercrime.gov.in. The first hours matter most. The same pattern turns up in AI scams and how they work, so read that one too.

Keeping the phone in your hand

One more thing protects you, and it is not a setting.

Your phone time depends on the people around you. When your phone use looks useful to the house, it continues. When it looks like time pass, it gets cut. That is unfair, and it is also true.

So do one visible, useful thing with it. Write your father’s leave application. Explain a bank letter to your mother in Hindi. Show your younger brother a maths method. There are ready ideas in helping your family with AI.

Protecting that access is part of protecting yourself. A girl with a phone can report. A girl without one cannot.

The next lesson, when using AI is cheating, covers a different line you need: where honest help ends and copying begins.

One last thing, and it matters more than every step above. If somebody makes a fake picture of you, the shame is his. It is never yours, and it is never your family’s.