Weaponizing Intimacy: Sextortion, Statutory Fragmentation, and the Case for a Dedicated Offence under India's New Criminal Code

Sextortion, the use of real, threatened, or fabricated intimate imagery to coerce a victim into paying money, performing sexual acts, providing further content, or remaining silent, has grown from an occasional interpersonal offence into an industrialised form of transnational cybercrime. Inspite of its scale and its documented psychological toll, no jurisdiction, including India, has yet enacted a comprehensive standalone sextortion statute. This article examines the doctrinal architecture that India currently uses to prosecute sextortion, principally section 308 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, together with the Information Technology Act, 2000, and, where minors are involved, the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 and argues that the retention of a property-based definition of extortion, combined with the gender-specific drafting of related sexual-offence provisions, leaves a structural gap that neither prosecutorial ingenuity nor judicial interpretation can reliably close. Drawing on comparative developments in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and South Africa, and on recent Indian judicial pronouncements including Soukin v. State, the article intends to argue for a dedicated, gender-neutral sextortion offence, evidentiary reform to accommodate victim-produced digital evidence, and institutional capacity to match the offence's transnational, technology-mediated character.