Sri Lanka cannot worship mothers in public while men trade women’s bodies in private

A 2025 UNFPA study found that cyber related complaints received by Sri Lanka CERT rose from 2,969 in 2019 to 20,219 in 2023. During the first nine months of 2024, thousands of complaints were classified as technology facilitating gender based violence. This digital environment does not exist separately from Women's offline experiences. Sri Lanka's Women's Wellbeing Survey found that 20.4% of partnered women had experienced physical and or sexual intimate partner violence during their lifetime. One in five cannot comfortably be described as an aberration

What men say when they think women cannot hear them

One screenshot begins with a sentence written in Romanised Sinhala: “Salli dennam ammawa set karala denna katada puluwan”, roughly translated as, “I’ll pay. Who can arrange a mother for me?” A telephone number subsequently appears and the conversation seems to move towards an inbox. The exchange does not establish precisely what is supposedly being arranged, and screenshots should not be embellished beyond what they show. Yet within the surrounding sexualised discussion, the language is disturbing.

Another post asks, “podi kellont karpu aya innawad”, which in the context of the conversation roughly translates as, “Are there people here who have done it to little girls?” Elsewhere, users apparently discuss younger sisters, underage girls and secretly obtained photographs. Another commenter writes, “Nangi Ammai wesiyo wage wate yawanna asai”, expressing a degrading desire to treat a younger sister and mother “like prostitutes”. Some posts appear to invite conversations into private messages, while others appear to normalise language that should provoke immediate alarm.

The people behind these accounts should not be tried through social media. Some profiles are anonymous, identities have not been independently established and online statements do not by themselves prove that those making them committed criminal offences. If offences are suspected, evidence must be preserved and investigated through due process. Yet due process does not require society to dismiss the language as insignificant. What is frightening is the casualness of the exchanges and the apparent expectation that others in the group will understand, tolerate or even participate.

That is why dismissing the material as the behaviour of a few disturbed individuals is inadequate. An individual can harbour a depraved thought alone, but a group can validate it. It can turn what should provoke condemnation into conversation and what should provoke alarm into entertainment. When references to mothers, sisters and children can circulate in such an atmosphere, the issue extends far beyond moderation failure.

We have seen institutional failure before

Sri Lanka repeatedly treats cases involving the abuse of women or children as isolated horrors. Outrage erupts, headlines follow and public anger burns intensely before attention moves elsewhere. Yet schools, families, religious institutions and other supposedly safe environments have themselves faced scrutiny when allegations of child abuse and safeguarding failures emerge. Sri Lankan courts have dealt with serious cases involving children abused within institutions that were expected to protect them.

The point is not to accuse an entire religion, profession or institution because of the conduct of an individual, nor should allegations ever be treated as convictions. The larger issue is whether any institution becomes so culturally protected that scrutinising what occurs within it becomes more controversial than protecting the vulnerable person who raises an allegation. A robe, title, profession, family name or social position should never place anyone beyond scrutiny.

When abuse occurs within spaces that children are taught to trust, the response cannot be institutional defensiveness. The responsibility must be to establish what happened, protect the child and allow evidence rather than prestige to determine the outcome. Religious institutions, like schools, families and workplaces, should be judged not by whether allegations ever arise but by how seriously they respond when they do.

Sri Lanka does not lack laws, institutions or agencies dealing with women and children. The National Child Protection Authority exists, specialised police mechanisms exist, the Ministry of Women and Child Affairs exists and helplines and safeguarding programs are already in place. The deeper question is whether those structures operate with equal force when the person under scrutiny is ordinary and when that person possesses authority, status, money, influence or institutional protection

The hypocrisy of worshipping mothers

Sri Lanka speaks endlessly about respect. Respect your parents, honour your elders, protect your sister, preserve the family and revere your mother. The word amma carries enormous emotional and cultural significance, and motherhood is routinely invoked as evidence of the country’s moral character. Yet the screenshots appear to show mothers and sisters discussed as sexual objects by the very men whose culture publicly claims to sanctify them.

Sri Lankan girls grow up inside an elaborate architecture of instruction. They are told not to go certain places, not to come home too late, to be careful what they wear and what they post, to protect their reputation and to protect the family name. We have become remarkably sophisticated at teaching girls to organise their lives around the possibility of male misconduct while investing far less energy in teaching boys not to become the men girls are being warned about.

The equivalent lesson to sons should be just as clear. Do not secretly photograph a woman, distribute intimate or private images, ask another man for sexual access to someone, or mistake possession of a photograph for ownership of the person in it. Do not laugh when friends degrade women and do not protect another man simply because exposing his behaviour would embarrass the family, school, workplace or religious institution. A society capable of teaching girls shame is capable of teaching boys boundaries.

The Facebook material also exposes a weakness in the language Sri Lanka uses around female dignity. Men are often told to respect a woman because she is someone’s mother, sister or daughter, but that argument collapses when mothers and sisters themselves become subjects of sexualised discussion. Women should not need a relationship with a man to qualify for dignity. A woman deserves respect because she is a human being.

Facebook did not invent misogyny. It gave it infrastructure

Meta has questions to answer about how online communities containing this kind of content survive moderation, particularly when conversations move between Sinhala, Romanised Sinhala, slang, coded language and private messaging. However, blaming Facebook alone would be convenient because the platform did not invent misogyny, sexual entitlement or child abuse. It provided them with infrastructure, speed and an audience.

A secretly taken photograph can be duplicated indefinitely, a degrading remark can receive encouragement rather than condemnation and a person contemplating crossing a boundary can enter an online environment where the boundary itself appears negotiable. Not every obscene statement online becomes an offline crime, but technology facilitated abuse is not an imaginary problem.

A 2025 UNFPA study found that cyber related complaints received by Sri Lanka CERT rose from 2,969 in 2019 to 20,219 in 2023. During the first nine months of 2024, thousands of complaints were classified as technology facilitating gender based violence. This digital environment does not exist separately from women’s offline experiences. Sri Lanka’s Women’s Wellbeing Survey found that 20.4% of partnered women had experienced physical and or sexual intimate partner violence during their lifetime. One in five cannot comfortably be described as an aberration.

The severity of different forms of abuse varies enormously, but the logic beneath many of them can be similar: what I want matters more than your boundary. That principle appears in image based abuse, sexual harassment, coercive relationships and, in its most serious form, the exploitation of children.

 A civilisation should not be measured by how loudly it praises motherhood or how often it calls the family sacred. It should be measured by what happens when a woman is harmed inside that family, when a child speaks about abuse, when an institution›s prestige competes with a victim›s safety and when someone powerful would prefer an allegation to disappear

Stop telling girls to make themselves smaller

The familiar response to online abuse is predictable. Girls are told to lock their profiles, women are told to stop uploading photographs, parents are encouraged to monitor daughters more closely and young women are repeatedly warned not to trust people online. Digital caution has value, but when the primary answer to male misconduct is to reduce female freedom, society has identified the wrong person as the problem.

Some of the screenshots make this particularly clear because they appear to concern relatives. What privacy setting protects a child from someone already inside the home? What curfew protects her from a relative? What clothing protects a child from an adult who has decided that her boundaries do not matter? A young girl cannot be expected to carry responsibility for predicting predatory behaviour by the very people she has been taught to trust.

Sri Lanka must therefore stop asking only how women and children can make themselves harder to abuse and begin asking how abusers become confident enough to act. That means examining homes, schools, workplaces, religious institutions, friendship circles and digital spaces together rather than pretending violence begins only when a criminal offence becomes publicly visible.

Who does the system protect?

Sri Lanka does not lack laws, institutions or agencies dealing with women and children. The National Child Protection Authority exists, specialised police mechanisms exist, the Ministry of Women and Child Affairs exists and helplines and safeguarding programs are already in place. The deeper question is whether those structures operate with equal force when the person under scrutiny is ordinary and when that person possesses authority, status, money, influence or institutional protection.

Sri Lanka frequently worries about the reputational consequences of confronting abuse. People ask whether an investigation will damage a family, a school, a religious institution or the reputation of the country. Those questions reverse the moral order. Religious institutions are not protected by shielding alleged offenders from investigation, schools are not protected by suppressing complaints and families are not preserved by silencing victims.

A country’s reputation is not destroyed because abuse is exposed. It is damaged when protecting reputation becomes more urgent than protecting a child. The principle should therefore be simple: the child before the institution, the victim before reputation, evidence before influence and justice before prestige.

This requires more than outrage

If the Facebook material points authorities towards evidence of child sexual abuse, nonconsensual imagery, secretly obtained photographs or attempts to facilitate exploitation, that evidence should be preserved before it disappears. Authorities should establish whether identifiable women or children are at immediate risk, investigate apparent disclosures where legally justified and work with platforms to preserve relevant digital records through lawful processes.

This should concern the National Child Protection Authority, the Ministry of Women and Child Affairs, the Police Children and Women’s Bureau and law enforcement leadership. It should also concern political leaders because violence against women and children cannot remain an issue acknowledged only when public anger becomes impossible to ignore. When a problem touches policing, digital regulation, education, safeguarding and justice simultaneously, it becomes a question of governance.

Accountability means little when it is applied only to people without influence. Its credibility is tested when scrutiny becomes socially or institutionally uncomfortable and when protecting the vulnerable requires confronting people or institutions that command respect.

Where are the other men?

There is another figure missing from too many conversations about violence against women: the man who witnesses another man’s behaviour and decides it is none of his business. Every abusive online space has an audience. Someone reads the post, recognises the woman, knows an image was taken secretly or realises the person being discussed may be a child. What that person does next matters.

Sri Lanka has spent generations teaching girls how to respond to dangerous men. It needs to become equally serious about teaching men how to respond when the dangerous man is their friend, colleague, relative or classmate. They should not ask for the photograph, forward it, laugh at it or protect someone because acknowledging his behaviour would make a friendship uncomfortable. If a child appears to be at risk, the responsibility should be to report it.

Male silence is not equivalent to committing abuse, but environments in which decent men remain silent are environments in which abusive men learn how little resistance their behaviour attracts. Prevention therefore cannot consist only of police action after harm occurs. Consent, bodily autonomy, digital ethics and responsible intervention must become part of how boys and young men are educated.

Screenshots circulating from a Sri Lankan Facebook space appear to show men sexualising mothers, sisters and children, discussing secretly taken photographs and moving conversations into private messages. The scandal is bigger than a Facebook group. It confronts Sri Lanka with a more uncomfortable question: when the dignity of women and the safety of children collide with male entitlement, institutional reputation and power, who are we actually protecting?

Outrage is not a child protection system

Sri Lanka knows the rhythm of scandal too well. Something horrific becomes public, screenshots circulate, television discussions follow, politicians condemn it and social media erupts. Then another story arrives and public attention moves on while victims and survivors remain inside the same institutions.

That is how isolated scandals become cycles. Sri Lanka invokes “2,500 years of culture” when regulating women’s clothes, relationships and sexuality, yet culture seems strangely quiet when men degrade women among themselves. We worship mothers in speeches while screenshots appear to discuss mothers as commodities. We describe sisters as precious while sisters appear to become sexual material, and we describe children as the future while repeatedly discovering how difficult it can be for institutions to put them first.

A civilisation should not be measured by how loudly it praises motherhood or how often it calls the family sacred. It should be measured by what happens when a woman is harmed inside that family, when a child speaks about abuse, when an institution’s prestige competes with a victim’s safety and when someone powerful would prefer an allegation to disappear.

Sri Lanka has spent generations teaching women how to be respectable. The Facebook screenshots pose a different challenge: whether the country is prepared to become equally serious about teaching men to respect.

When the outrage eventually fades, one question should remain: when the next woman speaks, when the next child asks to be believed and when power enters the room, who exactly will Sri Lanka choose to protect?

(The author is an International Relations student at Monash University whose writing explores politics, governance, and international affairs)