What are the online spaces that young people navigate in India? While conducting our interactive workshops on denormalising online abuse at schools and colleges, we often start with this question assessing the wide variety of social media that the youth are using these days. And time and again, over a course of 17 such workshops across government schools in New Delhi, and colleges across New Delhi and Coimbatore, students (most of whom are adolescent girls and young women) have told us about a range of online games that they spend most of their time online on. PUBG and Free Fire are the most common but from the government schools in Delhi, female students also shared their experiences of playing Moba Legends and Kamla – Indian Horror Game among others.

In one of the workshops at a girls’ school in North Delhi, interacting with girls from class 9 and 10, many of them shared about being mocked at for being female once the group members find out their gender as they use the mandatory audio feature during the playoff. Then they are inundated with message requests to be added on Instagram and other social media platforms. They also shared how these games are addictive and they spend a lot of time on these games as “losing is depressing”.

A student shared how one has to continuously play these games for long hours to upgrade their gaming ID to Pro level which they can, then, sell for thousands of rupees. I heard about this particular activity translating into monetary transactions happening over online gaming across multiple such workshops.

But young women on gaming platforms face a plethora of toxicity and harassment too. One would think that the online harassment is within the bounds of social media but as women’s participation in online gaming is increasing, OGBV is also extending to these gaming platforms with little accountability from the platforms. With 420 million online gamers, India is one of the world's largest online gaming markets. Yet for women and gender minorities navigating this space, global patterns of gender-based harassment collide with distinctly local fault lines: a legal system ill-equipped to address digital harm, platforms that enforce inconsistently at best, and deep-seated cultural resistance to women's presence in tech-adjacent spaces.

About 20 percent of female gamers have faced online gender based violence, including death and rape threats, while participating in online gaming in India, according to empirical data a study titled ‘Online Gaming and Harassment: Cyber Violence Against Women in Digital Entertainment Spaces’ published by International Academy of Science Engineering and Technology (IASET) published early this year. Globally, this percentage hikes up to 59 percent of women who face online harassment while playing digital games. The study further reports that 26% of all women and 36% of LGBTQ+ women prevent posting their gender online actively to reduce their risk of harassment, which is another type of self-censorship that limits genuine online engagement.

The abuse ranges from verbal sexist insults, dehumanising and demeaning female players, inappropriate sexual remarks, sexual solicits, sexual objectification, and overt sexual offers to exclusionary behaviours such as gatekeeping, dismissal of female players’ ability to play the game and organized campaigns to keep women out of gaming subcultures.

The girls at Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya already know this, even if they don't have the language for it yet. When they mute themselves during playoffs to avoid being identified as female, when they field unsolicited Instagram requests from strangers who just heard their voice, when they describe losing as "depressing" and still keep playing, they are navigating, in real time, the same structural violence.

In our workshops, we do a Spectrum Activity where we ask students to take either a ‘strong agree’ or a ‘strong disagree’ stance for a few statements that we share with them. While most of our workshops have been with all-girls groups, when we conducted this activity during the workshop at a co-ed university in Coimbatore, one of the statements was that toxic behavior in gaming is normal and harmless. Usually, girls would strongly disagree with this statement but in the co-ed group, most boys and some girls strongly agreed to that statement and then some girls disagreed with it. The results were unparalleled and there was a clearer gendered divide. It gave us an insight into how boys and girls see toxicity in recreational activities like online gaming and whether they saw inappropriate behaviour as toxicity and/or harassment. What the workshops revealed is that for adolescent girls in government schools in Delhi, gaming is neither trivial nor purely recreational. It is a site of sociality and economic aspiration. The harassment they described did not feel exceptional to them. It is the cost of entry. That normalisation is perhaps the most urgent finding. Across these workshops, not a single girl named what was happening to her as abuse. It was just gaming. It was just what happened when they spoke and someone heard a girl's voice on the other end. This is where the data and the lived experience converge most sharply. The gap between incidence and recognition is itself a form of harm. A legal system that has not caught up with digital violence, platforms that treat enforcement as optional, and a cultural script that still frames women in gaming as intruders rather than players: all of it compounds in the lives of teenage girls who just want to play PUBG after school. The question is no longer whether OGBV is happening on India's gaming platforms. The girls already told us it is. The question is who is listening and what they intend to do about it.