A photograph picked up from a colleague’s social media profile can now be altered into a convincing intimate image in minutes. A voice note can be cloned from a thirty-second clip. A face can be placed into a video the person was never in.

When this is done to a female colleague and circulated in a team group, an official WhatsApp group, a project channel or a client mail thread, it is not a technology glitch that the organization needs to fix, but rather a complaint of sexual harassment that it needs to address.

Section 2(n) of the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013 defines sexual harassment to include showing pornography and any other unwelcome physical, verbal or non-verbal conduct of a sexual nature. A morphed or artificially generated explicit image of a female colleague, circulated without her consent, falls within that second limb. The Act mentions ‘what’ constitutes sexual harassment but does not anywhere mention anything about any one particular acceptable medium used for creating and transmitting the same. Thus, the content does not gain immunity because it was seemingly produced by a machine. In simple words, the ‘machine’ is merely the ‘instrument’. It is the ‘Brain’ feeding the ‘prompt’ that the Act seeks to punish. ‘Authenticity’ is a question for police and forensic labs to investigate. The IC’s mandate is narrower. Did unwelcome and sexually coloured conduct occur and did it create a hostile work environment? Once the IC internalises this distinction, the question of ‘who is the Brain’ becomes more easier to answer.

In the present era where AI is shaping how modern workspaces function, the courts have time and again held that the definition of “workplace” is elastic enough to extend beyond “physical office” and includes virtual environments like audio – video – text messaging and conferencing environments. So, when the workplace has gone virtual, how can ‘workplace harm’ be confined to the four walls of a traditional workplace? This wider concept of virtual workplace harm must thus be accompanied by strong technology to evaluate evidence. The process of evaluation is further bifurcated into three distinct layers. First – Content Evidence (the unwelcome conduct which falls under section 2(n) of the POSH Act; the file itself); Attribution Evidence (the person who owned it, created or forwarded it; can be determined through device logs, account activity or admissions; Impact Evidence (the complainant’s testimony, witness accounts and downstream workplace consequence.

An HR Manager of a mid-size IT company receives her first formal POSH complaint. Twirling the complaint in her hand, she thinks, what now? The company does have a POSH Committee and an Internal Committee (IC), but only on paper. But not one member of the committee has ever conducted an inquiry. The clock has already started ticking.

Here is the point most employers overlook. Firstly, the right place of the complaint is not the HR’s table, but the Internal Committee. An Internal Committee is not an HR body. It functions like a small civil court within your organization. The law that created it, the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, gives it the real power.

This guide sets out what the Internal Complaint Committee does – its composition and member qualifications, the inquiry procedure, the recommendations, the deadlines, and the penalties for disregarding them.