Since 2017, India's battle against child exploitation online has intensified, making this investigation more relevant than ever.

The Growth Of Child Porn

India is a land of contrasts – this is a hackneyed line that I had written over and over in my school essays and every time I used it to describe how we have regional contrasts and still we are one, or that there are so many languages but they come under the one big umbrella of nationalism and so on. However, as you grow older, irony sets in to show you incidents in a very different light.

So, an essay now from my pen would be –  India is a land of contrasts, where the I&B ministry curbs the time frame for condom ads from the television and justifies it by saying that they impose negative effects on children and at the same time, according to a leading online publication, almost 30-35% of the total porn uploaded from India on the Internet is child porn.

Most of these videos originate from tier II or III cities in India, taken with mobile phones and this culture has not only taken its root but has managed to grow at an alarming rate. In a quote to India Today, Kislay Chaudhary, director of the Indian Cyber Army (ICA) said,

“The content and consumers of child pornography are growing at a sharp rate. There are no exact statistics but our findings show that search engines get over 1,16,000 queries every day related to child pornography.”

Large Scale Availability Of Rape And Child Porn In Cybershops

However, when we are looking at India, there is a bigger picture involved. Porn is not only available online; it’s also available on a larger scale offline. In seedy cybershops, you pay 100 bucks and they will fill 1GB of your memory card with porn and you can specify what you want/desire. They have it in their stock. Back in 2016, Al Jazeera did an expose, where a large nexus of those who engage in these practices was brought to the forefront. These “local films” are of girls, who are underage and are being raped and videoed.

These videos are then sold for as less as Rs. 20. There is another avenue of porn that’s trending in the porn sites when it comes to India, WhatsApp sex videos.

These are the culmination of revenge porn, phones landing up in the hands of wrong people and other nefarious means. How bad is it? Well, for every category I mention here, I am going to do a search on a porn site and see how many results it gives me.

1. The first query I typed in was, “Indian WhatsApp Videos” and I was hit back with 115,646 results.

2. The next query is “Indian school Girl forced” the feedback is 262,495 results.

3. “Indian homemade” gives you 134,780 results.

4. “Indian scandals” come up with “44,597” results.

The Study Of Sex And Porn Effects

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-yCtVWcjw8

Now, this is only one site and the parameters are broad. It is estimated that almost 30% of the Internet constitutes of porn and India is one of the most populous countries in the world. I hope it’s not that tough to do the math and the numbers are increasing every day. There are several underlying factors that make this into a vicious circle. In India, sex education is almost absent; therefore, for most Indians the only way to understand sex is porn. When they watch porn, after a while they stop looking at the broad genres of porn and take an interest in the sub-genres like – BDSM, torture, mutilation, child porn, horror porn, forced porn and in their minds these become the normal way to approach sex.

To add fuel to the chaos, the videos of porn that emerge from Indian states also make them think that if someone got away with it, the other one should be okay to get away with it too. A circle that’s not perturbed by government intervention, because it’s childish to think that children watch television for a certain section of time or those who access the internet haven’t heard of VPNs or they don’t know how to use them.

Porn filters in through torrents, WhatsApp and other means, forming a very twisted sense of what is “okay” or what can one pass off as normal even though it violates every moral fabric. India doesn’t need bans or curfew periods, it needs proper education about sex, consensual intimacy, more so in the pockets of tier II and tier III cities, where it runs rampant.

Without sounding preachy, there should be more awareness on how to protect people from revenge porn or one should say no to advances of filming an intimate moment, even if the other partner says “koi nahi dekhega” or “I will delete it.”