Pornography is a Greek word, which originally meant “writing about prostitutes”. Today the definition of pornography considerably varies across cultures, regions, religions and generations. According to modified version of Kuhn etal-2007, “Pornography is a communication material provided for the purpose of sexually arousing or gratifying a user in isolation from others or in company of others.”
According to experts, pornography is ‘perversion’. It provides a field for deviant and violent fantasies to be developed eventually leading to some viewers acting out those fantacies in practice.
Before the advent of online pornography, the compulsive voyeur used to haunt public places, parks, and bed room windows from where he could surreptitiously watch courting couples. The perverted voyeur in experts’ view may be frightened of sexual inadequacy, many of them are partially impotent with women and prefer voyeurism because there they dominate the situation psychologically.
Alfred C Kinsey considered voyeurism to be limited solely to men, but in United States, the 1971 Commission of Pornography and Obscenity revealed that women responded to visual stimulation, pictures of nudes, in the same way as men.
Does online pornography has the destructive power to turn a simple normal, everyday man into rapist or murderer? This alarming question surfaces everytime a rape with murder especially of children and infants hits the headlines.
Online pornography has literally converted the entire society into a ‘Dystopia’ full of immoral, sordid and corrupt behavior or activites. Experts trace a marked co-relation between watching pornography and sexual crimes.
Anytime, someone sensible talks about regulating porn, some morons and perverts start referring the prohibition of pornography with minted pet words like ‘Talibanistan’, ‘freedom of speech’, ‘moral policing’, ‘personal liberty’, ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘privacy rights’ etc. Watching porn is considered as ‘fundamental right’ by these great souls. There is no life without watching porn for these enlightened people in power and the same is necessary for them as water, air and food.
Porn consumption has come a long way from 40 years ago, when one had to watch it through Video Home System(VHS) video recording on tape casettes, developed by Victor company of Japan in 1970s. However, since the late 1990s, with the proliferation of the ‘Internet’ and ‘world-wide-web’, pornography viewing has reached to the stage of epidemic, thereby creating the sex culture in India and forming the dicturn, “pornography is the theory- rape is the practice”.
In Ranjit D Udeshi case, the partners of a book-stall, were prosecuted under Section 292 IPC for selling copies of an allegedly obscene book, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D H Lawrence, but the same ‘law of land’ is silent on online hardcore pornography, having tendency of ‘exciting lustful thoughts’ resulting in rapes, in total disregard to ‘community standards’. This shows that the ‘law of land’ does not permit the slightest obscenity ‘offline’ but does allow the worst kind of hardcore pornography ‘online’.
This is evident from the fact when a good intentioned citizen, Kamlesh Vaswani, Advocate, filed in Supreme Court, a petition No.177 of 2013, seeking to ban pornography in India and praying for direction to the Government of India to treat watching of porn videos and sharing as non-bailable and cognizable offence, but the Government of India supported pornography in supreme court.
Attorney General submitted that if someone wished to watch porn within their bedroom, how can the State interfere with such an activity. He asserted that the government did not want to do moral policing and that we (India) cannot become a totalitarian State by banning all pornographic websites because clampdown would infringe the ‘right to freedom’. State action may raise issues regarding the privacy rights.
CJI Dattu, who had used a similar line during the previous hearing, interrupted and said, “Mr. Attorney, why are you using our lines?”
“The Attorney General further contended, “Simply viewing an obscene object is not an offence. It becomes an offence only when someone has in possession such objects for the purpose of sale, hire, distribution, public exhibition or putting it into circulation.”On this appearing for the petitioner, learned counsel, Vijay Panjwani argued that criminal activity is a criminal activity, whether carried out in private or public. Moreover, when the obscene object has come on Internet, it has already been circulated and automatically becomes ‘public’.
Subsequently, on February 26, 2016, before the Bench of Justice Dipak Misra, Additional Solicitor General, Pinky Anand spelling out the government stand argued, “It is difficult to ban pornographic websites as it involves privacy rights and does not fall under any country’s jurisdiction.”
The bench here differed from Pinky Anand and said, “when obscenity is an offence under the criminal law then why can’t you define it accordingly. It has already been decided that freedom of speech and expression is not absolute.”
Talking to Lawyers Update, Vijay Panjwani said, “The government does not have willingness to block the porn websites for obvious reasons, but the fact remains that there is technology available to block such sites. Panjwani revealed that in India there are eleven towers which receive the signals from under water cables of foreign countries. A technologist from Banaras Hindu University has undertaken to block all those eleven points who receive porn contents. It is a very low budget technology, provided government agrees to it. He further pointed out that a committee under the leadership of communication minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, has been constituted to review this matter but how can you expect the blocking of porn websites when earlier he has given a statement, “we are not a control freak government and strongly object to the word Talibanisation.”
According to Neeraj Aarora, Cyber expert & Advocate on Record, Supreme Court of India, “The publication of pornography on the internet is a continuing offence as internet is now treated as a public place and as such, every type of pornography on the net , whether adult or child attracts criminal prosecution. It is the duty of the State not only to punish the disseminators of such obscene material but also to block the content in the larger interest of the society. Though, it is not possible to completely block the pornography from the internet but the same can be prevented to a large extent by deploying various techniques. It includes blocking of the obscene websites at the ISP levels which requires the identification of pornographic websites and blocking their URL at ISP level. The framework used by various countries is to create an entity whose job is to identify the pornographic websites which are required to be blocked and categorize them as ‘Black Website’ and the data of such black websites is shared with ISP for blocking. There will be two challenges:-
Rouge website will change their URLs to byepass the control and as such new website would again be categorized as Black Website and this game of Cat & Mouse will go on but still 99% of the pornographic material can be blocked.
VPN & proxy websites can be used to byepass the control but still a large segment of the society can be shielded from harm.”
The Supreme Court Women Lawyers Association (SCWLA) also filed Intervention Application (I.A.) in the apex court which was admitted on February 26, 2016, as I.A. No. 6 of 2015 in Kamlesh Vaswani vs. Union of India case. Senior Advocate Mahalakshmi Pavani, appearing for SCWLA, expressed her agony by submitting that the child pornography is spreading like cancer and it would not be out of place to call it a moral cancer. Pavani brought to the notice of the court, how a school bus driver and his helper were arrested as they had forced the school children to watch pornography on their mobile phones and molested them.
Renowned Supreme Court advocate, K.C Kaushik, expressing anger on government’s illogical version of privacy rights, totalitarianism and moral policing etc. said that before the advent of online porn, no one had even heard of child rape but today headlines are flooded with news pertaining to child rape. It is shameful that the government instead of safeguarding the honour and lives of women and girls is defending the perpetrators of the sex crimes in the open court. Is the government not sacrificing the lives of women and children at the altar of the service providers with the view to generate revenue?
K.C Kaushik pointed out that the epidemic of pornography has not gripped the teenagers, illeterates only but has caught hold people of highest status and matured mind too. In March, 2015, Britain sacked three judges while a fourth resigned after allegations that they viewed pornography on official computers. The Judicial Conduct Investigations Office said in a statement that Lord Thomas of Cwygiedd, the Lord Chief Justice and Chris Grayling, the Lord Chief Justice, had investigated allegations against the four judges. They concluded that it was an inexcusable misuse of court equipment and condemned the judges’ conduct as wholly unacceptable.
Kaushik rejected government’s stand that online pornography cannot be blocked technically. He cited the example of China, where in 2014, Chinese Government’s National Office Against Pornographic and Illegal Publications, had launched a movement to crackdown the online pornography by employing thousands of educated internet savvy youth to remove obscene videos, even cartoons that were deemed too risque.
Sharing his views with Lawyers Update, Dependra Pathak, IPS, Special Commissioner of Police, Delhi, said, “Pornography as of today has become a larger issue which needs to be debated holistically. The issue no more rests in the domain of police and courts. The definition of the term ‘human sexuality’ is not a limiting factor. Social norms differ from culture to culture and country to country. Social norms are again bound to change with the fast changing technological developments. As such, Parliament is the right place to decide on such issues.”
Pathak however clarified that as Delhi Police spokesperson, he recommends stringent provisions to contain pornography. He suggested amendments in Sections 292, 293 of IPC by inserting punishment for producing, disseminating and viewing porn sites. Pathak agreed that this online menace is in the result of misuse of technology by (naked) capitalism.
Here are some facts showing co-relation between porn and rape:-
“Inspite of the lack of formal research, though, the Federal Bureau of investigations’ (FBI) own statistics show that pornography is found at 80% of the scenes of violent sex crimes, or in the homes of the perpetrators.” (Anderson K.J; (2003).
In fact there is a bunch of evidence about that link. The University of New Hampshire did a study that showed that the states with the highest readership of pornographic magazines like Playboy and Penthouse also have the highest rape rates. (Baron, L; & straus, M. (1984). The Michigan State Police Department found that pornography is used or imitated in 41%of the sex crimes they have investigated. (Campbell, M.C. & Campbell, J.M. (2005).
Dr. Victor Cline in his research, “Pornographic Effects on Adults and Children” (2009) showed how men who become addicted to pornographic materials begin to want more explicit or deviant material and end up acting out what they have seen.
Two doctors revealed in their research-based book, “Pornography and Sexual Aggression” that “certain (aggressive) forms of pornography can affect aggressive attitude toward woman and can desensitize an individual’s perception of rape.” They also found that adult pornography was connected with each of the 1400 child sexual molestation cases in Louisville, Kentucky, and child pornography was connected with majority of them. (Malamuth N.M. Donnerstein E (1982)).
Zillmann in his study, “Effects of Prolonged Consumption of Pornography” (1986) writes that extensive viewing of the pornographic material commonly sold at adult bookstores was positively co-related with an increased self-reported willingness to commit rape or other forced sexual acts.
Dr. Dolf Zillmann and Dr. Jennings Bryant in their study (1982) found that continued exposure to pornography had serious negative effects on beliefs about sexuality in general, and on attitudes toward women in particular. They also found that pornography desensitizes people to rape as a criminal offence and that massive exposure to pornography encourages a desire for increasingly deviant materials that depict violence such as sado-masochism and rape.
The Kingston Sexual offenders clinic in Canada conducted a study of their patients over a period of six years and found that 10 of the 10 rapists said that they used pornography to incite rape fantasies. (Marshal, W.L. (1988).
Kingston D.A. (2008) in Aggressive Behavior, Vol 34, page 341-351, writes a number of studies have shown that pornography activates and reinforces inappropriate cognitive representations (viz. hostility towards women) and fosters the development of sexual preoccupation in these men.
In ‘Effects of Prolonged Consumption of Pornography’ Zillmann conducted a research for the Surgeon General of the United States in 1986, and concluded that extensive viewing of pornographic material may produce negative sociological effects, including a decreased respect for long-term monogamous relationships and an attenuated desire for procreation.
Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer of Wisconsin, who killed 17 people before hunting for a victim used to watch pornographic videos and the magazines.
Andrei Chikatilo, a Russian serial killer murdered atleast 53 children and women. He was found with pictures of naked women in his prison cell, he blamed pornography as the cause of these troubles.
Ed Gein alias ‘The Butcher of Plainfield’, the serial killer had “accumulated a library of porn magazines in the 1950s”. John Wayne Gacy’s wife had filed a suit for divorce in 1976 because Gacy had killed atleast 33 young boys in Chicago, Illinois.
Dennis Rader, a Kansas native who killed 10 people had a collection of pornography. David Berkowitz killed over a dozen people in New York. He had joined a cult and was introduced to sadistic pornography and violent crime. Richard Ramirez was exposed to having pornographic pictures of his cousin raping Vietnamese women. He killed 13 people in California.
Edmund Kemper, a serial killer of California was a Necrophile, used pornography for erotic stimulation. He picked up women for hitch-hiking, then killed and raped them post-mortem. Ottis toole from Florida became obsessed with gay pornography. He committed his first murder at the age of 14. During his killing spree accompanied by Henry Lee Lucas, he killed 108 boys.
Lonnie Franklin Jr. had a penchant for prostitutes and pornography. He would pick up prostitutes, take pornographic pictures of his victims, then strangle them to death. His killing spree included 11 murders. Mark Bridger, a UK native in 2013 abducted April Jones, he viewed online photographs of a young girl and a pornographic cartoon depicting rape before raping and killing Jones.
In the 2013 murder case of Tia Sharp, a 12 year old girl from UK, the judge declared to murderer Stuart Hazell, “The records of your internet searching on your mobile phone make abundently clear that you were looking out for pornographic pictures of little girls.”
In India, a series of ghastly incidents of gang rapes reported from Sangam Vihar, Badarpur, Gandhi Nagar etc.; Delhi police carried out a survey to find out the causal factors and had found that in all the cases the accused committed the crime of rape after consuming liquor and watching porn due to its easy availability on internet.
The Bangalore school rape case accused arrested in July, 2014 had child porn on his laptop when it was seized by the police. He had a folder full of child pornography downloaded from the internet. Most of the downloaded videos depicted children in school uniforms being raped.
Manoj Kumar and his friend Pradeep Ram, the rapist of five year old child were watching pornographic video clips on a mobile phone shortly before they abducted the child from their neighbourhood, starved her for two days, raped her multiple times, strangulated her and left her unconscious in a pool of blood after trying to slit her throat.
In May, 2013, a 28 year old bus driver and his helper from a South Delhi school were arrested by Hauz Khas police for molesting some minor students and forcing them watch pornography.
According to the learned council of Kamlesh Vaswani case, Vijay Panjwani, “The accused of Delhi gang rape case of Dec, 2012, in their 164 Cr. PC statement had admitted that before committing the ghastly crime, they consumed liquor, watched pornography, then decided to have party(they meant committing rape).
According to government figures in Dec, 2017, a child is sexually abused every 15 minutes. India with one-fifth of the world’s children holds the dubious distinction of having the largest number of child sexual abuse cases.
The case of Delhi based tailor, Sunil Rustogi, is yet another example of raping minors after watching child pornography. Rustogi was charged with assaulting over a hundred minor girls inspite of serving an earlier sentence.
No sane person would like to talk about a beast in human form but the lessons that the notorious American serial killer, Ted Bundy’s life offers are worth mentioning here. In his interview given to Games C Dobson, seven hours before his execution through electric chair, Bundy documented his early exposure to hard core pornography saying that the porn watching had a crystallizing effect on his violent tendencies which eventually led him to acting out his evil fantacies.
Renowned Supreme Court lawyer, Reena Singh firmly asserted, “In my opinion, online pornography should be banned in India by declaring ‘public health crises’. Since 2011, there have been atleast 24 studies that have revealed online porn negatively impacting the young brain which may actually be altered by pornography. Researchers have found that internet porn or addictive substance like drugs have very similar effects on the brain. We need to create awareness and fight against the porn industry that is tangibly harming youth, relationships and society as a whole. It features degredation, abuse and humiliation of females in a way never before seen in the mass media. Moreso, besides criminality, it amounts to Indecent Representation of Women. It is connected to violence against woman and girl child. The total ban by law is the need of the hour.”
Reena Singh revealed, “Researchers found that of all the factors considered, porn use is the second strongest indicator that a marriage would suffer. It distorts sexual attitudes and social realities. In families, porn activities lead to marital dissatisfaction, infidelity, separation and divorce.”
Reena Singh is right as recently a Mumbai based 27 year old woman has filed a complaint in Supreme Court through Advocate Kamlesh Vaswani, saying that her 35 year old husband is suffering from acute porn addiction to the extent he is indifferent to her physical and material needs and has been insisting on divorce with mutual consent.
A Turkish woman named Gunul, in Feb, 2015, had slit the throat of her husband as he had become a pervert and used to watch porn throughout night. He used to beat her for refusing to act out scenes he had watched.
Doctor Mary Anne Layden, talking about ‘Porn and Marriage’, reportedly said, “Pornography damages the sexual performance of the viewers. They tend to have problems with premature ejaculation and erectile dysfunction. Having spent so much time in unnatural sexual experience with offline or online pornography, they find it difficult to have sex with real human being.”
It is unfortunate that many woman activist NGOs and individuals who claim to be the passionate supporters of women cause failed to respond our questionnaire on the subject for reasons best known to them.
One such woman rights activist, Ranjana Kumari gave only this hotch potch response, “My views on porn and impact on perverted sexual behavior are well known. However I don’t have any evidence for it as we have not conducted any research on this subject.”
The Committee on Petitions of Rajya Sabha had presented its 152nd Report on August 6, 2015, to the Rajya Sabha on the petition praying to put a check on cyber pornography by amending the Information Technology Act, 2000. Suggestions obtained from the stakeholders/individuals were duly incorporated in the said Report.
Sensing the dangerous effects of satanic porn culture, generating sex related crimes, Madhya Pradesh Government has recently asked the Central Government to enact a strong law to block porn sites as the existing laws were not effective in checking the growth of such sites.
Bhupendra Singh, the State Home Minister blamed such websites for rise in cases of rape. The porn sites impact tender minds of the children, hence such sites need to be blocked. The minister further said that the MP Government has blocked 25 such sites but the central law is need of the hour.
Is the Central Government listening to MP Government?
