No Porn Please, We’re Indian

Is there a case for banning porn in India? Or are we barking up the wrong tree as usual?

WrittenBy:Somi Das
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Online pornography is the in the eye of a storm in the aftermath of the gruesome rape of a five-year-old girl in the national capital. The fact that one of the accused watched porn on his phone before committing the crime has made the relation between online porn and crime and against women a drawing table topic. Through last week, TV channels have debated and discussed the issue in an attempt to relate porn consumption to crimes against women. Celebrity guests and social activists were seen vehemently arguing for or against the topic.

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However, much before details of the events leading up to the child’s rape emerged,  the Supreme Court had admitted a petition by Indore-based advocate, Kamlesh Vaswani, seeking a ban on porn sites.  According to Vaswani, watching obscene videos is one of the major causes of crime against women. The Court has sought a response from the ministries of Information and Technology, Information and Broadcasting and Home Affairs as well as the Internet Service Providers Association of India. News channels played up the fact that the accused watched porn before raping and torturing the minor girl. Thus building immense pressure on the government to take action. It will be no surprise if online pornography is made the scapegoat. A government that keeps looking for reasons to censor online content would only be too happy to entertain such a possibility.

Commenting on the prospect of porn being banned in India, Junior Minister for Information and Technology Milind Deora, in an interview to NDTV 24X7 said, “If the government decides to censor porn in some way, we (Ministry of communications and IT) will implement that, we have to find ways to do that with the internet, technology etc”. While watching porn is suddenly being made out to be the big villain by the likes of the Director of Centre for Social Research, Ranjana Kumari, who says that “watching porn makes men horny and attack women”, any solid statistics that establish a relation between consumption of pornography and an increase in crimes against women is absent. It is convenient to divert the discussion around a five-year-old’s brutal rape as an effect of watching porn.

Here are the facts. Yes, watching porn is legal in India. Its distribution is illegal. In February 2009, the Parliament passed the Information Technology Act which banned the creation and transmission of child pornography and made its browsing punishable. The punishment for a first-time offence of publishing, creating, exchanging, downloading or browsing any electronic depiction of children in an “obscene or indecent or sexually explicit manner” can attract five years in jail and a fine of Rs 10 lakh.

Interestingly, it is not just India where banning porn is being seriously considered as a measure to protect women and children from sexual violence. Our neighbor, Sri Lanka, keeps conducting organised drives against the local porn industry from time to time. In 2009, Sri Lankan Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (TRCS) blocked access to 12 porn sites. In 2010, it followed up the drive even more vigorously by blocking over 100 adult websites featuring Sri Lankan men and women. In an extreme move, in the same year, the Sri Lankan police released pictures of over 80 alleged local porn stars, mostly women in the media, to track them down. While nothing explains the logic behind such a witch-hunt, these drives have not been successful in bringing down crimes against women or children. Instead the rate of child rapes has only seen a northward movement. In 2012 alone between January and July, 700 minors have been victims of rape in the country.

It’s not just third world countries which think banning porn can stop sexual violence. Iceland, known as being an ultra-liberal European country, is campaigning to ban porn.  Iceland’s Minister of Interior, Ögmundur Jónasson, has proposed banning porn arguing that “tackling online porn, particularly the violent kind, is part of a broader set of policies to protect children and reduce sexual violence”. What triggered the campaign to ban porn in Iceland is not clear as the crime-rate in general, be it against women or children, is negligible.  The country is considered one of the safest places in the world for women. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap report for 2012, Iceland is the best place for women to be in terms of safety, gender sensitivity and participation of women in the workforce and the economy. The country has claimed the top spot in the report since 2009.

While Iceland’s intentions behind banning porn is being seen as just another step in its attempts to eliminate the sex industry entirely, (prostitution and strip clubs are illegal there), there are some countries who have used censoring online pornography as a means to keep a watch on the online medium – thus infringing the citizen’s freedom of speech.

The German Parliament passed a bill in 2009 imposing censorship of pornographic websites in the backdrop of the need to protect children. “The legislation was proposed by a coalition of German social democratic and conservative parties. It required the country’s federal criminal investigators to maintain a list of websites accused of containing child pornography and to distribute it to German ISPs, which will then be required to block queries to those websites with a stop sign.” The bill met with huge opposition from internet activists as it gave immense control over online content to investigators, which could be misused to randomly block any site. The governing parties ultimately decided in April 2011 to repeal the law altogether.

Similarly, in 2012, Russia passed a law called, “On the Protection of Children from Information that is Harmful to their Health and Development”. The law was meant to make it easier to block sites which have child pornography, promote drugs and provide instructions on how to commit suicide. However, the law has come under huge criticism. While the objective of the law is to stop content like child pornography from reaching citizens, it gives the Russian Federal Service for Supervision which oversees IT and telecom sectors, the power to blacklist websites without a court’s consent.

Keeping in mind apprehensions about online censorship and its repercussion on freedom of speech, the European Union recently junked the idea of voting in favour of banning porn. In March this year, the EU was on the brink of banning porn of all kind.  A report prepared by the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality called on EU member states “to take concrete action on its resolution on discrimination against women in advertising, which called for a ban on all forms of pornography in the media and on the advertising of sex tourism”. When the report was put for vote, it was passed with an overwhelming majority by the EU Parliament, however, sans  the contentious “porn ban” section. The proposal was shot down because of ambiguity over the term “media” and whether it included the online media. A majority of the member countries were not willing to venture into online censorship of any kind.

Returning to the Indian context, we need to keep in mind that when we are speaking about banning online porn, we are also venturing into the domain of online censorship. As seen in the case of Germany and Russia, banning online porn led to widespread misuse of the powers vested with the supervisory body. It is a little misdirected if a population’s demands for better policing to prevent crimes against women/ children turns into a campaign to ban online porn access. And when the police commissioner of the national capital refuses to take responsibility for procedural lapses and conduct of his officers and instead blames “depravity in society”, “sickness of mind” and “psychopathic behaviour of criminal” – you know by digressing from the core issue that we need better policing and stricter laws, we are only helping his and the establishment’s cause.

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