Boys between the ages of 8 and 16 are particularly lured to the porn sites through ‘porn-napped’ and ‘typosquatted’[191] Websites. Figures reveal that nearly 90% of boys aged 8 to 16 who have access to the Internet, have viewed pornographic sites while doing their homework (Jayachandran, 2003). In fact, the easy accessibility of pornographic content has led to a growing interest in pornography among school-age children and urban youth who have now moved beyond simply watching pornography to shooting their own porn videos and uploading them online.
This trend becomes even clearer as mainstream news media in India keep breaking shocking stories about Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) scandals involving school children and pornographic rings being busted by police after they engaged in the filming and distribution of ‘reality’ sex videos shot with hidden cameras.
• In December 2004, the country was rocked when the news of the now infamous Delhi Public School MMS sex scandal broke. A 17-year-old schoolboy filmed his girlfriend in a sex act and made the footage into a pornographic film. The video was circulated widely online and by roadside DVD vendors.
• A girl in Siliguri committed suicide in October, 2010, after an obscene MMS clip which captured her in a compromising position was made and circulated by Anindya Garai, a fellow student at the Siliguri Polytechnic Institute.
• In October 2010, 4 students of a school in Salt Lake, Kolkata, and West Bengal sent porn MMS clips to one of their teachers – just for the fun of it.
• In November 2010, 38-year-old Sarvjit Singh, an architect, was arrested for making a MMS clip of a girl in the Dalanwala area. The girl complained to the police after being blackmailed by Singh.
• In December 2010, a woman in Murshidabad, West Bengal, had her own husband arrested for allegedly shooting their intimate moments on a cell phone and circulating it online.
• Also in 2010, the ‘North Karnataka MMS’ featured a former beauty queen from Dharwad. The clip was uploaded by her ex-boyfriend after she had dumped him.
These uncovered cases reveal a deep link between pornography and real life sexual violence. Those who frequent pornography sites are more likely to view sex as a purely physical function and to regard women as sex objects. They are also more likely to hold such views permanently if they perceive the material as more realistic. A survey by Jochen Peter and Patti M. Valkenburg about Dutch teenagers, published in The Journal of Communication in 2006, has found that there is a relationship between porn use and the feeling that it is not necessary to have affection for people to have sex with them. Boys were much more likely to hold such views than girls.
The Mizoram police also found a link between the increased incidence of sexual assaults including rape and paedophilia, and the watching of pornographic tapes and videos. The Aizawl superintendent of police, Lalbiakthanga Khaingte, commented that convicted rapists and others caught for assaulting young girls and minors confessed to having watched porn videos before committing such crimes (Karmakar, 2010).
For those who cannot access the Internet, the Indian pornography industry produces ‘blue’ movies mostly in Hindi, Bengali, Malayalam and Tamil languages. Local cable networks show these pornographic films in the middle of the night. They are also sold as DVDs. Some hardcore Indian porn is available illegally in Indian markets through high-speed Solid State Drive (SSD) productions.
Earlier scripts in Indian pornography often included lengthy bathroom scenes featuring the lead actress who is later raped by 2 or 3 men simultaneously and penetrated in the mouth, vagina and anus. In more recent pornography, most of the girls depicted as ‘porn stars’ in the films seem to be in their early teens. The preference is for very young girls, especially real clips of schools students, or girls in school uniforms or frocks. A new trend is to depict the rape of tribal girls, especially from hill tribes:
• In January 2011, a porn clip of a young tribal girl being forced to disrobe and walk naked for 8 km and being molested by 100 men hit the markets as DVDs and videotapes.
• In West Bengal in July, 2010, a private tutor in Burdwan was lynched to death by a mob after a porn DVD featuring one of his students hit the market.
• In a film called Deepa India, a teenage girl, Deepa, is seen stripping in front of a camera before she is sexually abused. This seems to be a real life video shot of a college girl coaxed into being filmed, or filmed unknowingly.
• In Sonia Mauled by Three Studs, a girl dressed in a frock is forced to have violent penetrative sex with 3 youths. She is down on her knees sucking on three large Indian penises, at the same time as these boys take turns to penetrate her. They also use dildos and cucumbers whilst screaming abuse at her.
• To satisfy the demand for depicting the rape of girls from Indigenous hill tribes, pornographic films are made in Nepal’s homes. “Watch these nepali’s [sic] bang hard in desi style”, says the cover of a DVD readily available in Kathmandu. “Exclusive Nepali sex” boasts another.
The greatest number of child pornography videos are shot in Nepal and this has attracted a large number of paedophiles from Britain, Germany and USA who now prefer Nepal over their traditional hunting grounds of Thailand and Cambodia (Mukherjee, and Basu, 2007). The most talked about scandal that attracted public notice and condemnation was the case of Irish poet, Cathal O’Searcaigh, who abused street kids and young boys in Nepal (Sarkar, 2010).
In India and Nepal, pornography filmmakers are increasing the exploitation of women as well as coercing and forcing young children into making homemade cheap pornographic videos for sale. The police suspected that Moninder Singh Pandher, accused in the Noida serial killings case, might be part of an international child pornography racket (Sinha, 2007). They seized photographs of nude children from his residence as well as pornographic literature, a laptop computer and a web cam.
In India, Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code (1860) provides protection from child pornography.[192] But Section 292 does not per se deal with obscenity online. This difficulty was solved by the insertion of Section 29A which included electronic documents also within the purview of documents thus making the law applicable to electronic media as well (see Indian Child, 2010).
Growing concerns over the pernicious effect of porn on children and adults alike, and the rise in abductions, coercion and shooting of illicit porn films without the knowledge of the victims, have finally led the Indian Government in December 2008 to pass RAID or The Information Technology (Amendment) Bill with 45 amendments. The law now treats both purveyors and recipients of pornography in the same manner and provides a full section subtitled “punishment for publishing or transmitting of material depicting children in sexually explicit acts, etc. in electronic format” (in Gilani, 2008).
Most pornographic ‘tableaus’ depict women as being submissive and passive. A woman undresses, assumes a number of sexual positions, the male protagonist(s) achieve(s) orgasm – this is the typical formula that the majority of porn scripts follow. Pornographers use every aspect of a woman’s body, sexualise it and find a way to dehumanise it.
Books, postcards, magazines, painting, animation, drawing, videos, films, video games, sound recording, photos, sculpture… pornography uses all these mediums to present sexually graphic content. Books and magazines published in different Indian languages have a long history from early Bat tala publications to modern magazines like Meri Kahaniyan (Hindi), Satya Kahaniyan (Hindi), Alokpaat (Bengali).
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7 ‘Typosquatting’, also called URL hijacking, is a form of cybersquatting which relies on mistakes such as typographical errors made by Internet users when inputting a Website address into a Web browser. Should a user accidentally enter an incorrect Website address, they may be led to an alternative Website owned by a cybersquatter. Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typosquatting, accessed April, 2011).
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8 It is important to note that in India, pornography is legally defined as obscenity. See Rana (1990).