BANGALORE: Four south Indian states — Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu — account for almost 60% of the pornography cases booked in the country in 2010, 2011 and 2012.
Karnataka, where legislators watching porn clips in the assembly embarrassed the government a couple of years ago, stands third in the country with 114 cases. The assembly incident had prompted the government to install a software for blocking sexually explicit content. Kerala tops the table with 386 cases, while Maharashtra comes in second with 199 cases in the three-year period, according to information accessed from the ministry of home affairs.
“A total of 609 cases were booked in Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu during these three years, while the total number of cases across the country stands at 1,413,” a senior official said. Among other states, MP accounted for 100 cases, while Rajasthan, West Bengal and UP for 88, 70 and 61 cases respectively.
“It is a challenge technologically to prevent the uploading of such material. The number of cases does not reflect the correct picture. There are many more who go unpunished,” said the official.
Sections 67, 67A and 67B of the IT Act and sections of the IPC provide the legal framework to counter pornographic content, but the challenges of implementing them are complex. Just like any other cybercrime, the main hurdle is tracking the source of the content, which is often websites hosted outside the country.
Many raids have found a high prevalence of child pornography, with a total of 945 people arrested for it during 2009-2011.
Granting the correlation is not causation, I do find it interesting that India, which pursues pornography more zealously than almost any nation on earth, is also one of the most dangerous places on the planet for women. Rape is disgracefully common there and the lack of proctorial enthusiasm for going after rapists is more disgraceful still.
Perhaps they’re just too busy looking out for porn to invest any time or energy in protecting their own female citizens.