The spike in cases of child pornography reflects the grim picture of online child sexual abuse in India.
New Delhi: India has one of the most avid users of pornographic websites. Unfortunately, the industry shows several harmful content, including online child sexual abuse. The spike in cases of child pornography reflects the grim picture of online child sexual abuse in India. The data compared by The Sunday Guardian between Lok Sabha 2021 and NCRB 2021 indicates the cases have increased from 738 (2020) to 969 (2021).
To understand the challenges in identifying cases of child pornography, this correspondent spoke to the director of the Rati Foundation, who works on the protection of women and children, online and offline. The director, Siddharth P, said, “When a girl child is above 15, it becomes visually difficult to identify whether the child is below 18 or not. The cases are usually registered faster in the case of older children, but the cases of online abuse of children between 14-18 years of age are difficult to trace.”
Also, the idea of victim shaming is still prevalent in Indian society. “The police and other stakeholders always question the victim—‘Why did YOU do it?’ There is an urgent need for all stakeholders to go beyond questioning victims as they may have gotten trapped in this exploitation.”
The Indian government has strict laws against such abusive content under Section 14 and Section 15 of the POCSO Act. Section 14 of the POCSO Act speaks of punishment for using children for pornographic purposes, whereas Section 15 of POCSO refers to punishment for the storage of pornographic material involving children. However, there are other loopholes too.
Talking about the loopholes, Advocate Kumar Shailabh, who works with HAQ: Centre for Child Rights, told this paper, “Section 14 and Section 15 of the POCSO Act have a wide range of offences specific to children pornography. However, we need to look at whether our investigative agencies are equipped enough to understand and invoke such offenses.”
Similarly, in the report dated 29 July 2022, the Lok Sabha stated that the pendency of POCSO cases has increased over the years. In 2019, 135184 POCSO cases are pending, whereas the number has increased to 170271 in 2020. “There is an alarming rate of POCSO cases pending (95%) at courts, which shows whether the courts are equipped enough to understand the seriousness of POCSO Act Section 14 and Section 15,” Advocate Shailabh added.
Also, the offenders use image hosting services to distribute such abusive content. According to the Internet Watch Federation (IWF), offenders use free-to-use services where no payment is required to create an account and upload the content. These are hidden services, otherwise known as websites hosted within proxy networks or dark webs, that are challenging to detect as the location of the hosting servers cannot be traced normally.
As per the NCRB report, Delhi reported 161 incidents and 161 child victims. Karnataka has reported 159 incidents, and 167 were child victims. Kerala had 129 cases with children as victims.
According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, 78% of the reports involved female children, and 15% involved male children as victims. Several times, the offenders approach the youngster on a social networking site and obtain information about their family. Then, the offender tries to switch the communication to an anonymous messaging app, where they access sexually explicit content through a messaging app or live video chat. Then, these images and contents are used against children who ultimately become the victims of sextortion.
To deal with such cases with seriousness, the Department of Justice is implementing a scheme for setting up 1023 Fast Track Special Courts and 389 Exclusive POCSO Courts for trial and disposable cases. As of now, 892 Fast Track Special Courts are functional in India. Currently, the Delhi Police has blocked 23 Twitter accounts for allegedly posting tweets about rape and child pornography. The CBI has also conducted raids at 59 locations in 21 states and UTs as part of its “Operation Megh Chakra” against the online distribution and sharing of materials containing child sex abuse.