The Asifa story is disturbing at many levels. It is nothing surprising that much like the Jyoti Singh gangrape and consequent death, even this case has attracted sharp stories from the west including the New York Times. The UN too has intervened calling for immediate action.
Even as we speak India has been raising its voice by gatherings and protest marches. Alarmingly the fetish to search videos of Asifa Bano online on porn sites has not gone well with many. But hard truth is that the problem emanates from our clear ignorance and the ever flourishing industry that despite curbs continues to create child pornography.
The 8 year old was drugged, abducted and raped for days on. There has been massive politics, sensationalism and communalisation of the issue.
While limits were seriously crossed, it came to public eye that Asifa, who had to endure such a tragedy was being actively searched for on a porn site. Her name was trending at number 1 position.
Social media users have been very vocal about this development saying that this is not acceptable. Knowingly or unknowingly the idea of child pornography exists because some take interest in it.
India, Pakistan and Bangladesh saw the trends show Asifa.
Reports of just a year back by Mail Today clearly seem to suggest that while the government seemed to have tried to crackdown on pornsites sites regulating such content, India has emerged as one of the biggest contributors and consumers of child pornography.
Reportedly adult content is created in India every 40 seconds.
While we rally for the Asifa porn site search, sadly statistics show 35-38 per cent of total porn uploaded online relates to children or teenagers.
Reports estimate Indians watching porn online spend an average eight minutes, 22 seconds per visit viewing an average 7.32 pages per visit
A quarter of Pornhub’s users in India are female, just above the world average of 23%.
Keywords like ‘schoolgirls’, ‘teens’ and ‘desi girls’ are among top trends say analysts. With search engines getting over 1,16,000 queries related to child pornography each day, a search on Asifa should not irk us.
25 per cent of all search engine queries are related to pornography which will be about 68 million search queries a day.’
Experts say among the most vulnerable are school students, children in rural areas and those from underprivileged backgrounds.
While the Centre did talk of blocking 3,522 adult websites a few years back, it was the Indian populace that upped the ante against this move.
The other theory to the inability to block a long list of sites by the government was clarified by Nikhil Pahwa, editor and publisher of MediaNama, which monitors digital policy in India, who said in an interview he feared Modi government was creating a government-controlled web filter in the garb of regulating porn.
Recent studies by the University of Tasmania have only proven true the worst fears. It underlines that there has been a dramatic expansion of child pornography market, which further acts as catalyst for hands-on abuse of children.
With growing access to private moments of couples or letting derogatory comments pass without checks we have only let this mindset further grow. Add to that Whatsapp and now we are sitting on a ticking timebomb.
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