Hasan Khurshid
The easy access to online obscene content is making an increasing number of people getting hooked on to the extent of perversion
Online pornography has literally created a ‘porn pandemic' as deadly as ‘COVID-19'. Experts trace a marked correlation between watching pornography and sexual crimes. Pornography is a Greek word, which originally meant “writing about prostitutes”.
Today, according to modified version of Kuhn etal-2007, “Pornography is a communication material provided for the purpose of arousing or gratifying a user in isolation from others or in company of others.” Pornography is “perversion”. It provides a field for deviant and violent fantasies to be developed eventually leading to some viewers acting out those fantasies in practice. Before the advent of online pornography, the compulsive voyeur used to haunt public places, parks and bedroom windows from where he could surreptitiously watch courting couples. Now the voyeur is privileged to watch couples on screen. After getting constantly aroused, he would prowl around in search of a soft target, mainly the tender-aged child, as many a time the voyeur has low level of sexuality and finds himself partially impotent with a grown up woman.
Alfred C Kinsey considered voyeurism to be limited solely to men, but in the US, the 1971 Commission of Pornography and Obscenity revealed that women responded to visual stimulation, pictures of nudes, in the same way as men do. According to a recent survey, a large number of users of these porn sites is not adults but adolescents.
Does online pornography have the destructive power to turn a simple normal, everyday man into rapist or murderer? Why this alarming question does not surface every time a rape with murder, especially of children and infants, hits the headlines. Ironically, there is no stringent law in India on full viewing of sexual acts online; whereas, on the contrary, the law of the land showed its utter sensitivity on obscenity under the provisions of Section 292 and 293 of IPC.
This is evident from the fact that Kamlesh Vaswani, Advocate, filed in the Supreme Court a petition seeking to ban pornography in India and praying for direction to the Government to treat watching of porn videos and sharing as non-bailable and cognisable offence, but the Government supported pornography in the court.
The Attorney General submitted that if someone wished to watch porn within their bedroom, how can the State interfere with such an activity? He asserted that the Government did not want to do moral policing and that we (India) cannot become a totalitarian State by banning all pornographic websites because clampdown would infringe the “Right to freedom”. The State's action may raise issues regarding privacy rights.
Chief Justice HL Dattu, who had used a similar line during the previous hearing, interrupted and said: “Mr Attorney, why are you using our lines?” The Attorney General further contended: “Simply viewing an obscene object is not an offence. It becomes an offence only when someone has in possession such objects for the purpose of sale, hire, distribution, public exhibition or putting it into circulation.”
Petitioner's counsel Vijay Panjwani argued that “criminal activity is a criminal activity”, whether carried out in private or public. Moreover, when the obscene object has come on the internet, it has already been circulated and automatically becomes “public”. Subsequently, on February 26, 2016, Additional Solicitor General Pinky Anand told Justice Dipak Misra: “It is difficult to ban pornographic websites as they do not fall under any country's jurisdiction.”
Differing, the Bench said: “When obscenity is an offence under the criminal law, then why can't you define it accordingly? It has already been decided that freedom of speech and expression is not absolute.” The petitioner's counsel contended: “There is technology available to block such sites. In India, there are 11 towers which receive signals from under water cables of foreign countries. A technologist from Banaras Hindu University has undertaken to block all those 11 points that receive porn contents. It is a very low-budget technology, provided the Government agrees to it.” A committee under the leadership of then Communications Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad had been constituted to review this matter but he gave the statement: “We are not a control freak Government and strongly object to the word Talibanisation.”
In fact, there is enough evidence available about the link between serial killers/rapists and their addiction to pornography. The accused of the Delhi gang rape case of December 2012, in their 164 Criminal Penal Code statement, had admitted that before committing the ghastly crime, they had consumed liquor, watched pornography, and then decided to have a party (they meant committing rape).
In his interview to Games C Dobson, notorious American serial killer Ted Bundy seven hours before his execution in the electric chair documented: “I was a normal person. I led a common life except for this one segment. Pornography can reach in and snatch a kid out of any house today. It snatched me out of my home 30 years ago. I deserve, certainly, the most extreme punishment society has. And I think society deserves to be protected from me and from others like me.” According to Gover-nment's figures in December 2017, a child is sexually abused every 15 minutes, still the authorities are more concerned on ‘naked capitalism'.
(The writer is a legal journalist and author. The views expressed are personal.)
