India as a country lies rock bottom when it comes to safeguarding human rights and especially child rights in particular, a notion which was further made evident by the much publicized Asifa rape case where an 8 year old girl named Asifa was brutally gang-raped, tortured and finally killed off allegedly by 4 men, who have been arrested and await further trial.
But you know what’s worse?
It’s not just the rapists who are to be blamed for this incident but us a society too, because we’ve been complicit to the crime in an even more heinous way.
The Asifa rape case gathered headlines for all the wrong reasons, since the dead body of the victim was subjected to a postmortem and investigation had revealed that she had been held captive inside a temple complex, where she was drugged and repeatedly raped by the accused. The arrests of the accused individuals caused widespread outrage from religious right wing groups, which further convoluted the main cause of the movement against the rape culture by communalizing the incident and arguing in favor of the accused.
But hey, we didn’t stop there.
Our inherent psychology where our sexual perversions are generally exhibited in their ultimate glory was again at a full show when it was reported via a Reddit thread that a certain popular porn website accessible in India was showing a heinous trend, where Indians were searching for porn using the search term “Asifa”, which quickly became the top trend in India on that website.
Yes. Ours is a population which has the propensity to be sexually aroused by the rape of an 8 year old girl. You can’t even pinpoint the amount of wrong aspects this incident has highlighted.
What will you pin-point? Paedophilia? Perversion? Voyeurism? Misogyny?
And what possible outcomes do you think our current legal system can bring about for this?
Sure, we have Section 67B of the Information Technology Act and The Protection Of Child From Sexual Abuses Act but these laws have little or no effect on the general psyche of people, compared to what they can do once a certain offense is committed.
As a system, you can punish one man (or multiple men) for sexually exploiting a child but what about the millions who want to watch that exploitation at the comfort of their computer screens?
Ex-NDTV journalist Nutan Manmohan rightly pointed out that cases like the Asifa Rape Case (also known as the Kathua Rape Case) and Surat Rape Case are a result of industrial quantities of brutal porn available; with zero intervention by ministry of IT & Technology in India and the telecom companies laugh their way to the bank because of these massive downloads.
No arguments there, at all.
Even if the government somehow manages to put an umbrella ban over child porn on the mainstream internet porn websites (not accounting for dark web), there is no guarantee that people still won’t search for rape porn or child porn, even if the ban is made effective immediately because that’s where the government can’t control the outcome of things.
Related: Web Hotline Launched To Curb Child Pornography In India
Somehow, someone will find a loophole to exploit and child porn will circulate regardless, a trend which had a distinct case where child porn was being spread over an international WhatsApp group, which was then later busted by the CBI in February.
The Central Government had also reported to the Supreme Court in 2017 about blocking over 5000 websites containing child porn but as a logical human being, understand this:
Just because there is no supply, doesn’t mean there will be no demand.
The perverted idea of rape-based voyeurism only goes ahead and shows how sexually and ethically backward we are as a collective and how much we enjoy exploitation, no matter if it’s done to a woman, a teenage girl or in this case, an 8 year old child.
Even after the gruesome Asifa rape case, we have learnt nothing.
About damn time we start educating our boys.
Image Credits: Google Images
Sources: Wikipedia, The Indian Express, Hindustan Times + more
You’d Also Like To Read:
http://edtimes.in/2018/04/kathua-rape-case-accused-demons-need-more-attention-than-the-victim-lets-share-their-names-faces/
