Child porn ring on WhatsApp busted: Why India hasn't been able to fully crack down on paedophilia

On February 23, the CBI claimed to have busted a child porn racket operating over a WhatsApp group, which had members from several countries. The main administrator of the group, a 20-year-old unemployed man from Kannauj in Uttar Pradesh, has been arrested, the CBI said, while four others have been booked.  

According to the CBI, the group was called KidsXXX and had 119 members from the US, China, Pakistan and Brazil, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Nigeria, Mexico and New Zealand, besides India.

The investigative body is now trying to trace the members. The source of the sex videos circulated on the group is not yet clear, and it is not known if the administrators were involved in shooting, and not just sharing, child porn.

A child porn clip is a video recording of a heinous crime – it is illegal, not to mention depraved, to involve children in sexual activities, and recording it on camera is documenting their violation. Sharing such clips victimises the children repeatedly.  

The busting of this group has once again brought to fore the disgusting reality that child porn has a lot of consumers, and India is increasingly becoming a destination to satisfy such pernicious cravings.

In December last year, the Malappuram police in Kerala bust a group of child sexual predators on the messaging app Telegram.

According to a report published last year, “an offending video is created in India every 40 minutes. Kerala tops the list in uploading such content while Haryana leads in viewing it, on mobile. Alarmingly, 35-38 per cent of the total porn uploaded on the web is related to children or teenagers. Keywords like “schoolgirls”, “teens” and “desi girls” are among the top searched”. Mail Today quoted Pawan Duggal, a lawyer and IT expert, saying: “There is a massive demand for Indian content in the global market as it is much cheaper for them to buy. Websites are flooded with child pornography.”

India has strict laws to deal with pornography: Under the Information Technology Act, accessing, producing, recording, uploading or circulating child abuse videos or pictures are offences punishable with seven to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to Rs 10 lakh.

However, the problem seems to be in the implementation. India does not maintain a central database of such crimes. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) statistics do not provide any information on child pornography cases. 

What is equally worrying is India in the past decade has also emerged as a hub for “child sex tourism”, where paedophiles come to the country in the hope of easy access to children to sleep with. Goa is a major centre of this heinous crime, where, a Times of India  report had found, children were available for sex for as little as Rs 50.

The backwaters of Kerala are another haven for child sex abusers, where houseboats are used as easy cover for the indulging in child rape, which is exactly how paedophilia ought to be seen.

State indifference and unwillingness to upset the tourism apple cart have been cited as reasons for the disturbing trend.

Protecting a child from sexual abuse – which can leave behind lasting physical and emotional damage – is everyone’s responsibility, every individual, the government, the society as a whole. In November 2017, the government had ordered internet giants such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and WhatsApp to crack down on objectionable content regarding child pornography, rape and gang-rape being shared on the internet. 

The latest racket busted by the CBI is even more horrific – a systematic, sustained and collective enjoyment of something as terrible as child porn.

While the road to justice in this case is likely to be complicated with the accused residing in different countries, it is to be hoped that the guilty are brought to book and robust mechanisms to deal with such a menace can be evolved.

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