MP home minister needs to understand why banning porn won't stop rapes
Post the furore over gruesome rape cases like those in Kathua and Unnao it is only natural to expect that people across the nation would be more sensitised about rape culture and its entrenched presence in India. If only! Politicians in India, if nothing else, are consistent in making either banal or inane comments on rape. Madhya Pradesh’s home minister Bhupendra Singh is no exception.
Singh, on April 24, said that he believes pornography is the “main cause” for rapes in the state. He added that he has written to the Centre on Monday to ban access to all porn sites.
“A study by the MP home department revealed pornography is adversely impacting childhood, with even young boys and girls getting easy access to it. Rape and sexual assault are a result of access to these sites,” said Singh, without disclosing the details of such a study. He added, “Though some 25 porn sites have been banned, we do not have direct control over such sites. So, we have urged the Union government to ban all porn sites and introduce a stringent law to control porn.”
This is not the first time a ban on porn sites has been proposed in the name of curbing sexual violence. In 2015, the Centre ordered the blocking of 857 pornographic websites, with plans to put in place an ombudsman to look into cyber content-related issues; all this in the name of preventing pornography from becoming a social nuisance.
The ban was prompted by a petition filed in the Supreme Court by a lawyer seeking a blanket ban on such sites because according to him, it was socially destructive and promoted violence against women. His petition argued that watching porn puts the country's security in danger and also propels men to commit sex crimes. Of course, the order had to be taken back and all pornographic websites that did not host child porn were allowed to function.
Porn has been widely accessible in India. And rapes, other gendered crimes and sexual violence have only gone up across the nation. But is there a correlation?
The first thing that needs to be addressed is that pornography, especially the most commonly available kind, perpetuates negative notions. Pornography in general can be excruciatingly misogynistic and violent towards women. Often, it is racially problematic. Sometimes there is abuse involved. And more than anything else, the young and naïve who grow up watching a steady stream of porn can develop not just wrong, but also problematic ideas about what intimacy and sex look like.
What makes pornography more dangerous to the impressionable mind is that within the thousands of genres of porn available online, content about rape fantasies, bondage and sadomasochism is more readily available to everyone than they should be. To grown-ups who understand consent and comprehend the nature of fetishes like rape fantasies and bondage, viewing such smut may be nothing more than indulgence. But for others — teenagers and the less educated — rape fantasies and bondage may blur the lines of what is acceptable and what is criminal behaviour.
But is it only anecdotal evidence that suggests that porn can have a corrosive effect on its audience, especially through overexposure? No. One controversial study carried out by Danish professor of criminology Berl Kutchinsky who watched the effects of legalising porn in three countries — Denmark in 1969, Sweden in 1970 and Germany in 1973 — would suggest that porn has a positive effect on curbing sexual violence. Kutchinsky’s study, conducted over two decades, found that gendered crimes and sexual violence in these countries fell as men had a “release” for their sexual desires before they acted on them. Kutchinsky concluded that the free availability of porn was the “direct cause of this decrease”.
But porn of the 1970s is very different from the porn we see today, in terms of both variety and availability. Additionally, a lot of people do not take Kutchinsky’s study seriously. In her book Pornography: Men Possessing Women, the anti-pornography feminist writer and activist Andrea Dworkin illustrated how pornography dehumanises women and how the pornography industry is complicit in violence against women. Dworkin argued that by depicting women as men's willing sexual playthings, porn contributes to rape.
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Whatever argument one chooses to believe — porn decreases sexual violence or porn causes more of it — what one can't deny is that porn has its fair share of problems. But does banning porn even come close to a solution, especially in India where we recently witnessed rallies in support of the rape accused in both Kathua and Unnao? Not one bit.
Banning porn is a half-hearted solution akin to announcing death penalty for child rapists. Neither of them are constructive solutions that try to tackle the muddy mess of patriarchal oppression and rampant misogyny in this country.