How cheap smartphones have given people easy access to porn
In December 2012, mobile phones were used nearly 4.1 million times a month to search the keyword “rape”.
On April 15, 2013, Manoj Sah, a 22-year-old garment factory worker, and his 19-year-old accomplice Pradeep Kumar admitted to abducting and raping their neighbour’s five-year-old daughter in east Delhi. While in police custody, they also said they had watched porn on Sah’s smartphone prior to committing the heinous act.
Previously restricted to the few who could afford computers or DVD players as well as private space, the past decade has witnessed a disturbing growth in the consumption of pornography, piggybacking on the mushrooming increase of cheap smartphones and easier-than-ever-before access to the internet.
Consider this: In a report this March, the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) stated that there would be 478 million mobile internet users in the country by June 2018. Predominantly used by youngsters under 25 years, 46 per cent in urban areas and 57 per cent in villages, IAMAI estimates that mobile internet penetration in Indian cities is already at 59 per cent, while it’s only about 18 per cent in rural areas. While this has fuelled a rapid increase in easy access to information as well as an astonishing array of services, it’s also served to literally put porn in people’s pockets.
IAMAI reports that both young (school and college students) and illiterate users spend the majority of their time on audio and video streaming. And for those still saddled with dodgy data connections, there is always the ubiquitous mobile “repair” shop to fall back on.
From the bylanes of Gaffar Market in Delhi’s Karol Bagh to south Mumbai’s Manish Market and the unending stores and kiosks in Chandigarh’s Sector 22, there’s a shocking assortment of porn out there for the taking — all deftly loadable onto tiny memory cards that come with almost all smartphones.
Sarju, a Bihari domestic worker in Chandigarh, says, “It’s just about Rs 150 for three-four of the raunchiest B-grade Bhojpuri movies. The remaining space on a 4 GB card filled with dozens of porn clips.”
Now consider this: The pornography site Pornhub is today the 36th most popular of the estimated 1.8 billion websites in the world and a whopping 67 per cent of the traffic to the site in 2017 was on smartphones. But here’s the kicker: Pornhub’s “2017 Year in Review” report states that the growth in mobile traffic to the website was the maximum in India — 121 per cent between 2013 and 2017. And 86 per cent of Indian visitors to Pornhub were on mobile devices. And, there’s the very real possibility that a large section of Indians share a morbid fascination for depictions of sexual violence.
According to Google AdWords, in the wake of the Nirbhaya gangrape and murder in December 2012, mobile phones were used nearly 4.1 million times a month (on an average) to search the keyword “rape”. Search keywords included “Indian girls raped”, “raping video”, “raping stories”, “raped in public”, “little girl raped”, “raping mom”, “father raping daughter” and “raped to death”. That, incidentally, didn’t include people who go out and buy their fix of sleaze-on-the-go from mobile repair shops, the street corner DVD-wallah or the overly-friendly cyber cafe owner. It’s a frightening prospect. Your cook, driver, the neighbourhood postman, any among the line of autorickshaw-wallahs on the street corner, the neighbour’s teenage son or even the “nice” young executive who lives next door and always offers to carry groceries up to your flat, could have been watching porn on his or her mobile phones moments before they engaged with you. Or your five-year-old daughter!
(Courtesy of Mail Today)