Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry
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It is tragic that these new markets are targeted at teenage boys whose first introduction to sex is through pornography. In India today, 1 in 5 teenagers watch porn before the age of 13.6 Violent 3-D animation sex video games are especially created for this young market. They start with a pop-up site in which a woman prompts the user to undress her. That act then leads to violent sex games.
Gopal, 13, of Chennai, got sucked into this world of pornography. It all started with a pop-up. It flashed a woman and prompted him to undress her. He did, and got trapped via unending windows into a Website of violent, sex-filled games. It became a habit until, one day, his father accidentally clicked the Internet history button and discovered a long list of Websites with names such as Playboy, Leisure Suit Lady, Guy Game and PC Rape. The cyber crime unit of the police traced them to the narrow lanes of Burma Bazaar and the Internet browsing centre that was beaming these Websites. K. Srinivasan, co-founder of the Cyber Crime Society of India, says: “More than 50% of the victims are young children from affluent families” (in Datta, 2011).
Boys between the ages of 8 and 16 are particularly lured to the porn sites through ‘porn-napped’ and ‘typosquatted’7 Websites. Figures reveal that nearly 90% of boys aged 8 to 16 who have access to the Internet, have viewed pornographic sites while doing their homework (Jayachandran, 2003). In fact, the easy accessibility of pornographic content has led to a growing interest in pornography among school-age children and urban youth who have now moved beyond simply watching pornography to shooting their own porn videos and uploading them online.
This trend becomes even clearer as mainstream news media in India keep breaking shocking stories about Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) scandals involving school children and pornographic rings being busted by police after they engaged in the filming and distribution of ‘reality’ sex videos shot with hidden cameras.
• In December 2004, the country was rocked when the news of the now infamous Delhi Public School MMS sex scandal broke. A 17-year-old schoolboy filmed his girlfriend in a sex act and made the footage into a pornographic film. The video was circulated widely online and by roadside DVD vendors.
• A girl in Siliguri committed suicide in October, 2010, after an obscene MMS clip which captured her in a compromising position was made and circulated by Anindya Garai, a fellow student at the Siliguri Polytechnic Institute.
• In October 2010, 4 students of a school in Salt Lake, Kolkata, and West Bengal sent porn MMS clips to one of their teachers – just for the fun of it.
• In November 2010, 38-year-old Sarvjit Singh, an architect, was arrested for making a MMS clip of a girl in the Dalanwala area. The girl complained to the police after being blackmailed by Singh.
• In December 2010, a woman in Murshidabad, West Bengal, had her own husband arrested for allegedly shooting their intimate moments on a cell phone and circulating it online.
• Also in 2010, the ‘North Karnataka MMS’ featured a former beauty queen from Dharwad. The clip was uploaded by her ex-boyfriend after she had dumped him.
These uncovered cases reveal a deep link between pornography and real life sexual violence. Those who frequent pornography sites are more likely to view sex as a purely physical function and to regard women as sex objects. They are also more likely to hold such views permanently if they perceive the material as more realistic. A survey by Jochen Peter and Patti M. Valkenburg about Dutch teenagers, published in The Journal of Communication in 2006, has found that there is a relationship between porn use and the feeling that it is not necessary to have affection for people to have sex with them. Boys were much more likely to hold such views than girls.
The Mizoram police also found a link between the increased incidence of sexual assaults including rape and paedophilia, and the watching of pornographic tapes and videos. The Aizawl superintendent of police, Lalbiakthanga Khaingte, commented that convicted rapists and others caught for assaulting young girls and minors confessed to having watched porn videos before committing such crimes (Karmakar, 2010).
For those who cannot access the Internet, the Indian pornography industry produces ‘blue’ movies mostly in Hindi, Bengali, Malayalam and Tamil languages. Local cable networks show these pornographic films in the middle of the night. They are also sold as DVDs. Some hardcore Indian porn is available illegally in Indian markets through high-speed Solid State Drive (SSD) productions.
Earlier scripts in Indian pornography often included lengthy bathroom scenes featuring the lead actress who is later raped by 2 or 3 men simultaneously and penetrated in the mouth, vagina and anus. In more recent pornography, most of the girls depicted as ‘porn stars’ in the films seem to be in their early teens. The preference is for very young girls, especially real clips of schools students, or girls in school uniforms or frocks. A new trend is to depict the rape of tribal girls, especially from hill tribes:
• In January 2011, a porn clip of a young tribal girl being forced to disrobe and walk naked for 8 km and being molested by 100 men hit the markets as DVDs and videotapes.
• In West Bengal in July, 2010, a private tutor in Burdwan was lynched to death by a mob after a porn DVD featuring one of his students hit the market.
• In a film called Deepa India, a teenage girl, Deepa, is seen stripping in front of a camera before she is sexually abused. This seems to be a real life video shot of a college girl coaxed into being filmed, or filmed unknowingly.
• In Sonia Mauled by Three Studs, a girl dressed in a frock is forced to have violent penetrative sex with 3 youths. She is down on her knees sucking on three large Indian penises, at the same time as these boys take turns to penetrate her. They also use dildos and cucumbers whilst screaming abuse at her.
• To satisfy the demand for depicting the rape of girls from Indigenous hill tribes, pornographic films are made in Nepal’s homes. “Watch these nepali’s [sic] bang hard in desi style”, says the cover of a DVD readily available in Kathmandu. “Exclusive Nepali sex” boasts another.
The greatest number of child pornography videos are shot in Nepal and this has attracted a large number of paedophiles from Britain, Germany and USA who now prefer Nepal over their traditional hunting grounds of Thailand and Cambodia (Mukherjee, and Basu, 2007). The most talked about scandal that attracted public notice and condemnation was the case of Irish poet, Cathal O’Searcaigh, who abused street kids and young boys in Nepal (Sarkar, 2010).
In India and Nepal, pornography filmmakers are increasing the exploitation of women as well as coercing and forcing young children into making homemade cheap pornographic videos for sale. The police suspected that Moninder Singh Pandher, accused in the Noida serial killings case, might be part of an international child pornography racket (Sinha, 2007). They seized photographs of nude children from his residence as well as pornographic literature, a laptop computer and a web cam.
In India, Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code (1860) provides protection from child pornography.8 But Section 292 does not per se deal with obscenity online. This difficulty was solved by the insertion of Section 29A which included electronic documents also within the purview of documents thus making the law applicable to electronic media as well (see Indian Child, 2010).
Growing concerns over the pernicious effect of porn on children and adults alike, and the rise in abductions, coercion and shooting of illicit porn films without the knowledge of the victims, have finally led the Indian Government in December 2008 to pass RAID or The Information Technology (Amendment) Bill with 45 amendments. The law now treats both purveyors and recipients of pornography in the same manner and provides a full section subtitled “punishment for publishing or transmitting of material depicting children in sexually explicit acts, etc. in electronic format” (in Gilani, 2008).
Most pornographic ‘tableaus’ depict women as being submissive and passive. A woman undresses, assumes a number of sexual positions, the male protagonist(s) achieve(s) orgasm – this is the typical formula that the majority of porn script
s follow. Pornographers use every aspect of a woman’s body, sexualise it and find a way to dehumanise it.
Books, postcards, magazines, painting, animation, drawing, videos, films, video games, sound recording, photos, sculpture … pornography uses all these mediums to present sexually graphic content. Books and magazines published in different Indian languages have a long history from early Bat tala publications to modern magazines like Meri Kahaniyan (Hindi), Satya Kahaniyan (Hindi), Alokpaat (Bengali).
The north Indian regional pulp fiction industry was mostly centered around Meerut and Daryagunj in Delhi. In the 1960s and 1970s, these magazines and books were selling in the hundreds of thousands. Some popular writers were Pyareylal Awaaraa, Kushvaahaa Kant, Gulshan Nanda, Ved Prakash Sharma, Rajhans, Ibn-e-Safi, Akram Ellahabadi, Ranu and Surendra Mohan Pathak, some of whom had written over 1500 novels each. In the 1980s, many of these novels were easily selling 500,000 to 600,000 copies without any pre- or post-launch publicity (Pande, 2008).
A dash of crime romance laced with a heavy dose of pornography where women were stereotyped as passive and brutalised by ‘macho’ men was the main content. Ved Prakash Sharma’s Vardi Wala Gunda (1996; translated as The Criminal in Uniform) is a story based on Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination and is laced with a liberal dose of black magic and tantric potions induced to make the women wild, though ultimately subjugated by brutal men. It sold a million copies.
These books are a long way away from the Kama Sutra by Vatsyayana, the Sougandhikaparinay, the Shritawanidhi or the Basholi, Kangra and Rajasthani style of miniature paintings with erotic illustrations. These earlier texts contained practical descriptions about the art of sex and did not depict the degradation or domination of women, violence or paedophilia.
The sex industry has confused and manipulated the minds of many who believe in sexual equality by normalising pornography (see Suraiya, 2004). Due to this there has been little resistance to the flooding of the Indian markets with explicit, sexually violent and degrading material.
This normalisation has even led to top government officials using pornography and the judiciary defending them. In 2008, the Bombay High Court Judge Justice Vijaya Kapse-Tahilramani, crushed the case against top customs officers arrested for watching porn flicks. He stated that merely watching an obscene film in the privacy of one’s home is not a punishable act under the Indian penal code.
In May 2010, following a tip-off from police in Germany, a serving lieutenant colonel of the Indian Army was arrested by the Crime Branch in Mumbai for uploading child pornography on Websites. The police are investigating whether the officer, Jagmohan Balbir Singh, 42, was also involved in producing these videos (Sharma and Singh, 2010).
Religious men too are not out of the purview as pornography makers and distributors. In January, 2011, a ‘godman’ from Mathura near Lucknow, called Vrindavan ‘Porn Swamy’ Rajendra, was arrested for making sex clips with children for his foreign disciples, who helped him market these through some Websites. Police confiscated a movie camera, DVDs, and hours of footage with children, his wife and some foreigners. Mathura police said he had been booked under Section 377 (unnatural sex) of the Indian Penal Code and 67B of the IT Act.9
A 2007 report suggests that the surge of foreign tourists in India is mainly due to the rampant child pornography industry in India. According to the data issued by the Ministry of Tourism, the number of tourists visiting India has gone up from 3.92 million in 2005 to 4.43 million in 2006. This is a sharp increase of 13%. Jeff Avina, director of operations at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Vienna, speculates that the paedophilia industry might be one of the causes of the sharp increase in foreign tourism in India (Pratyush, 2007). In 2009, a Dutch national, 56-year-old William Heum, was arrested on child pornography charges in Chennai on a tip-off by Interpol.10
Feminist anti-pornography resistance does not match the might and money of the sex industry. Saheli Women’s Resource in Delhi has been running a continuous campaign against pornography since 2004 on the basis that it commodifies women’s sexuality and depicts women as sex objects (Saheli, 2004). In July 2009, at a conference ‘Daughters of Fire: India Courts of Women’, organised by Vimochana in Bangalore, feminist anti-porn activists drew links between pornography and violence, the oppression of women and girls, and negative impacts on the sexual behaviour of people in general (
These victories seem small at a time when news magazines are writing cover stories that glorify the sexual emancipation of Indian women. But they are significant for highlighting the fact that there are a whole lot of men in India who are not very emancipated and have a hard time accepting women’s sexual emancipation. They are having such a hard time that they must secretly film nude girls and women having sex, and then disperse the results to thousands of others in the global world of online pornography.
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Bhattacharya, Ekalavya (15 May, 2007) ‘Online Status of PORN in India’,
Bollywood Hungama News Network (6 July, 2010) ‘UTV conducts online survey among teenagers as part of marketing plan for Udaan’,
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Gilani, Iftikhar (28 December, 2008) ‘Internet pornography becomes serious crime in India’,
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Government of India (2005) Protection Against Sexual Harassment of Women Bill,
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Tejaswi, Mini Joseph (2 January, 2011) ‘Smartphone Porn in Latest Buzz’ The Times of India,
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1 These stories are so ubiquitous that I will not provide Websites.
2 According to Section 67 of the Information Technology Act (2000):
“Whoever publishes or transmits or causes to be published in the electronic form, any material which is lascivious or appeals to the prurient interest or if its effect is such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it, shall be punished on first conviction with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to five years and with fine which may extend to one lakh rupees (approx. US$2,233) and in the event of a second or subsequent conviction with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years and also with fine which may extend to two lakh rupees.”
3 The Protection Against Sexual Harassment of Women Bill (2005) states that sexual harassment “includes such unwelcome sexually determined behaviour as physical contact and advances, sexually coloured remarks, showing pornography and sexual demand, whether by words or actions …”