A week after a doctor was raped and murdered in Kolkata’s RG Kar Medical hospital, a Telegram channel emerged with the name of the victim. The admin of the group sent just one message, posting multiple links that claimed to have ‘leaked’ photos and videos of the victim. The group has over 25,000 subscribers.
A quick search revealed that there are multiple such channels and groups on Telegram that have shared links to porn videos with the name of the victim.
A day before India’s Independence Day, even as hundreds of women took to the streets to protest sexual violence and reclaim the night, searches for the victim’s ‘rape videos’ spiked on Google. It wasn’t surprising though.
Back in 2018, soon after the news broke of the rape of an 8-year-old in Kathua, news channels quickly identified her with her name and photos on big screens and websites. It didn’t take too long for the Internet to start searching for her ‘rape videos’ on pornographic sites.
A year after that a Hyderabad woman’s name was searched 8 million times on a porn website a week after she was raped and killed.
There have been multiple such incidents over the years where the Internet searches reveal a dark yet common phenomenon— the quest to find the videos of sexual assault.
“Rape culture and sexual violence is normalised in the country so it’s predictable that this is happening,” Ntasha Bharadwaj, a criminologist who works on gender violence told Decode.
“Our problem is not the law, but normalisation of sexualisation,” she said.
The Business Of Sexual Assault Videos
Bharadwaj pointed out that over the years with cheaper access to technology, it has also become easier to film and upload videos of sexual assault. And that indicates the larger business of such videos too.
In 2016, Al Jazeera published an investigative report on rape videos being sold in the markets of Uttar Pradesh. Marketed as ‘rape videos’, the videos clearly showed the women’s faces. “They make it to blackmail the victims [of rape] … so that they don’t go and file a complaint in the nearest police station,” one activist had told the reporter.
Videos of sexual violence is clickbait, and it’s very common to make money on them, said Bharadwaj. She also said that with deepfake AI videos, a large population wants to see more violence against women.
An earlier investigation by Decode revealed Instagram accounts that post sexualised images of Indian children lead viewers to Telegram channels, where people sell child sex abuse content for anywhere between Rs 40 to- Rs 5,000.
The Search For Rape Porn
A search on Google trends with ‘rape porn’ in the last week makes it evident. All the related searches are with the name of the victim. Some of them are her name + porn. It’s obvious that the Internet is rushing to find her rape videos. The most common search is her name + rape video. The searches are from across the country, with Assam, Tripura, West Bengal, Arunachal Pradesh, and Meghalaya topping the list.
A search for her name + rape video on Google trends yields this result.
The countries that top the list for this search term include Bangladesh, Rwanda, Sri Lanka followed by India and Pakistan.
However, Clare McGlynn, professor at Durham Law School at Durham University in UK said that she had not come across such searches following a known rape case. “We know that many sexual assaults are filmed, but I had not come across this general search for such material,” she told Decode.
“This tells us that it is now well-known that perpetrators film rapes and share the footage. It is expected, hence the searches,” professor McGlynn added.
For circulation of rape videos, in India, an accused can be booked under sections 323 (criminal intimidation), 354 (assault or criminal force on woman with intent to outrage her modesty) 376 D (gang rape) of IPC, 7/8 Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (in case of the victim being a minor) and section 67 and section 67 A, of the Information Technology Act.
The problem may also be when the media makes a victim’s name public. In the Kathua rape case and the recent Kolkata one, the names of the victims had gone viral even though it is illegal to identify victims of sexual assault.
Gruesome leaked photos of the Kolkata victim's body have spread across social media, alongside viral WhatsApp messages revealing her name and hashtags seeking justice. Videos of her funeral and interviews of her parents are also visible on YouTube. Despite a Supreme Court order to remove media revealing her identity, fake Instagram accounts continue to post her photos, and YouTube still hosts videos that violate the order.
The ‘Dark Side Of Society’
“I suspect though that people would be searching based on the name/situation even if the name was not known. And if someone did have a video like this, they would probably tag it with such labels, even if no name, so that it could be found. It shows how anonymity is so vital yet so difficult to preserve in today's social media world,” McGlynn, who has an expertise in the legal regulation of pornography, sexual violence and online abuse, said.
But so many searches just for representation of non-consensual sex such as sexually explicit deepfakes, and for footage of actual rapes reveals a ‘dark side to the society’.
“It shows that once material like this is on the internet, it is so difficult to get it taken down as so many are searching for it, wanting to see it and would happily share it,” she added.
Meanwhile, at the victim’s home, internet influencers are rushing to click the photo of the nameplate bearing the prefix Dr and the victim's name. "People were clicking photographs of the nameplate with my niece's name. There is no amount of secrecy anymore," the victim’s relative had told Decode.
Explaining how ‘rape pornography’ is a common search term, professor McGlynn said that it is also freely and easily accessible from many western countries. “It is also available on the mainstream pornography sites. On the mainstream sites, the label rape is rarely used, but instead there is force and similar words. There are also many scenarios where the woman is woken up by the man having sex with her; this is rape in many jurisdictions as there is no consent,” she added.
“Non-consensual sex is eroticised,” she said summarising her views on why the Internet obsesses to find such videos.
Pornhub and XVideos, in their terms and conditions, prohibit all content “depicting” child sexual abuse, rape, incest and forced sexual acts. XHamster bans material that is “unlawful, threatening, abusive, harassing” or “hateful”. However, the reality is starkly different.
A search on Google with the Kolkata’s victim’s name and ‘rape porn’ leads one to multiple porn sites. The videos are not of the victim, but they are tagged with the victim’s name.
Dr Carole Lieberman, a forensic psychiatrist, told Decode that people are inherently attracted to photos and videos of violence that can even turn into an addiction. Lierberman has studied patterns of violent behaviour for years and has provided expert witness testimony for cases that have included the murder of Scott Amedure, a gay man who confessed his crush on another man and was shot dead by the latter in Michigan.
“Sigmund Freud discovered that violence and sex are inborn drives. Just like some people are addicted to pornography, others are addicted to gruesome killings and deaths,” she said.