In an alarming report, the India Child Protection Fund (ICPF) has claimed that there has been a huge spike in child pornography in the country ever since the nationwide lockdown to contain the coronavirus pandemic began. According to the agency, the online data monitoring websites are showing an increase in demand for searches like “child porn”, “sexy child” and “teen sex videos”.
“The nationwide lockdown to contain the COVID-19 outbreak has exposed a dark underbelly of our society – millions of paedophiles, child rapists and child pornography addicts have increased their activities online, making the internet extremely unsafe for our children,” the ICPF said in its report titled ‘Child Sexual Abuse Material in India’. The survey, conducted in 100 Indian cities, including New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata and Bhubaneswar, showed that the overall demand for child pornography was an average of 5 million per month on the public web during December 2019, which has now spiked.
“Most individuals were interested in generic CSAM content such as ‘school sex videos’ and ‘teen sex’. However, the trend was explicitly moving towards demand for more specific content. This means the individuals wanted to view content around specific age groups, locations, formats and sexual actions,” the report said.
In another disturbing fact, as per the survey, there has been a 200 per cent increase in demand for violent content. “While all child pornography is violent, 18 per cent individuals exhibited explicit intent for videos where children were choking, bleeding, tortured, in pain or screaming. The demand for this kind of content grew as much as 200 per cent during the project duration. This indicates that Indian men are not ‘satisfied’ with generic child pornography and demand violent and exploitative content,” it said.
The ICPF report has identified New Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and Mumbai, besides many other Tier II cities as the hotspots for child pornography. It also noted that a large number of individuals were using Virtual Private Network (VPN) to circumvent the government’s ban on CSAM content.
"This presents a chilling reality of the extreme threat faced by India's children during this period of lockdown. Demand for child sexual abuse material indicates children are more vulnerable to sexual predators," it said, while urging authorities to further step up online vigil in these cities for potential exploiters.
The ICPF demanded creation of a CASM Tracker through nationwide scale up of artificial intelligence tools. It also sought formation of a CASM Offenders Registry for individuals found to be consuming, distributing and selling CSAM contents.
In its report, the ICPF pointed out that data from Pornhub, the largest pornography website in the world, showed that traffic from India on its website has increased by 95 per cent between March 24 and March 26 as compared to their average traffic.
“As children spend more time online during the lockdown, they are often unsupervised. International agencies like Europol, the United Nations and ECPAT are reporting that paedophiles and child pornography addicts have increased activity to target children online to ‘groom’ them - befriending them on social media, building an emotional connection and luring them to perform sexual activities through photos and videos,” it said.
The report also noted that the Childline India Helpline had received more than 92,000 SOS calls asking for protection from abuse and violence, 11 days into the lockdown. It also referred to a Rajya Sabha AdhocCommittee, constituted by Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu, which had made more than 40 recommendations to arrest this crime and end the impunity of perpetrators of online child sexual abuse.