In 2020 alone, 738 child pornography cases were registered in India, according to data from the National Crime Records Bureau. This was reiterated by the Union Women and Child Development Minister Smriti Zubin Irani in the Parliament while answering a question raised by Congress MP Dr Shashi Tharoor.
Now, this data also shows a sharp increase in the number of child pornography cases from 2019, where only 103 cases were registered. In 2018, at the same time, the numbers were only 44. This means that 2020 saw a steep rise in the number of 619 per cent in child pornography cases, compared to 2019. In 2020, however, only 272 cases were chargesheeted and no one was convicted. Four people were convicted in 2019 and one person was convicted in 2018, according to the data.
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Graphs by Parvathi Benu
Does this mean that child pornography is an issue that India started facing only in 2020? Not at all. The numbers might merely suggest that more people have come forward to report these cases. According to a report by legal news and commentary service website jurist.org dated May 14, 2020, in India, a pornographic video is captured every 40 seconds, about 38 per cent of which are linked to child sexual abuse and that 25 per cent of all the search engine queries in India are related to child pornography. A recent study by the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and the Indian National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) found that more than 25,000 pieces of alleged child sexual abuse content have been uploaded to social media platforms in India over the last 5 months (as on 2nd May 2020).
Vidya Reddy who works at Tulir – Centre for Prevention and Healing of Child Sexual Abuse in Chennai says that the real number of these cases may be much higher because very few get reported. "This is not a linear crime. In the past six to seven years, almost every POCSO case that we have dealt with has had a technology angle. A child who was abused was either shown pornographic material as part of the grooming or the abuse was recorded," she says.
Reddy also recalls an incident where children were shown pornography and Child Sexual Abuse Material by a man. "However, when we reported the incident, I asked them to include section 67 B of the IT Act or sections 13 to 15 of POCSO, they said that All Women Police Stations cannot file cases on Information Technology, but only Inspector Law and Order can do that. Either she was inefficient or ignorant," she says. She also says that it is very important to create a situation where people understand what they are doing and seek help for having a sexual interest in children.
In 1998, over 3,000 cases were registered against websites containing child pornography, across the world, according to the Jurist report. The number of cases increased to over 100,000 just a decade later, and in the year 2014, the number exceeded 1 million for the first time. Last year, there were 18.4 million reported cases of child pornography across the world.
