UP Police Will Monitor Your Porn Searches in Internet History. Will it Reduce Crimes Against Women?
Uttar Pradesh Police said it has hired a company to "keep an eye" on people's internet search data to monitor those looking up pornographic content.
While the country celebrated Valentine's weekend, police in Uttar Pradesh have devised a new tactic to keep women safe - by keeping tabs on people's porn search history.
On Saturday, Uttar Pradesh Police said it has hired a company to "keep an eye" on people's internet search data to monitor those looking up pornographic content. Meant to curb crimes against women, a new team called the 'UP Women Powerline 1090' has been set up that will be alerted if a person searches for pornographic material on the internet.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?
UP Police has hired a company named 'Oomuph' to study the analytics of the internet. The company has been tasked to keep an eye on what is being searched on the internet through data. If a person sees pornography, the analytics team will get the information.
Those who search for pornography will receive an alert message and the information will be saved with the police as well. The move is meant to aid the police's information database in cases of crimes in a certain locality.
While UP Police's drive toward women's safety is commendable, it raises two questions.
WHAT ABOUT WOMEN WHO WATCH PORN?
It may (still) come as a surprise to many in India but women watch porn. But they do. In 2017, porn website Pornhub revealed that India came at number 4 in terms of a number of viewers and a large number of these viewers were women. In fact, Indian women beat the global average when it came to watching porn. Pornhub found that more women in India watch porn than in countries like the United States, Canada, and the UK, India Today reported. The next year, Pornhub reported that in 2017, women viewers of porn had increased by 129 percent. With UP Police monitoring people's porn search history in the name of protecting women, it would not be surprising if many of the alerts they get are set off by women.
DOES A PORN BAN DETER SEXUAL CRIMES?
While the government of India chose to ban or regulate porn to prevent sexual crimes, studies across the world have shown that legalizing porn does not directly lead to any increase in rape or sexual assault. A 2010 study conducted in the matter in Czech Republic found that as "as seen everywhere else studied (Canada, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Sweden, USA), that rape and other sex crimes have not increased following the legalization and wide availability of pornography". The study went on to make the controversial point that the incidence of child sex abuse had reduced since 1989, the same time when child pornography became more easily accesible. A similar phenomenon has been noted in Japan and Denmark.
In 2018, the Uttarakhand High Court asked the Center to ban pornographic websites in India citing a case of gangrape where four boys had raped a junior class 10 student. It was later found that the boys had been watching pornographic content prior to the incident. Following the order, the Centre directed ISPs to ban 827 pornographic websites.
This was not the first time that porn was blamed for rising crimes in India. In 2015, the CBI while investigating a series of cases where the accused shared videos of themselves committing rape with their friends, leading to the images and videos going viral. The CBI in its report said that the easy availability of porn was one of the reasons for the rise in rape cases.
Despite several moves to ban porn, crimes against women have not ceased. Several websites like Pornhub continue to be banned by leading ISPs in India.
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