Chennai, Bhubaneswar lead 'ugly' India's search for child porn

Several reports have analysed and found that the demand for porn streaming has witnessed a sudden spike since the start of the mandatory nationwide lockdown. However, in India, a particular genre has been taking the top spot – child porn.

A report by the Indian Child Protection Fund (ICPF) pointed out that the demand for child porn in the country saw a sudden rise during the lockdown. According to online data-monitoring softwares, ‘child porn,’ ‘sexy child,’ and other child-porn related searches saw a spike in the past few days.

One of the most popular porn sites in the world, Pornhub, revealed that their site traffic from India increased by around 95 per cent during March 24 to 26th compared to the average traffic before the pandemic began.

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The ICPF report also warned that there could be a rise in online child harassment cases amid the lockdown as these searches indicate that millions of pedophiles have surfaced online who pose a risk to children in their vicinity as well as in the online world.

According to a report titled ‘Child Sexual Abuse in India,’ Chennai and Bhubaneswar reported the highest demand for child pornographic content among 100 Indian cities which were monitored.

Apart from Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, and Mumbai many tier-2 cities that have been marked as hotspots of COVID-19 have seen a surge in child pornography searches. Around 500 million searches per month were recorded in these cities. This abuse material demand indicated the rising vulnerability of the children to sexual predators, says the report.

The content-specific demands were observed in Kolkata, Siliguri, Howrah, and Chandigarh with the trend indicating higher demands from all parts of India, including Delhi, Ludhiana, Chandigarh, Lucknow, Agra, Shimla; southern cities Bengaluru, Kochi, Chennai, Thiruvananthapuram, Pune, Mumbai, Thane and Ahmedabad.

Crime against children in India

According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), the country has reported around 3.77 lakh crimes against children in the span of three years between 2016 to 2018.

A constant rise in these crimes over the years is observed to be around 1.06 lakh in 2016 while jumping to 1.29 lakh in 2017, again climbing up to 1.41 lakh in 2018.

As per data given by the NCRB, the 19 metro cities accounted for around 15 per cent (or approximately 60 thousand) of these cases with Delhi recording the highest number of cases in all the three years (21,089 cases), followed by Mumbai (10,701 cases) and Bangalore (4307 cases).

Almost all these metro cities have reported a spike in child porn demands.