India Considers Banning Pornography as Reported Sexual Assault Rises

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times An internet cafe in New Delhi.

NEW DELHI â€"India’s Supreme Court, already deliberating a major, potentially government-destroying corruption case and a tense diplomatic incident involving the prosecution of Italian marines, took up a new and highly contentious topic last week â€" whether pornography leads to sexual assault of women and  should, therefore, be completely banned in India.

The Supreme Court’s interest in the issue comes in response to a petition that asks the government to enact a law that would make even viewing pornographic materials a non-bailable offense. Distributing pornographic materials is already illegal in India, but the related laws are vague and rarely enforced.

“I believe that watching porn corrupts people, and many of the crimes that happen to women, girls and children, such as sex-trafficking, are mostly related to pornography,” said  Kamlesh Vaswani, the author of the petition and an intellectual property rights lawyer who said he became interested in the issue after seeing the impact of pornography  in his hometown of Indore.

India has been reeling from reports of rape and sexual violence directed at women and girls. The fatal gang rape of a young woman in Delhi on Dec. 16 prompted the government to pass strict new laws about sexual crimes, but reported rapes have risen sharply this year and many say the police response remains inadequate. Last weekend, Delhi again erupted in protests after the parents of a five-year old girl said that the police refused to register a complaint that their daughter was raped and a police officer was filmed slapping a female protestor.

Anindito Mukherjee/European Pressphoto Agency Supreme Court of India in New Delhi.

The Supreme Court has asked the Ministry of Information and Technology, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and the Ministry of Home Affairs to respond by April 29 to the petition’s allegations that existing laws are not protecting women from the negative fallout of pornography.

As Internet penetration grows in India with the availability of high-speed data services and the spread of smartphones, pornography is spreading rapidly here, even though publishing or distributing it, in print or on the Web, is illegal under the Indian Penal Code and the Information Technology Act of 2000.

There is some evidence that Indians are more actively seeking pornography on the Internet than citizens of many other countries:

Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

Google searches for the word “porn,” as a proportion of total Google searches, have  increased five times between 2004 and 2013 in India, according to Google Trends. Over that period, India ranked fourth worldwide, after Papua New Guinea, Trinidad and Tobago, and Pakistan.

New Delhi, population 16 million, was the city with the highest-worldwide percentage of searches for “porn”  in 2012. Dallas was the second highest.

One of every five mobile users in India wants adult content on his 3G-enabled phone, one 2011 study by IMRB concludes, and pornography Web sites rank among the most popular in India. Sunny Leone, an Indian-origin Canadian porn star, became a popular in India after appearing on the “Bigg Boss” house here in 2011.

It’s a far cry from just a decade or so ago, when the sight of a naked woman on a movie screen, much less at home on the television, was rare here, outside of a few seedy cinemas and the occasional, much-circulated video.

Mahesh Kumar A/Associated Press A Bollywood film poster in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, featuring an actress who is part of the adult-film industry.

“Pornography corrupts the mind and causes sexual excitement to grow,” said Vijay Panjwani, the lawyer  who argued the petition on behalf on Mr. Vaswani in front of the Supreme Court last week.  “When a release is not found it leads to acts of sexual violence against women.”

Whether viewing pornography can be directly tied to sexual violence or rape is highly debatable. A common criticism of pornography is that it has a lasting effect on the minds of regular viewers by shaping the way they think about sex and encouraging aggressive behavior.

“What happens when a culture is saturated with sexually explicit images eroticizing male domination and female subordination?” asked Gail Dines, a sociology professor, and Robert Jensen, a journalism professor, in an op-ed for The New York Times.  They argue that most pornography contains images of physical and verbal abuse of female performers and skews the viewers’ attitudes towards sex.

Some sociologists say that in India, the negative effects of viewing pornography are exacerbated because of a social environment that discourages regular interaction between young men and women.

“India is a society in a phase of transition that is based on a high segregation of men and women,” said Ranjana Kumari, the director of the Center for Social Research in New Delhi. “In this environment viewing pornography creates heightened sexual desire and aggression in young men who have no normal interaction with women and that can often lead to violent behavior.”

The porn industry also has many defenders. The incidence of rape in the United States has declined 85 percent over a period of 25 years while access to pornography has increased, according to research by Anthony D’Amato and Glenn Reynolds, both law professors.

David Loftus, an actor and author of “Watching Sex: How Men Really Respond to Pornography,” argues that the effect of watching pornography depends on the viewer and not on the content. “The men who have difficulties with pornography, much like many who cannot relate well to others and turn to crime, tend to come from dysfunctional backgrounds, where stringent rules, hypocrisy, unhappiness and even violence abounded,” he wrote.

As a growing number of Indians watch pornography, the government has tried heavy-handed attempts to suppress popular Web sites. In June of 2009, for example, the government asked all Internet service providers to block a cartoon Web site called Savita Bhabhi, about a bored housewife on the grounds that it was  obscene.

But some government ministers are among the growing audience: In February 2012, three ministers resigned because they were caught on camera watching porn on a mobile phone during a session of the Karnataka state assembly.

Do you think making it illegal to watch pornography could curb sexual assault in India, or make the problem worse? Please leave your thoughts in the comments below.