CHENNAI: Social networking sites including WhatsApp and Facebook have, of late, become hotbed channels for escort agencies to reach out to more customers in the flesh trade.
Two weeks ago, a 23-year-old woman, a former model and small-time actor in Andheri, Mumbai, was arrested for running a prostitution racket. The woman had used WhatsApp to send photos to customers so that they could select the girl and decide the price. Similar arrests were made in Mysuru and Kolkata too before this.
The scene is no different in Chennai. Sex workers use digital platforms for their promotion on social media. There are hundreds of websites and unrestricted pages, which give detailed information of the service provided along with their telephone numbers, email IDs, amount to be paid and even unsolicited ‘offers’ sometimes.
“Send a WhatsApp message to this number, your inbox will be filled with pictures of sex workers along with their rates,” said one of the customers from Thoraipakkam. The customer added that the rates varied depending on the location and they had to pay extra cash if they preferred door services against travelling to specified mansions or hotels.
When someone becomes a regular customer, and thus trustworthy to the pimp or the ring members, he would be added to a WhatsApp group, which is updated with the details and rates of the girls as soon as they become a part of the business. You can even do advance bookings on these groups.
“Nowadays, once a girl becomes familiar with a customer, she gets his number and they keep in touch through WhatsApp. They don’t need us anymore,” said a retired ‘madam’ who once had more than 50 girls working for her. Contrary to popular perception that these rackets operated mostly during night time, “We start from 10 in the morning,” said a city-based pimp.
The public promotion of sex racket has raised concerns about adolescents being exposed to these explicit content and ‘offers of adult service’. According to media reports, Facebook had brought down nearly 10 such pages in the last two years and has now made it clear that action could be taken, but only if the public reported it as offensive.
S Ramadoss, member, Indian Society of Criminology (ISC), who has researched the field for more than a decade, said he was unaware of these developments. “But with the technology, it is going to be tough for cyber police to identify the culprits,” he rues.
They easily escape the police radar as interception of conversations between the pimps, girls and customers become difficult in these digital platforms. “The end-to-end encryption support provided to ensure user privacy has been exploited by the pimps and immoral traffickers,” he adds.
When City Express tried to contact the police, they refused to comment. However, cyber security experts expressed concern over the facilities available with the government to track offenders who use digital platforms to lure customers to the flesh trade. “WhatsApp, with its two way encryption, is very secure and without a centralised encryption policy or WhatsApp community’s encryption methodology in place, it is nearly impossible to track down the crime,” explained Zaki Qureshy, a cyber expert working with the Centre to create a secure ‘Digital’ India.