Punishing child porn offenders
The industry that exploits the innocence of children for perverse sexual gratification is thriving, and the recent crackdown in Kerala only proves that. As many as 41 people were arrested for dealing in child pornography earlier this week. A similar operation in June had resulted in the arrest of 47 people. The increasing demand for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online is an ugly reality of our society, and a recent study found the lockdown imposed to contain the pandemic too contributed to this disturbing trend.
Since April 2019, when the Kerala police launched their Operation P-Hunt to track down and nab paedophiles lurking in the cyberspace, 124 people have been arrested, but given the widespread consumption of child porn, across age groups and geographical locations, the investigators may have scraped only the surface of a deep-rooted social evil. Some of those nabbed were found to be part of global child porn rackets and had been creating and supplying obscene content.
India has legal provisions to deal with those using and disseminating CSAM with both the IT Act, 2000, and the POCSO Act, 2012, defining what constitutes child porn. But there are gaps that need to be filled. Though the recent amendment armed the POCSO Act with a provision to report pornographic material involving children, ISPs and the payment industry are still under no obligation to inform authorities of CSAM-related activities they come across.
Moreover, strict laws alone won’t be enough to discourage criminals trawling the net. Tracking and monitoring mechanisms must be scaled up, and aggressive awareness campaigns on how to identify and report abuse and porn must be taken up. Though law enforcement agencies are now more alert to its occurrence online, it’s not often that the offenders who are caught get the punishment they deserve. Mostly, they come out on bail, and are free to continue their activities.
The increase in demand also means an increase in the supply of such content, which makes our children even more vulnerable to online predators. Hence, there’s a need to ensure that the offenders are not only tracked but punished so that the laws and the criminal justice system can prove to be a deterrent.