On a busy afternoon in the southern Indian city of Visakhapatnam last month, a young man raped a destitute woman on a pavement. Many pedestrians walked by as he forced himself on the woman, but a few paused – to record the rape on their smartphones.
The police seized one cellphone – of the person who alerted them to the crime – but found he had already shared the video on social media, officers in Visakhapatnam told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Women’s rights campaigners in India said countless rape videos circulate online with few of them reported to the police.
“I receive a dozen rape videos a day from people who are afraid of reporting the crime themselves,” said Sunitha Krishnan, a rape survivor and founder of the charity Prajwala.
Krishnan lodged a petition in the Supreme Court in 2015 against rape videos circulating on social media, seeking action from the government and social media giants to end the menace.
Last month, the court asked the Indian government to report by December on the steps it will take to allow the safe and anonymous reporting of videos showing rape and child sexual abuse – as the country witnesses a surge in social media use.
“I had submitted nine rape videos to the Central Bureau of Investigation (India’s top crime-fighting agency). The investigation into these videos brought to light how big the problem is,” Krishnan said.
More than 750 cases related to obscene and sexually explicit content posted on the Internet were registered with the India police in 2015, government data shows – but the official figures fail to reflect the prevalence of the crime, campaigners said.
In 2015, 35,000 rape cases were registered in India, an increase of 40% since 2012 when the fatal gang rape of a young woman on a bus in Delhi sparked a national outcry.
“We have (now) taken precautions (to stem sexual violence) but given the scale of digital sexual violence, I am not sure how effective they are,” said Asha Bajpai, professor of law at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai.
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