India Thinks Cracking Down on Porn Will Help Solve Its Rape Problem

It's already illegal to sell pornography in India. But the country's Supreme Court is contemplating an all-out ban on the stuff, and police in the city of Patna are preparing to crack down on cyber cafés and so-called "CD parlors" — all because they believe it could help curb India's rape epidemic.

It's already illegal to sell pornography in India. But the country's Supreme Court is contemplating an all-out ban on the stuff, and police in the city of Patna are preparing to crack down on cyber cafés and so-called "CD parlors"—places where people download adult films onto their mobile phones—all because they believe it could help curb India's rape epidemic. Which, hmm. According to a cop interviewed in The Times of India today, the authorities have determined that there is a connection between porn and rapists. "During investigation of rape cases, it was often found that the rapists regularly watch such movies in their mobile phones. CDs are less in demand because one needs technical set-up for watching such movies in CD form," the officer said.

That sentiment was echoed by Kamlesh Vaswani, an attorney and the author of a petition that would make viewing porn an non-bailable offense. "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," he tells The New York Times's India Ink blog.

This is the logic, apparently: Rapists who have been caught watch porn, so porn is one of the major factors in the rapes ... so if we eliminate porn, we eliminate rapists! Again: hmm. Hence the push in Patna, a city of around 6 million in India's northeast, for a porn ban and the elimination of about 500 cyber cafés, described by The Times of India as "small cellphone and recharge shops in Patna where anyone can get porn movies and clippings downloaded at a very cheap rate," which is gross.

And which raises several questions: What about the part of India's population of 1.2 billion people that never watches porn and never rapes people? And what about countries with fewer restrictions on porn that have seen their reported rape cases go down? "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," report The New York Times's Neha Thirani Bagri and Heather Timmons. 

But one key argument from leading sociologists insists that a different set of rules apply to India than to places like the United States. "India is a society in a phase of transition that is based on a high segregation of men and women," Ranjana Kumari, the director of the Center for Social Research in New Delhi, tells The New York Times. "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." And getting rid of porn, it seems, would be a lot easier fix at the moment than, you know, tackling bigger problems like trying to educate a massive country about its victim-blaming culture, and making sure women aren't urged by police to marry their attackers.