Monday 27 May 2013

DON'T BLAME RAPE ON PORN?






INDO-CANADIAN porn star, Sunny Leone has happily reinvented herself as a Bollywood actress. But though her past pursuits have been no barrier, being linked to India's rape crisis represents a new challenge.

The 31-year-old actress became one of the most searched names on the Internet in India when she arrived in 2011 to appear in a reality TV series, and has since taken several raunchy roles in mainstream movies like Jism-2, Shootout At Wadala, and the upcoming Ragini MMS-2.

But as India casts around for reasons to explain a series of horrifying sex crimes, pornography is under scrutiny and has led some to call for Sunny to be jailed.

Recent events have galvanised anti-porn campaigners after it was revealed that the suspects in the rape of a five-year-old girl had watched explicit material before the crime. Aroused by video clips on their mobile phones, they abducted the girl and drunkenly raped her so violently, she suffered brain injury and died 11 days after the attack.

"Our children are accessing more and more graphic and brutal videos and they are imitating them and we are suffering," says Kamlesh Vaswani, a lawyer who has petitioned to demand an outright ban on porn. "Our laws are very vague in this area so it can be corrected in the Supreme Court."

Two laws already outlaw the distribution or creation of obscene material, with one act prescribing up to five years in jail for anyone caught publishing "lascivious" material. But as most of the porn accessed is on sites outside the jurisdiction of prosecutors and viewed in the privacy of homes or on mobile phones, convictions are rare and the restrictions are largely meaningless.

"It is technically possible to ban it," adds Vaswani, who has a 10-year-old son in the city of Indore. "They need to have some expert help from the IT sector."

He blames Sunny Leone, star of X-rated hits like Sunny's Casting Couch and Sunny's Slumber Party, for bringing adult material in India to a wider audience. "She deserves to go to jail if she continues to promote pornography," he says.

Appearing in a recent debate on the Headlines Today news channel, Sunny defended her dual career as porn star and actress and dismissed fears that adult material was linked to sex crime.

"Pornography is not for people who think it's for real. It's fantasy and it's entertainment," she said. "It's complete nonsense to blame rape on adult material out there. Education starts at home. It's mums and dads sitting with their children and teaching them what is right and wrong."

John Abraham, her co-star in Shootout At Wadala, also defended her, saying those seeking to blame porn for rapes were missing the root cause of the problem in India—social attitudes to women and a lack of education.

"By banning something you're not going to solve the problem. The world over, people have access to porn. Are there rape cases like this [of the five-year-old] that exist the world over? No. Did rape cases exist before porn came into being? Yes," he said.

The debate about links between porn and sex crime mirrors other largely unresolved controversies globally about whether violent video games cause gun crime or if gangster rap encourages anti-social behaviour.

Some experts deny any link, pointing to stable or declining incidences of rape in countries where porn has gone from scarcity to ubiquity in the last 15 years, thanks to its availability on the Internet. Others say the Internet provides a forum for criminally-minded perverts to meet and vocalise their darkest desires.

The Supreme Court ruling in India will set a new legally binding precedent and could force the government to find a way to ban one of the most searched for subjects on Google.

"In terms of the larger debate, whether porn leads to violence, I don't think anyone should have a knee-jerk reaction and say it does," say junior IT minister Milind Deora. "We are a liberal society and we don't want to get into the space of censoring content." (AFP)

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