4 hours agoAuthor: Vaibhav Palnitkar
Date – 16 November, Day – Tuesday and Time – Morning breakfast. CBI officers were correcting their planning for the last time. By the way, every street, every house and every person had already been identified. But 77 different cities in 14 states were to be raided at the same time, so they could not take any risk. It is a matter of getting the children out of the very bad swamp. Such a swamp in which even the children of our house can be trapped. And we do not know that here we are keeping the story of a 13 year old girl and a 16 year old girl as well as an 8 year old boy. Read this first, then go deeper…
First case – online meeting, virtual friendship and then sexual abuse for months
13-year-old Aishwarya (name changed) from Hyderabad hails from a middle class family. Aishwarya, the only daughter of software engineer father and doctor mother, spends a lot of time surfing the internet apart from studies. In the year 2018, Aishwarya befriends an adult woman on the social media platform Facebook. In the initial days, both of them have a hi-hello, general conversation, then gradually Aishwarya starts sharing her personal things with this woman.
Aishwarya was teased for a long time that my body shape is not good and that is why my friends keep making fun of me. Aishwarya expressed her problem to her Facebook female friend. The Facebook lady consoles Aishwarya that she will help her in getting her body shape right. After this Aishwarya starts taking physical training from the woman on video chatting and in this sequence Aishwarya is asked to take off her clothes and do some exercises related to the private part.
About 4 months later, Aishwarya’s cousin, while surfing the Internet, sees a child porn video and in it he sees a very ‘dirty’ video of his sister Aishwarya. When the family came to know about this, they were horrified. Parents shared this entire incident with Sunitha Krishnan, who was engaged in the campaign to stop child crime. Sunitha has also been awarded the Padma Shri in 2016 for her social work.
Sunitha says that ‘Aishwarya’s case was such a case of online child abuse in which the victim girl never even realized that she was being sexually abused. When Aishwarya came to know about the child porn video, she locked herself in the room and refused to meet anyone.
Aishwarya’s family refused to file this case with the police. It is clear that like Aishwarya, many cases do not even come in the police records. Therefore, this problem of online child sexual abuse is much bigger than the figures.
Second case- 16 year old girl from Kerala
Cybercrime team of Kerala Police found horrifying videos of a minor girl during surveillance on dark net. The police had to struggle hard in the dark web of the Internet for three months. The IP address of the origin of this video was traced through special software and a horrifying story came out.
In January 2021, after the first wave of Kovid, a 16-year-old girl Radhika (name changed) is sexually abused in a house just 3 km from the police headquarters in Kerala’s capital Thiruvananthapuram. The sexual abuser was not an outsider but Radhika’s uncle. Along with sexually abusing Radhika, her video was also made and then her uncle would sell that video in the child pornography market.
Manoj Abraham, ADG of Kerala Police and Head of Cyber Department, says that- ‘We have found many such cases in which only the parents or acquaintances of children are recording porn content. Live streaming of child pornographic content makes a good amount of money. In this way also exploitation of children is going on at home itself.
Third case- Chatting, friendship, acting, then blackmailing and repeated child sexual abuse
8 year old Rahul (name changed) coming from middle class family of Mumbai. Like the rest of his friends, he was quite active on the internet. In the year 2016, while surfing on the social media platform, Rahul became a virtual friendship with another person. One day suddenly the person in front sent pictures of his private part. In return, Rahul also started sending her pictures of his private parts.
Now the person in front started blackmailing Rahul on the basis of these pictures and said that you send more such photo-videos. Rahul was threatened if he does not send more photos, videos of his private parts, then he will make the old photo viral.
Even after blackmailing, Rahul was forced to shoot this sexual video and give it. After this, Rahul’s parents came to know about this incident and they were stunned. The parents reported the sexual abuse on Rahul to the police. During interrogation, Rahul told that – he is trapped in the trap of sexual abuse. Siddharth Pillai, a member of Aarambh India, an organization working on sexual abuse of children, got information about this case. Siddharth is an IT expert and works to detect child abuse content online and remove it from the internet.
80% of victims are girls below 14 years of age
According to the latest Interpol report, only 2.4 million cases of online child sexual abuse have been reported in India between 2017 and 2020. 80% of the victims are girls under the age of 14.
Recently, the CBI raided 70 locations in 14 states in connection with child pornography. After interrogation, the agency has arrested 7 people from places like Delhi, Noida, Dhenkanal, Jhansi and Tirupati. We have investigated child pornography and compiled a series of three reports.
Words like ‘child porn’, ‘sexy child’ are searched for child porn content
In April 2020, the India Child Protection Fund (ICPF) conducted research on the demand for child porn content in India. In this research, it was found that on an average, 5 million child porn content was demanded every month from 100 cities of India. ‘Child porn’, ‘sexy child’ and ‘teen sex videos’ are trending searches on the public net. 90% of the people who viewed this content were men. According to data from porn site Pornhub, there was a 95% jump in porn demand in India between March 24 and March 26, 2020.
Child porn content highest in India
According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), an American NGO working on Sexual Abuse Materials (CSAM), India ranks first in the world in terms of content related to child porn. In the list after India, in the year 2020, NCMEC gave reports of 2.17 crore Sesam content to an agency named CyberTip. There was a 28% increase in Sesam content in the year 2020 as compared to 2019. A major reason for this increase has been the Kovid period.
By reading our first report on child porn, you must have understood how dangerous the entire network of child porn is. Our children and the children of your house who keep their phones in hand day and night and pretend to be on the internet, are becoming victims of this child porn. In the next series of investigation, we will tell you the case of Rajasthan. Will you understand from this how the disgusting business of child porn operates? How do criminals sell porn content by forming groups on messaging apps? How does the police investigate and nab the accused in these cases? We will introduce you to some police officers from Kerala and Mumbai who have done a great job of cracking down on child porn.
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