Hyderabad: Twenty-six-year old IT professional Sayujya (name changed) was shocked when a close friend called her on July 27 and said that an intimate video of hers with her ex-boyfriend had been uploaded on porn websites.
She had broken up with her boyfriend a month-and-a-half back following an insecure relationship. Little did she know that he would upload videos of their intimate moments, in an act of revenge.
Since then, Sayujya is living in a state of depression and seriously thinking of quitting her job. She’s sure that most of her friends have got the link to the video and many more colleagues have come to know about it. She wants to move to another city, to escape shame. She is also worried about her parents who are looking for a prospective groom for her without knowing about the incident.
Sayujya is just one of the many victims in Hyderabad who had been shamed on the Internet by their vindictive ex-es. While a few of the victims are ready to approach the police and seek justice, many like Sayujya are reluctant to lodge complaints.
Revenge porn is the gravest cyber crime that the city police and state CID deal with these days. The cases have doubled this year, as most people have smartphones, webcams and cheap spy-cams. The victims, meanwhile, remain helpless even after the arrest of the perpetrators since the damage can’t be repaired.
“There are cases of ex-husbands trying to ruin the lives of their former spouses by uploading obscene content online,” said S. Jayaram, ACP of Cyber Crimes, Cyberabad. In an earlier case, Banjara Hills police had arrested TV actor Oruganti Srikanth for uploading his ex-girlfriend's nude photographs and video clips online. He had also circulated the content on WhatsApp to embarrass her.
No strict law to punish cyber crooks in India:
India does not have a specific law to prevent or punish revenge porn, while United Kingdom and a few states in the US recently introduced specific laws. Officials said that India’s Information Technology Act, which deals with cyber offences, does not have a separate section to deal with revenge porn. Such cases are booked under Section 67 (publishing or transmitting of obscene material in electronic form), which is punishable with a sentence of up to three years in prison and fine up to Rs 5 lakh.
If the victims in these cases are under 18 years, the crime is treated as child pornography (publishing or transmitting, in electronic form, of material depicting children in obscene, indecent or sexually explicit manner). The perpetrator can be punished under Section 67B of the IT Act with punishment of up to five years in prison and a fine of up to Rs 10 lakh.
"We do not have a stringent law to deal with this menace. Usually separate sections of the IT Act and the Indian Penal Code (IPC) are invoked against the suspects,” said prominent lawyer Pappu Nageswar Rao. According to law experts, apart from the IT acts, the victims can seek justice under other sections two, depending on the nature of the crimes.
“If the victim was threatened by the accused, she can seek justice under IPC section 506 (criminal intimidation). The victim can also file a defamation suit under IPC section 500. If the suspect is convicted, he will be imprisoned for three years,” said Mr Rao. However, even if all these sections are put together, the punishment of the perpetrators is not strong enough to deter them from indulging in future crimes.
Other strong sections of IPC, which deal with insulting the modesty of women and sexual assault, cannot be booked because of the specific clauses in them. "The IPC sections dealing with molestation and harassment (IPC 354- outraging modesty of women) specifically mention that the perpetrator can be punished if he touches the victim,” said Mr Rao.
The act of revenge porn largely falls under cyber crime and IPC sections have very little to do with it. Thus, it is high time a separate section is introduced in the IT Act for revenge porn, say experts.
Tech giants unable to curb crimes:
In the middle of this year, Google and Microsoft announced that they would start removing links of revenge porn from their search results. However, prominent pornographic sites have a huge collection of such videos, which the site owners refused to take down. As per their website policy, an item can be taken down only as and the uploader makes such appeal.
The Information Technology Act of India does not refer to the right to remove pornographic content posted out of revenge. Google was the first to come out in support of the war against revenge porn. In a blog post by Google in June 2015, its management stated: “We’ll honour requests from people to remove nude or sexually explicit images shared without their consent from Google Search results.”
Later, in July, Microsoft also declared that its search engine Bing would no longer show the results of or links to revenge porn. However, in many cases the perpetrators spread the offensive content by posting it in multiple pornographic websites. In a short while, other websites also pick them up and re-upload the content.
Weeks within the first upload, the specific video or photographs spread across the Internet and it becomes impossible to remove them, say cyber security experts. The websites voluntarily take down a content if the victim is minor, as child pornography is prohibited and they could land in legal hassles. Even when the police tries to take such things down by sending official requests to the websites, the effort goes in vain.
“Most websites are owned and hosted by firms in the United States or other foreign countries,” said a senior police official from the Cyber Crime police station. Unlike other normal websites and social networking sites, we do not even get a reply when we send a request to these pornographic sites,” the police official from the Cyber Crime police station said.
