Many from Hyderabad search for info on rape victim

 Hyderabad: Even as people are left bewildered at the widely circulated news of rapes, search results on Google Trends show an even more disturbing development — how people react to such news, especially after the rape-murder of a medico in Kolkata’s RG Kar Medical College.

Google Trends showed a breakout in the state’s population searching for the Kolkata rape victim’s name, photographs and even videos of her becoming a subject of the heinous crime.

A breakout on Google Trends signifies that a particular search term has grown in volume by more than 5,000 per cent over a particular period of time. When filtered out based on the region, it was revealed that most of the searchers belonged to Hyderabad.

Some users looked for updates on the case, but for most part people had specifically used keywords like, “kolkata rape victim name”, “kolkata rape video” or by adding the name of the victim while searching for her photos.

The Supreme Court had directed that all references to the name of the deceased, photographs and video clips be removed from all social media platforms and electronic media. Three days later, the victim’s images are still showing up on Google.

Several Facebook accounts had uploaded pictures of the victim, adding lewd comments in the caption.

Speaking to Deccan Chronicle, Aliza Sayani, founder, outPSYED, said, “One of the main reasons is curiosity. Due to a lack of sex education, people start to build up a curiosity. Especially when something like this goes viral, people looking up for something like this is usually a general response to the curiosity one develops after hearing of it.”

Psychologist Diana Monterieo said, “Most of the cases I have come across stem from excessive porn addiction. When one gets used to watching such content on the internet, there comes a time when the violence in it stops affecting them. Porn of any kind has more often than not proven to be arousing, however disliked at first. When one makes it a habit to watch this kind of content on the internet, they get used to it and that might lead to such behaviour in the future.”

Aliza said, “The trauma a rape victim goes through is incomprehensible. Even if she is a survivor and has reached even stage 1 of her recovery, images of her on the internet or even her name getting public can double that trauma.”