Rising Sexual Violence in India Connected to Rise in Porn Access, Say Experts

DELHI—The rape and brutal murder of a 31-year-old trainee doctor on Aug. 9 in India’s eastern city of Kolkata—allegedly by a hospital volunteer—continues to rule news charts and sociopolitical discourse in the country.
A psychoanalytic profile conducted by India’s Central Bureau of Investigation revealed that the prime suspect in the case was severely addicted to pornography, a “sexual pervert” with “animal instincts,” according to Indian news service PTI.
The case has sparked massive protests by doctors around the country as well as solidarity protests in countries such as Australia, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Along with a widespread call for  justice for the victim, it has once again highlighted the issue of increasing sexual violence against women in India.
Despite changes to India’s criminal justice system after a highly publicized gang rape in 2012, the number of rapes each year in India has largely remained at about 30,000.
In 2018, on average a rape was reported every 15 minutes across the country, according to a government report.
In 2022, the latest year for which data is available, there were more than 31,000 reported rapes, a 20 percent increase from the previous year. Since many cases go unreported, it is thought that the actual numbers are much higher.
Possible factors behind the rise in sexual violence have been widely discussed, with commentators pointing to Indian societal and family structure, its court system, law enforcement, and other factors.
According to one expert, the Kolkata case raises the alarm about another issue, namely the surging consumption of pornography in India and its effect on behavior, relationships, and sexual violence, as well as wider social misconduct.
Pornography, Booyens said, is a “drug”: a violent and speedy drug that quickly erodes a society’s social fabric. Porn affects behavior in the same way as drugs such as cocaine, heroin, and alcohol do, but the latter are more widely identified and accepted as a menace, he said.
According to Booyens, if India is going to correct its rape problem, it needs to understand how pornography is sabotaging its families and its wider social conduct.
“The drug is external. So someone has financial problems, they get depressed, so they could drink alcohol and become an alcoholic. If you remove alcohol from them, [they] sober up,” he said. Pornography, on the other hand, is the only drug that’s “internal,” he said, making it especially malignant. “It’s the most violent drug on earth.”
Despite the increasing cases of sexual abuse in the country, addiction to pornography has yet to receive its due in the public health ecosystem of India.
Booyens said it’s important to draw a connection between the consumption of pornography and the increasing number of rapes. He described the psychological relation between the two.
“It’s a drug that never satisfies, ever. Remember, heroin, cocaine has about a four and a half, five hour high, and people can manage to stay on a high for weeks with different drugs,” he said.
“A sexual high is 30 seconds, after 30 seconds of a sexual high, the desire for the next hit is immediate, which means the intervals in consumption [are] very short, which means the frequency of abuse is very high, which means they get de-sensitized to the images. So the images have to become more graphic, more violent.”
The human brain gets used to pornography and “normalizes” it. It then desires “a stronger drug” and reaches a point where the addicted consumer wants to act out on those desires, according to Booyens.
With pornography addiction, “normally, what happens is men will become sexually violent with their wives,” Booyens said. “When that no longer sustains [the high], they‘ll go buy sex.” And when that’s no longer enough, they’ll turn to rape, he said. Further, as the addiction progresses, the person is likely to engage in child molestation or child sex trafficking, he said.
According to numbers from a widely reported analysis by Indian NGO Child Rights and You (CRY), child rape cases in India increased by 96 percent between 2016 and 2022.
“You’re now taking sex from someone who is completely defenseless,” said Booyens. “You’re looking at a culture with one of the highest rape rates because they’ve got one of the highest pornography addiction rates.”
Booyens digs deeper into the sociology of aspirational societies like India, warning that widespread addiction to pornography could soon be a time bomb. He explains this on the basis of two psychological factors: “need and desire.”
“The desire to be a doctor is great. The need financially, to carry a family on your shoulders, to work yourself out of a class system, etc, is a great need,” Booyens said.
Booyens’ meaning: In developing societies such as in India, “need” and “desire” are strong drivers. Today’s generation is doing better than the last: in the example of the Kolkata rape victim, her father was a poor street tailor, but she became a doctor—an achievement not just for her but for her entire family and community.
In a society like India, the need to do better, to rise out of poverty and social limitations, is coupled with a desire to excel. Need and desire drive a tremendous amount of growth in this context.
And as India’s standard of living improves, the “need and desire” for more and better opportunities is contagious, particularly in a society where the median age is only 28 years. Sixty-six percent of India’s population—808 million people—are below 35 years of age.
Adding pornography into this mix of social-psychological factors “is a time bomb,” Booyens said. “It is a matter of time before people are being exploited [in] mass numbers.”
Pornography has the potential to create massive unrest, he said, as normal human emotions, running strong in a developing society, are twisted. Focused, productive people become addicts who undercut the productivity of an emerging economy and then prey on others, creating a society of predators and traumatized victims.
“So between these two worlds of desire and need, if you introduce sexual immorality into that culture, it’s anarchy, absolute anarchy. Pornography is the entry drug to human trafficking. Pornography is the catalyst. Pornography is the secret sauce that starts chipping away at the moral fiber of a culture,” said Booyens.
“The majority of users reported loss of productivity at the workplace,” according to the study of global trends. “Users are known to develop psychiatric distress due to problematic use of the internet. Internet use has become the topmost priority in the lives of users and could be attributed to a ’triple A engine’ approach—affordability, anonymity and accessibility of technology.”
The economic repercussions are felt in areas like workplace productivity, family relationships, and mental health.
The report notes that after the Indian government imposed stringent regulations on pornography in 2018, lesser known OTT (Over the Top) platforms—those that offer media service directly via the internet, rather than through cable or other providers—took advantage of existing rules and began selling “what can essentially be categorized as soft porn.”
In March of this year, India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting banned several OTT platforms for hosting pornographic content. But stopping the spread of porn is difficult as providers of adult content shift tactics.
While there are estimates of the economic cost to business productivity of pornography in the United States—some $16 billion annually—it is difficult or impossible to find such statistics for India, despite its being one of the fastest growing markets. Nor is it easy to find analyses about how pornography is impacting India’s human resource development—the work productivity of its employees and the overall growth of the country.
The Indian Policy Foundation report said that although the Indian government has banned hundreds of pornography websites, viewership of pornographic content increased by 95 percent during the pandemic.
“The statistics [go] on to show that the government’s move did not have any lasting impact as the pornography websites have found a way to bypass the decision with name changes and launch of new sites to cater to the rising demand of the Indian market,” said Parameswaran. The report cited various case studies to illustrate how adult content is expanding in the Indian market, particularly on social media platforms.
Parameswaran examined the issues caused by pornography use, citing a meta-analysis published in the behavioral science journal “Aggressive Behavior” about the correlation between sexually violent pornography and violence against women.
Regular consumption of pornography makes violence appear normal, she said. “It would desensitise people to emotions. It becomes more so when everyday interactions [such as those with a] doctor or teacher [are] sexualised and normalised,” Parameswaran said.
“The negative effects become much more pronounced when porn is introduced at younger ages through [the] internet. Adolescent boys are more prone to equate sex with power and the adolescent girls are conditioned to accept these skewed power structures.”
Nonetheless, the financial profits are so high that they are driving a massive industry in India. “[As long as] the industry continues to rake in big money, it seems unlikely that there will be any slowing down of production of such content,” she said.
Booyens expressed his belief that China is a major source of funding behind pornography in India. The Epoch Times couldn’t independently verify this claim.
However, the Chinese military’s own documents indicate a strong focus on psychological warfare.
Regardless of its source, Booyens said, pornography is a “silent weapon” and he appealed to India’s legislators to acknowledge that fact.
In this context, he said, pornography raises many multilayered and cross-cutting challenges.
“This is a geopolitical conversation. Yes, it is a socio economic conversation. It’s a human rights conversation, and then it is a household conversation for every parent.”
He returned to the story of the Kolkata rape victim whose father, a tailor, is devastated.
“Indian doctors are some of the greatest, if not the greatest, doctors on Earth. The Indian brain is so brilliant. Yes, it’s incredible. And that child was going to uplift the generational value of a family. Legacy,” he said.
“There’s no weapon on Earth more destructive than pornography, nothing, because it creeps into a household quietly. A child sits [at] a dinner table and watches it in front of her parents without them knowing. Yes, it’s on every social media platform.”