India is currently in an utter state of turmoil regarding its attitude towards protecting women. The rot that was festering inside the nation’s heart was exposed during the Nirbhaya case and has been further highlighted after what happened in Kathua and Unnao. The situation has worsened to such an extent that women aren’t safe even in public places. And MP Home Minister Bhupendra Singh believes that all this happening because of porn.
According to the Times of India, Madhya Pradesh’s Home Minister, Bhupendra Singh thinks that pornography is the reason for the rise in sexual assault cases in India. He said,
“A study by the MP home department revealed pornography is adversely impacting childhood, with even young boys and girls getting easy access to it. Rapes and sexual assaults are a result of access to these sites.”
Although Singh talked about a “study” that was conducted by the MP Home Department, he was neither able to discuss about it in detail, nor present the report to the media. And considering how multiple psychologists and scientists have debated heavily over this matter (with proof), saying it so easily without any evidence seems hypocritical.
Singh was so confident about his Home Department’s “study” that he said that he wants to take stricter action on porn sites that are still active in India.
“Though some 25 porn sites have been banned, we do not have direct control over such sites. So, we have urged the Union government to ban all porn sites and introduce a stringent law to control porn.”
Although the Home Minister is accurate about the banning, his numbers are way off. In 2015, the Government shut down access to 857 porn sites, after a petition was filed in 2013, claiming “porn corrupts people”. And this further illustrates the problem with Bhupendra Singh’s statement. That is, if porn was the real problem, then this banning should’ve reduced the number of rape cases in India, instead of increasing it.
Studies have found that the effects of porn differs from person to person. That’s why it’s difficult to pin-point the exact correlation between porn and sexual assault. Instead, the better solution will be sexual education that’ll teach boys and girls to see each other as humans and better understand the repercussions of sex. Which, FYI, has been banned from Madhya Pradesh’s curriculum since 2007. I’ll let you be the judge of that.