With rapists and sexual offenders taking the social media route to brazenly post videos of their sensational crime — two such clips have been doing the rounds on YouTube and WhatsApp for months together — the Supreme Court on Friday ordered a CBI probe into the incidents and asked the Centre to suggest steps to curb this unhealthy trend.
A letter by NGO Prajwala to the Chief Justice of India exposed how victims of crime were reduced to objects of pleasure by the offenders who commit rape on them, film the horrific crime and post the videos on social networking sites. There is a host of websites which carry such pornographic or sexually explicit videos and there is no bar on such graphic material being circulated through the latest social networking sites such as YouTube, Facebook and WhatsApp.
Terming the situation as “shocking”, the Bench of Justices Madan B lokur and UU lalit said, “On the basis of the letter, it’s clear that issues raised are extremely serious and of great public concern.” So gruesome was the narration of the crime in the letter that the Bench did not wish to see the video. But the court directed the NGO represented by advocate Aparna Bhatt to supply a copy of the video to CBI director who was directed to start investigation forthwith.
The fact that the video was in circulation for months and yet not reported even once to the police was more shocking. The court felt, “It has a negative impact on criminal justice system and also makes it difficult for public to report to law enforcement agencies.”
The Bench thought it appropriate to issue notice to the two nodal Ministries at the Centre — Ministry of Home Affairs and Ministry of Communications and Information Technology — as it relates to both law and order and cyber crime. The court asked Prajwala to file a composite PIl encompassing suggestions by the NGO to deal with this menace.
While the NGO had demanded a CBI probe into the two videos and all such videos and websites in circulation, the court went a step further by directing Chief Secretaries and DGPs of West Bengal, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi to submit a report of the two incidents in question along with action taken against the offenders of the crime.
In addition, the NGO demanded a special Task Force on technologically-driven sex crimes, mechanism to encourage reporting of such online videos, a registry of sexual offenders, tie up with YouTube, WhatsApp to remove such offending videos and to penalise persons posting them.
