Why banning porn on web won't end sex crimes

Just when the Supreme Court was coming round to the view that Indore lawyer Kamlesh Vaswani's PIL for banning internet pornography was driven by a severe bout of "pornophobia" - the howling fear that porn is out to destroy morality and society, Union IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has fired a fresh salvo which is bound to cause a stir. Dragging out from the woodwork that old chestnut of "Indian culture and moral obligation towards society", he has directed the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and all ISPs to ensure that our browsers are cleansed of smut. And he is of the firm belief that it would eradicate rape and other sex crimes.

But before his ideas can be fruitfully implemented, the minister must overcome a few hurdles. Would he get flummoxed by a situation similar to that which Britain's Andrew Holland found himself in last month? Dressed in a tiger costume, Holland had sex with a woman and recorded a clip, but the internet censors, mistaking it for bestiality and extreme pornography, ensured that he faced multiple criminal charges. Or, the Facebook mess-up from a week ago - the content moderators mistook an elbow pic for that of a breast, and promptly blocked it. It begs another question which has taken the internet by storm - why should breast pics be blocked? It has been seen that only some breasts - those of white women conforming to a particular body image or size, are approved by the moral guardians of the internet, while others - for example, those used in breastfeeding or breast cancer awareness programmes, are not.  

Okay, suppose pictures are too explicit... so how about "pornographic" words, like say, "The Missionary Position", Christopher Hitchen's famous polemical critique of Mother Teresa? Or other double entendres (too many to list here)? Or objects of high art, such as "The Rape of the Sabine Women" - a popular subject for painters and sculptors in Renaissance art? If one reposes faith in the mediocre skills and capabilities of the average content moderator, as profiled by Wired magazine, then it is sure to get blocked. And if one tries to distinguish between art and pornography, then, as art historian Lynda Nead contends, drawing a distinction between sublime and profane seeks to serve a social legitimising function which result in moral policing and violations of the rights of many.

Would automatic filters, like the ones favoured by British Prime Minister David Cameron and implemented with much gusto (followed, invariably, by confusion and dejection) help matters? Not really. Apart from words like "Sussex" getting blocked, there was the issue of privacy. The seemingly innocuous "opt-in" (voluntary) system compelled one to disclose certain intimate preferences to the internet service providers, which meant that such information was ending up with either the government or with private corporations.

A country-wide survey done by India Today in 2008 would burst Prasad's thought balloon of wildly libidinous men going on a raping spree. One in five women approved of pornography, and many also made private porn videos with their partners, even in so-called "conservative" cities such as Chennai and Lucknow. The figures must have gone up now.

This breathtaking hyperbole of porn = rape is not supported by any conclusive research. Results of studies vary, and by a wide margin. They could well be polar opposites.

Joel Feinberg, a professor of Philosophy at the University of  Michigan, suggested in 1978 that those identifying with the cult of the macho are the most likely to be attracted to violent porn and commit acts of sexual assault. In 2000, Neil M Malamuth demonstrated there was a link between violent pornography and sexual aggression but in 2009, Ferguson and Hartley established an inverse relationship between pornography consumption and rape rates!

But, Todd Kendall's research suggested that incidents of rape decreased with more access to the internet and pornography, while  Lajeunesse encountered the most perplexing of situations - he was not able to find a single male in his 20s who had not watched pornography, and none of the men had demonstrated any signs of being sexually perverted or violent.

Let's put aside all these queries for the time being and instead focus on how the minister and his advisors would define porn. After all, there has to be an elementary thumb rule for any policy. They would run into the United States Supreme Court case of Jacobellis versus Ohio (1964) in which, when confronted with the question of defining pornography, Justice Potter Stewart was at his wit's end and could come up with nothing better than ,"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so."

And if they proceed with this, it will be akin to applying a tourniquet to freedom of expression on the Internet.