3 men gang-raped a woman and streamed it on Facebook Live taking crime to a new low
Even as the liberal world patted themselves on their collective backs for marching against Trump, for standing up to racial profiling, sexual assault, and the patriarchy, barely an ocean away, Sweden witnessed a kind of horror that one can’t even begin to imagine.
On Saturday, January 21, a woman in Uppsala, Sweden was reportedly gang-raped. But it gets worse. The entire ordeal was streamed live for three hours on Facebook. According to reports, this horrific event was broadcasted in a closed Facebook group to over 60,000 members.
The police have, so far, arrested three men - aged 18, 20 and 24 - at the apartment, according to Expressen. According to reports, witnesses saw multiple men storming into the victim’s house armed with guns. A police complaint came from Josefine Lundgren who saw the live stream. According to her, one of the men allegedly told the woman, “You have been raped,” at the end of the broadcast.
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| Livestreaming rape crosses boundaries of revenge porn as we have ever known it. [Photo: Reuters] |
A second live broadcast was streamed just after the first one, which allegedly shows the assailants forcing the woman to say that she had, in fact, not been raped. Another witness Linda Johansson, who saw the second broadcast said, “They put the girl in front of the camera, but the guy who filmed [her] tried to persuade her to deny she had been raped. He was putting the words in her mouth. He was extremely threatening and laughed throughout the film.”
Even though Facebook livestreams occur in real time, there obviously exist ways for the videos to be saved. In any case, the videos can be replayed later until the videos are taken down. According to police spokeswoman Lisa Sannervik, there may probably be many copies of the stream already.
Revenge porn (whose colloquial equivalent in India are the "MMS clips") has been a thing for a while. And despicable as that may be, this incident makes one wonder just how much lower can we sink as humanity. Livestreaming rape crosses boundaries of revenge porn as we have ever known it.
Juxtapose it against the recent march in India by women to declare the roads (the outdoors) as a "safe" space for them. How can any place be called safe, when a woman’s safety, even at her home, is violated in such a horrific voyeuristic manner?