According to data by the National Crime Records Bureau, a woman is raped every 6 hours in India. Statistically, it is the 4th most common crime against women in India. In the National Capital alone, as many as 5 women were raped and 8 were molested daily on an average. The situation has become so worse that even the Supreme Court had to issue the following statement last year “What is to be done? Girls and women are getting raped left, right and centre.” All this has driven India to be touted as the rape capital of the world.

The way the country deals with rape is inefficient on so many levels, with poor conviction, inefficient systems and social stereotypes all playing a part. However, what is even more difficult to understand is what prompts a person to commit such a heinous crime as rape. While there can be several situational and psychological causes, and those are thoroughly debated on live TV debates and news reports, one cause is conveniently left out of the limelight.

The role of Pornography in Promoting Rape Culture

Before you start going bonkers with the argument of how a single video can’t influence someone to commit rape and how not everyone who watches porn can’t be termed as a rapist, let me make the point of discussion very clear. Not everyone who watches porn is a rapist. Agreed. But the majority of the offenders of sexual crimes against women have shown a tendency to be influenced by pornography.

The Michigan State Police Department found that pornography is used or imitated in 41% of the sex crimes they have investigated. Not only this, the University of New Hampshire did a study that showed that the states with the highest readership of pornographic magazines like Playboy and Penthouse, also had the highest rape rates.

Simply put, porn promotes rape culture. The term ‘ Rape Culture’ can be described as “a society that normalizes sexualized violence,” persists despite the efforts of victims and advocates. 

While from the outside, watching pornography may simply seem like a harmless activity people do out of fun, curiosity or to release sexual tension ( And for most people it is exactly that), but look closer and you’ll come to realise the various problems that it poses. Oh, and it poses problems on multiple levels.

Rape Porn 

First is the porn video in itself. While the porn industry revolves around producing videos which are consumed by millions for pleasure, sadly the content it creates also fosters gender stereotypes, rape culture and sexual violence in general.

Sadly, there are specific sites that exclusively deal with rape porn. The libraries of these websites consist of videos whose storylines revolve around outright rape, of coercing women into non-consensual sex, and in some horrific cases, even videos of actual acts of rape.

One of such sites, Rapetube.org paints a horrific picture. The site urges users to share what it called “fantasy” videos of sexual attacks. It claimed to offer you a collection of videos according to your rape fantasy and preference, with some of the options available being attacks on drunken women, on lesbians, on schoolgirls etc. You just needed to have a credit card to access those.

Not only this, even mainstream porn actually contributes to projecting women as creatures that need to be punished with sex for any of their misdoings. They're actually shown to be as people craving for sex, looking to get it at every conceivable opportunity, trading it for something as trivial as non-payment of cab fare, to get a new house, to escape a fine and whatnot. While this makes for a fun story, to the uneducated mind, it actually serves to reinforce that women can be used as sex objects by men at will, which is essentially the basic plotline of every porn movie ever. Porn actually resorts to reinforcing the notion that men enjoy a physical and sexual superiority over women, which can never be a good thing.

The Legal Angle

Another issue with pornography is that it conveniently shows acts to be simply just sexual, when actually in the legal context they come under the umbrella of rape. Several videos show a boss asking for sexual favours from an employee in return for a promotion and a teacher looking to trade between sex and an A grade. The issue with these storylines is that while they’re used as realistic storylines and to titillate the viewer, these videos normalize the actions that actually amount to rape in the real world. 

Take Indian law for example. Under it Sexual harassment is defined under S. 354 A of the IPC as a man committing any of the following acts:

(i) physical contact and advances involving unwelcome and explicit sexual overtures; or

(ii) a demand or request for sexual favours; or

(iii) showing pornography against the will of a woman; or

(iv) making sexually coloured remarks,

Now think of all the porn videos that you’ve watched over the years. For you, the act of someone asking for sex in return for a good grade may be hot and sexy. In an Indian court, that can serve as an act of rape. Do you really think that when one watches these acts or practices happen in movies, it actually won't affect their subconscious and contribute to normalizing such illegal acts?

Porn As A Means Of Sex Education

This is one of the main factors that is overlooked in the debate of pornography’s role in promoting rape. In a country like India, where sex before marriage is a big no-no and sex education also being considered as taboo, many people resort to porn as a means of understanding more about sex.

It was reported that boys as young as 10 download pornography from mobile phone shops for as little as 10 rupees. What this curiosity eventually does is that it paints a very unrealistic and false image of sexual interactions. All of us know that sex in real life is nothing like they show in porn videos, and using porn as a barometer of how sex works are not only incorrect but inaccurate as well.

So when a young person watches porn and uses it to understand more about how sex works, what it actually does is that it makes them believes that all the acts shown in a porn video are the correct way to go forward. With several porn videos being guilty of being regressive, showing non-consensual sex, and unrealistic sexual practices, it eventually leads to a false depiction and understanding of consent, boundaries and even sex, ultimately leading to incorrect understandings of sex and its intricacies.

The recent case of a Delhi gang rape case actually goes on to show how porn actually can influence a person to commit rape. Manoj Kumar, a rape accused went on to confess how we drank liquor and watched porn on a mobile phone right before abducting a 5-year-old girl and raping her. The accused went on to confess how liquor and porn videos dominated them.

Therefore, rather than normalizing pornography, it makes sense to accept that porn in one way or the other, promotes rape culture. The fact that pornography promotes acts of sexual violence, reinforces incorrect gender stereotypes and paints an incorrect image of sexual acts, all contribute to the argument of how porn promotes rape.