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A Rape Video: Re-imaging The Porn Or A Digital Violence


A rape video of a teenage girl is viral on twitter. I mean to say, yes it is on twitter. Twitter is the intellectual Face Book as claimed by the users. This video is circulated and re twitted in thousands. A rape video does exactly what it connotes a woman or girl, getting raped, filmed by somebody, shared and went viral. It reaches to us by any means but social media.  The motive behind the rape video is not fun. It is done for blackmailing. Blackmailing for what. Money ..no. The real aim is to make her silent. The fear and threat to upload and circulate the video online or offline is used to compel rape victims into silence. A silence of shame.

When a rape video is uploaded into an online platform it violates the digital sexual consent. It becomes more dangerous when that video is used as porn. The definition of porn has been changed since the arrival of Mobile phones, CCTV and Web Cams. When a jilted lover uploads a live feed or hidden camera shows a girl changing her clothes in mall trail room or a rape video which is circulated in Social media does not help the victims or even we are not thinking to report those but it is helping to fuel our sexual fantasy.

People in my age group must have remembered 2004 DPS MMS. It was a buzz thing at that time. Still many videos in same name are floating in porn sites. Just to revitalize the memory, that DPS MMS depicts an act of oral sex between a teen age girl and her boyfriend. Viral term was not coined at that time. Scandal was the popular term at that time. So that video was scandal not viral. Middle class section was not prepared to accept the video content, they wondered how a girl was doing all those things..mean that kind of thing. Only white people in Pronos could do all these. Awwww… this was because of western world.

It was not circulated in western world; in India a Pan Shop keeper also had the access to sell that DPS MMS cd (CD was a popular medium for storing digital content at that time).  That video which was a scandal had some effects. Which are gendered? The boy who was involved in that video, whose identity remained unknown for public, who was hidden behind the camera only missed a cricket match. Remember the girl. Off course we do. Who was involved in that video, who was visible not only in video but in every media, paper, in CD, in porn site and in fantasy, was forced to leave the school and eventually left the country.

So the take away from this piece is that like all sexual violence, digital violence is gender specific. It targets women. Sunitha Krishan #ShameTheRapist campaign against viral rape videos is involving CBI and Cyber Crime to give justice to rape and victimized by digital contents.

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