52 CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE MATERIAL CASES PROBED
(By the CBI’s specialised unit set up in 2019)
These scenarios might, at first sight, seem like trailers of an OTT series devoted to fringe deviants and their twisted lives. But scenes like these are playing out all over India, with no particular bias with regard to geography or class—and rather too frequently for the phenomenon to remain unknown, unnamed and unremarked-upon. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) logged 149,404 cases of crime against children in 2021—16 per cent higher than in 2020. Of these, 53,874, or 36 per cent, were registered under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (PoCSO) Act, 2012. As many as 33,348 of those came under Sections 4 and 6 of the Act, relating to penetrative sexual assault and aggravated penetrative sexual assault. The real numbers, as often happens, would be much higher—for reasons of personal trauma, fear and social shame, an overwhelming majority of victim stories never reach the police.
Now, that zone of personal crime—dark enough, but small-scale and territory-bound—has expanded in unquantifiable ways after encountering the force-multiplying effect of the internet. The result is a mutant, Online Child Sexual Abuse, or OCSA, that seems to be infecting too many unlit corners in the country. Theincludes producing and sharing online child pornography, which has now been rechristened across the world as Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) to name it for what it is. The agency identifies three basic forms of online child sexual abuse: sharing of indecent videos or images of children, the most prevalent type; online grooming, wherein an adult engages a child in chats about sexual acts; and asking a child to expose himself or perform sexual acts for live-streaming, or share a sexual image or video on online platforms. The CBI’s findings that INDIA TODAY has accessed are a shocking revelation of such acts of sexual abuse and exploitation taking place across the country.
