In this industrial northern state, you can buy footage of a woman being raped for the price of a cheap meal.
Al Jazeera found
several videos that appeared to depict rape for sale across the state.
They cost from Rs 20 to Rs 200 (30 cents to $3) and are transmitted to a
customer’s mobile phone in a matter of seconds.
The faces of the women are visible in these films. Their voices are clear. The attacks on them are brutal.
In Meerut, a city in
western Uttar Pradesh, an area mostly known for the manufacturing of
sporting goods, local contacts indicated that the movie files, marketed
as “rape videos”, were available in nearby villages.
With shopkeepers
cautious about selling them to non-locals, one local man in the village
of Incholi – roughly 15km from Meerut – agreed to buy one and show it to
Al Jazeera.
Shahnawaz, who declined
to use his real name, said that the videos are not generally made with
the intention of being sold on the open market. Still, he’s heard a lot
about them.
“They make it to
blackmail the victims [of rape] … so that they don’t go and file a
complaint in the nearest police station,” Shawnawaz explained.
Sometimes, he said, the
videos are stolen from the perpetrator’s phone when he takes his device
to a shop for repairs. The stolen footage is them sold to anyone who
asks for it.
Most shopkeepers are
careful to sell the videos only to locals, and generally deny any
knowledge of them. Some, however, agreed to share explicit videos,
including rape clips, with Al Jazeera.
One of them admitted
that he had many such “local films”, as the videos are euphemistically
referred to. There are watchwords in the trade – akin to a secret
handshake – that let the sellers know that a customer seeks rape videos –
as opposed to other pornography, which the kiosks also sell.
Once a rape video
reaches one dealer, it spreads like wildfire, through applications such
as WhatsApp, to other parts of the country. In fact, “WhatsApp sex
videos” is one term used for rape videos in this part of the country.
In the village of
Saharanpur in western Uttar Pradesh, one man who readily admitted that
he frequently purchases pornography – particularly videos of rape – told
Al Jazeera that he buys them from other nearby villages.
The videos he buys at shops and kiosks come mainly from other
customers who sell the footage to the shopkeepers, he explained. He has a
collection of these films on his laptop and described the rape footage
as “pornography”.He watches the videos, he said, because they give him “peace of mind”.
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