<div><em>How easy it is to "ban" something' . A book, a film, food, a drink, a dress...</em></div><div> </div><div>And how difficult it is to learn that important lesson - bans don't work. Surely everyone knows that you only have to forbid something for it to become instantly popular.</div><div> </div><div>You ban a book, and everyone starts to circulate copies of it and read it and discuss it and usually wonder why it was banned or find that it never contained what it was banned for. It's the same with a film. Copies of it sprout up all over online and soon everyone has an opinion on it.</div><div> </div><div>This happened with the ban on the BBC documentary on the Delhi gang rape. I'm afraid the authorities who banned it came out looking worse than the documentary they feared.. Worse, it became such a trending topic and for so very long, it caught the world's attention and didn't particularly make the country an object of admiration. India becoming a country of increased interest because of its market size and other reasons, news that we think is internal to us no longer remains so. The government is closely watched for its handling of problems to contribute to an assessment of how easy or difficult it would be to work with authorities in the country. But yet, with increasing regularity, something or the other is banned, even before the technical feasibility doing this is properly examined.</div><div> </div><div>These bans make for unsavory news In what is often referred to as the largest democracy in the world. And this is especially so when it is done before proper attempts to solve the problem and as the easy way out . Instantly acting on the December gang rape In New Delhi of a 23-year-old girl,, doing something to truly improve security, putting in place police for reforms etc instead of more all less banning protests, would have been better then cracking down hard on a documentary film.</div><div> </div><div>But learning nothing from past history the government's telecom ministry suddenly took it into its head to ban porn. I am left scratching my head and wondering what they expected this dictat to achieve. Large chunks of the Internet are dedicated to porn and have been from early days. You can't ban half the Internet. and people so quickly find a workaround. All that the DOT (Department of Telecom) ended up at achieving a list to make itself the butt of relentless jokes in a Twitter backlash. Along with a flood of articles and radio and TV debates. It's even been suggested that the ban was meant for members of Parliament who have been known to surf porn at work. The whole situation was made worse by the fact that it was not legal to try and enforce such a ban.</div><div> </div><div>The focus for everyone indignant at this announcement of a ban was the violation of the freedom of expression. But there's another aspect that that deserves more consideration. Banning porn sites is unfortunately unlikely to help reduce abuse against women and children. The forces that lead to such abuse are both personal and societal and very powerful. They may be fueled by alienationand maladjustmentthen goes much beyond the availability of Internet websites. Look for instance at super crimes like the Nithari killings. These were sexually motivated murders of children that probably had little to do with access to porn. In this case, there is possibly some extreme sociooathy at work. To be sure, a great deal of corn in Volos violence against women and their extreme objectification. This is sometimes true even of lesbian porn. It is possible that the presence of porn and its repeated consumption validates abusive acts. But it is not the direct cause of it. And so, it's removal is unlikely to remove abuse. Rape is after all, often said by experts not to be an act of sex, but an of aggression. </div><div> </div><div>It's a case of shooting the messenger our blaming the bottle. </div><div> </div><div>If the government is interested in tackling abuse against women and children and anyone who is vulnerable, the starting point is certainly not a ban on porn. Instead, better research is needed into abuse in the context of Indian society in particular and then a reshaping of attitudes true looking at the root cause. The web one must remember is not a beast of its own making. It is entirely man-made, and reflects society. switching it off won't dispels the darkness in our souls. </div><div> </div>
BW Reporters
Mala Bhargava has been writing on technology well before the advent of internet in Indians and before CDs made their way into computers. Mala writes on technology, social media, startups and fitness. A trained psychologist, she claims that her understanding of psychology helps her understand the human side of technology.
